Tales of fear & regret

A thoughtful and assured near-future NZ pandemic novel takes its lead from a bubonic plague classic.

- CHARLOTTE GRIMSHAW

THE DECK, by Fiona Farrell (Penguin, $37) At the Auckland Writers Festival in 2021, in a lecture on the future of New Zealand literature, novelist Stephanie Johnson predicted a “a pandemic of work centring on the coronavirus crisis”. There have been quite a few works of fiction already, and Johnson has just published Kind, a satirical novel about the Covid pandemic.

Now, in her first novel for six years, Fiona Farrell has made her own assured and graceful contribution to pandemic lit. The Deck is a thoughtful, poignant response to our recent experience. Using structure to contemplate chaos, Farrell has found a beautifully sophisticated way to entertain us with the unthinkable.

It’s a narrative that confronts existential terror while using a classic literary frame. The Deck borrows from Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th-century masterpiece The Decameron to tell the stories of people who have gathered in a house on Banks Peninsula to shelter from a global pandemic.

As Farrell explains in her non-fiction foreword, The Decameron begins with a factual prologue that frames 100 tales told by 10 young Florentines, who have fled to the country to escape the bubonic plague.