Landscape with Solitary Figure
Shonagh Koea
Vintage, $30.00, ISBN 9781775535881
Shonagh Koea’s novel Landscape with Solitary Figure is concerned with themes of domestic trauma, emotional unhappiness, withdrawal and solitude, written with a careful attention to detail which mires the reader in the mindfully self-aware moment, producing an intense reading experience which is also deeply unsettling. It is a stately novel, its movements measured but never ponderous, pausing often to think and reflect, offering up a series of tableaux – not always in chronological order – as if they were a series of paintings in a gallery before which one pauses to admire and contemplate, the fuller narrative being formed somewhere in the spaces and connections between them.