The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt (23 page)

Half of the first draft of this novel was written while I was 2008 Emerging Writer-in-Residence at Katharine Susannah Pritchard Writers’ Centre. Grateful thanks to the Katharine Susannah Pritchard Foundation and ArtsWA for funding the residency, and to all at KSPWC – particularly Mardi May – for support and encouragement.

I owe much to this novel’s first readers, Barbara Polly, Robin Fleming, and Michelle Edgerley, for their honesty, their helpful comments, and their enthusiasm for the book’s early draft.

To Jane Fraser, Wendy Jenkins and Georgia Richter, at Fremantle Press, I owe huge thanks, particularly for taking a punt on me in the first place. Thanks are due to my editor Nicola O’Shea, for her enormously helpful and thoughtful input. The clear-eyed wisdom and patient professionalism of these women were vital in helping me craft the novel into its final form. I cannot thank them enough.

I’d like to thank Jane Aitken, Emily Boyce and especially Scott Pack at Aardvark Bureau, for leading Lena into the bigger, wider world; and a great big
kia ora
to everyone who’s championed this book, with particular thanks to Lisa Northcote.

This book was inspired and informed in part by the
documentary film
Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey
(written and directed by Steven M. Martin, 1994). I also found inspiration in the films of Gaylene Preston (particularly
Lovely Rita – A Painter’s Life
[2007]) and rich reference material in the articles and interviews available on Preston’s website (
gaylenepreston.co.nz
).

My great-grandfather, Charles Beilby, wrote a detailed account (as well as a sheaf of intriguing, incomplete notes) of travelling north from Perth to Singapore, and of his subsequent life in Malaya from 1907 to 1928. The transcription by my father, David Farr, of Charles’s writing was an invaluable source. Thanks, Dad, for this and other family history material.

From anecdotes and family stories told by my grandmothers, Joan Farr and Betty McKenzie, and my mother, Dee Squires, I have drawn inspiration, detail, and a very long bow. Their stories provided points of connection and reference for Lena’s fictional life – points for me to improvise from – and I am deeply grateful for them.

This book and I would also like to thank: all at Michael King Writers’ Centre where I was visiting writer in 2009, particularly Ian Wedde (who then held the University of Auckland Residency) for helpful discussion and encouragement; Joe Hubmann and Michele Morris for providing somewhere to write when I needed it; Jan Rogers for additional family stories; Spencer Stevens for considered comment and lively discussion; and friends, colleagues and family – most especially Spencer – for tolerating and understanding my frequent absences and distraction.

While I have the chance, thanks for their support and encouragement, particularly early in my writing career, is due to Fiona Kidman, Elizabeth Smither and Bill Manhire: all gracious teachers, generous mentors, beautiful writers.

My biggest, most grateful thanks, for this book and much more, go to Craig Stevens, my first first reader, who introduced me to the odd world of electronic music. I doubt Lena Gaunt would ever have moved on from cello to theremin without the influence of his strange interests and curious mind.

•
I was a solitary child, lacking companions my own age, but I was not lonely. I was happy in my own company, dancing to my own drum.
What kind of a character is Lena Gaunt? Do her childhood experiences shape the woman she is to become, or is there something innate in her character that helps to shape her life story?

• What is the impact of different relationships on Lena’s life, beginning with her relationship with Little Clive and ending with her relationship with Mo?

• How would you characterise Lena’s relationship to the concept of ‘home’?

• It might be said that Lena’s oldest and longest relationships are with Uncle Valentine, and with music. What difference do these make to her life?

• What is Lena Gaunt’s relationship to grief? And what is her relationship to music?

•
In those magazines of my uncle’s, and in the slim literary volumes on his shelves, I found pages alive with the buzz of the next new thing. Like me, they were of this century, not the last; they looked forward, not to the past. If these are possible, I thought – this machine, or this poem – if these are possible, then anything, anything might be possible.
In what ways are aspects of the unfolding twentieth century revealed through the character of Lena Gaunt? In what ways are they metaphors for her life?

• Does it matter that we do not ever really find out what happened to Grace?

• What is Lena’s reason for beginning – and then finishing – the writing of this story? Why does she choose to withhold and then deliver her long-kept secret to Mo?

• Why does the novel end in the way that it does? Does this book have a ‘happy ending’?

Tracy Farr is an Australian-born, New Zealand-based writer and former research scientist.
The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt
is her first novel.

Visit the author at
www.tracyfarrauthor.com