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Fiona Farrell ONZM is a New Zealand novelist, poet and playwright, and she writes non-fiction too, notably about the 2011 Christchurch earthquake.  I discovered her writing last year when I read (and reviewed) The Deck (2023), and promptly ordered Decline and Fall on Savage Street and (mistakenly thinking it was a novel) its companion NF title The Villa at the Edge of the Empire (2015).   From her  website, I learned the origins of these two books:

In 2013, Farrell received Creative New Zealand’s premier award, the Michael King Fellowship, to write twin volumes, one fiction, one non-fiction, prompted by the Christchurch earthquakes and the reconstruction of the city. The Villa at the Edge of the Empire, was shortlisted for the non-fiction section in the 2016 Ockham NZ Book Awards while its fictional twin, Decline and Fall on Savage Street was published to critical acclaim in 2017 and received that year’s NZSA Heritage Book Award for fiction. Together, the books have been described as ‘a wonderful piece of art.’

Decline and Fall on Savage Street is certainly absorbing reading, though it is not until Part Two that the Christchurch earthquake makes its deadly appearance.  The preceding 200-odd pages compress to cover the story of a house, beginning in 1906.  This is the blurb:

A fascinating prize-winning novel about a house with a fanciful little turret, built by a river. Unfolding within its rooms are lives of event and emotional upheaval. A lot happens. And the tumultuous events of the twentieth century also leave their mark, from war to economic collapse, the deaths of presidents and princesses to new waves of music, art, architecture and political ideas. Meanwhile, a few metres away in the river, another creature follows a different, slower rhythm. And beneath them all, the planet moves to its own immense geological time. With insight, wide-ranging knowledge and humour, this novel explores the same territory as its non-fiction twin…

Farrell has a gift for description with occasional sly wit, as you can see in Chapter 2: The Floor Plan, Spring 1908:

A villa.  Not too large.  Not one of the twenty-seven roomed fantasies that introduce his magnum opus: his catalogue of One Hundred Designs for New Zealand Residences.  Not the two-storyed extravagance of Smoking Room, Billiard Room, Fernery and the rest, but something more modest: ten rooms, perhaps.  A substantial villa for the man who is on his way, and for his dependants.  A villa combining tradition with modernity, the best of the past with contemporary comfort, for that is the style for this country, where public buildings favour imperial gravitas with columns and Roman porticoes, along with ample windows and modern plumbing.

And when they leave the public realm, the citizens whom luck and industry have favoured like to stroll home to one or two storeys of vaguely Gothic timber and gabling, or perhaps Georgian brick, with bathroom and kitchen in the contemporary American manner, ideally linked to the modern marvels of metropolitan sewerage systems, gas and electricity, all set behind the fences of a pleasantly private quarter-acre.  A house like this, for example: the ten-roomed villa, taking shape beneath the architect’s busy pen.  (p.11)

The first family to live in this villa is a large one and Farrell traces a patchwork of events in their lives, in chapters that move biennially through most of the century,  interleaved with the endless life-cycle of eels in the river.  Each chapter begins and end mid-sentence, and people come and go, leaving behind only traces of their activity in the house and garden.  When the last of that family is gone in the 70s, the house is found by Min, a bit of a flower-child who is looking for a share-house.  The villa has seen better days:

Midwinter, damp and grey, the river a ribbon of low-hanging fog.  And there it was, half-buried beneath periwinkle, its walls dimpled with damp rot under a cloak of ivy. A leafless vine entangled the front porch, ornamented with the fluffy seed heads of old man’s beard and fallen leaf lay knee-deep on the path between overhanging branches and the whole place reeked of damp and decay, cat pee and desolation.

Perfect.

Min stood in the overgrown garden, jeans soaked to the knees.  She’d regret that later: flares took absolutely ages to dry.  Beneath her sodden boots lay bricks and broken glass.  Beer bottles littered the porch, and someone had set a fire at the foot of the steps where a half-burned wire wove rusted over charred wood and a shabby sofa and armchairs slumped either side in a parody of three-piece gentility.  (p.127)

Min persuades her friends to buy it together. They made an offer, all chipping in as much as they could:

$500 from Steve who had a job that year at the Botanic Gardens, $1000 from Pete who had sold his car, the entire bequest left to Min by her Auntie Eve who had married a GI during the war and gone to live in Wisconsin, $2500 from Mack, and $1000 from Liz who had a scholarship, was doing law and drafted a proper contract that used phrases they never before had encountered, such as ‘tenants in common’ who between them had managed to raise $7000 which the agent said was reasonable. (p.132)

But it’s not enough.  Mack, to Min’s surprise because she’d had no idea that his family was wealthy, comes up with another $5000, and so they lived together more or less in shared harmony till the 1980s, when Mack leaves Min and their daughter Sunny because he’s moved on from political activism.  Pete, who moved on ages ago to be with Thanh in Melbourne, visits when Min is packing up their stuff, and he’s not well.  In an example of what may seem like redundant detail, but is actually referring to a tumultuous event…

He shivers.  He’s felt cold for days now, his head aches and he is so very, very tired.  He could lie down right now, right here, on the floor.

He stands with a carton in his arms.  Sways. Falls heavily against the cupboard.

‘Whoops,’ he says. ‘Sorry, Min. Wrecking the place.’

Min doesn’t look up.  ‘Doesn’t matter,  she says, tossing a copy of Backyard Farming into a bag.  ‘Someone else’s problem now.’  (p.168)

It does matter, when the reader joins the dots and remembers the AIDS epidemic that launched itself on an unsuspecting world in 1981 and as of 2023 has killed 40+ million people.

Later that decade another change of ownership introduces a blended family: an interior decorator with a taste for garish colours called Stephie who bonds with Paul the doctor who treated her son Ben’s broken arm.  Alas, he has obnoxious children determined to make her pay for ‘breaking up their family’, and his life seems harder than it ought to be.  I don’t know much about NZ politics of that era but Paul’s struggle with budget cuts in the public hospital system reminded me of the Thatcherites who took over in NZ, (and the economic migrants who fled to Australia, and probably regretted it when we got a Thatcherite of our own!)

A change of pace is signalled in Part Two by a change of dating.  Chapters no longer progress by years but by days and months, and the first day, 3 September 2010 is the day when Janey and Rob are painting their bedroom. The kids were quiet behind closed doors in their rooms, asleep or sneakily on their phones or transfixed by the computer’s pallid glow.  As the date ticks over to the 4th, Rob is standing in the dark at the window, fully awake, alert, and not quite sure why.  

And then the window gives a little preliminary rattle and something roars up, a rumbling rises beneath his feet, felt in every bone as much as heard, a deep visceral explosion that flings him up into the air, so that he loses balance and falls hard against the sill.  Which is in motion, as is the whole house.  It sways and jolts as if gathered up by immense hands and brutally shaken, and with the shaking the windows crack and there’s the crash of things falling, dwang and soffit splitting asunder as the momentum gathers, stronger, harder and from long training he knows he must get under the doorway.  That is the safest place.  Beneath a lintel. So somehow as the floor bucks and jumps, he stumbles over trestles and ladders to its protective frame.

Janey has got there before him, flung abruptly from sleep facedown on the floor, scrambling towards the door because above all the din there is a single, high-pitched cry that pulls her like a wire to Poppy’s room, to her daughter who is screaming in the jolting dark in her room along the hallway. (p.217)

Poppy, who thinks that the monster under the bed has finally come to get her.

The vivid images of this catastrophe gradually ease as the family transitions into the awful situation that was reality for so many.  Alongside other international aid agencies, Australia was there to help with the immediate aftermath.  We sent Search and Rescue and Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) teams, 300+ police, counsellors and medical assistance, and the government pledged $6million alongside ordinary Australians giving generously to charities such as the Red Cross.  But beyond these immediate needs, there were ordinary families scrambling for makeshift accommodation in a ruined city, dealing with traumatised children, working in difficult conditions from ‘home’ while offices in the city were inspected for safety, and waiting interminably for a bureaucratic insurance industry to enable reconstruction — if indeed the house can be repaired.  Marriages buckled along with the roads and buildings…

Decline and Fall on Savage Street is a sobering story, reminding us that the earth beneath our feet is not as solid as it seems.  But the parallel story of the eel in the river is a metaphor for human resilience: change is constant, and life goes on.

You may also be interested to read Time to Remember (2021), by Janna Ruth, see my review.  It’s a novel about young adults who were children at the time of the Christchurch earthquake.

Although about 100 earth tremors occur each year in Australia, the continent is sited in the middle of a tectonic plate and destructive earthquakes such as the 1989 Newcastle earthquake (NSW)  are rare. (See the Australian Climate Science (ACS) website for an interactive map.)  While the ACS reminds us that large earthquakes can occur anywhere in Australia, and without warning, it’s probably true that other kinds of devastating natural disasters such as fire and flood are front of mind in Australia.  But in New Zealand, which straddles the Indo-Australian and Pacific tectonic plates, noticeable earthquake activity is frequent and people are much more aware of the potential for disaster.

Christchurch is not the only city to experience a catastrophic earthquake — Napier was almost entirely rebuilt (in Art Deco style) after the deadly 1931 Hawkes Bay earthquake which killed 256 people, and Wellington copped a magnitude 8.2 earthquake, the most powerful ever recorded in New Zealand.  But that was in 1855 when the population was only about 6000 and there were very few casualties.

Image Credit:

Map of world tectonic plates, by CIA – http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/reference_maps/physical_world.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23270082

Author: Fiona Farrell
Title: Decline and Fall on Savage Street
Publisher: Vintage (Penguin Random House NZ), 2017
ISBN: 9780143770626, pbk., 359 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from Fishpond.

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