THE HARD LIGHT

by Stuart Hoar

reviewed by Mike Crowl

Vivid characters, a driving readability, but a bleak worldview. Throughout this book Hoar sustains his ability to invest the least of his characters with such life as to make them memorable long after they've finished their role in the story. But it's also true that most of the characters have such a bleak outlook that the end result of reading this book is a sense of purposelessness. That may be Hoar's intention. He may have set out to write an existentialist novel in the classic sense. If that was the case, he's succeeded admirably. The only sign of hope comes in the last few lines - and even there it's ambiguous. The goal of Katerina, the only character who survives from beginning to end, is to be nothing, do nothing, (in a philosophical sense) and to see that her son achieves nothing, too. When people ask her what she wants, she replies, "Nothing." What has killed her spirit is not entirely clear, and she seems to have no desire to enliven it again. Her son, Nathan, who is the focus of much of the story, slowly loses ambition, and slides downhill towards the end, until he and his mother are all that is left. Most of the other male characters die untimely deaths or decline into madness, and the several independently-minded females struggle to find love, but having found it, are not sure if they want it. The blurb on the back of the book claims that this is "an intelligent novel of passion which forces us to acknowledge the powerful truth that the framing power of history cannot be ignored." There is passion certainly, but passion in which the characters seem to have a perverse desire to destroy anything that is positive or hopeful in themselves or their relationships. None are satisfied for long, and none have any real warmth with which to engage the reader. Furthermore, the book seems more character-driven than history-driven. World War 2 is the setting for the central part of the story, certainly, and affects the lives of four of the characters, but a Big OE might well have done the same thing. Their basic and sometimes obscure motivations exist with or without the War. The Korean and Vietnam Wars are both mentioned, but not in such a way that they affect even the surface of the characters' lives. In the broader picture, politics is seen as a corrupt game from beginning to end, personified mainly in the obscene character of Clement Sharp, the all-time user of other people. Religion fares little better, treated mostly with a quiet mockery, except in the case of Nathan's mother-in-law, a minor character who is virulently anti-everything except her own brand of Catholicism. And business is regarded as abhorrent, a way of feeding off those who do the work. This is exemplified in a couple of scenes: the brutal beating of the wharfies, and the sickening speech of an industrialist at a penthouse party. But Hoar isn't just striking out at everything in sight. The novel is multi-layered, and the many seemingly disparate strands take on new connections the more the book is reflected on. A couple of quibbles. Where are the dogs on the sheep farms that are the background to much of the story - these farms seem curiously underpopulated. And did Dunedin have to be just another bleak character in this novel?

Published 1998 by Penguin Books

Back to the Index