Kind

A pile of library books is waiting to be read and more are knocking at the door, so to speak, as holds arrive at the library or on Libby. Today, I completed Kind by Stephanie Johnson, the title being a reference to Jacinda Ardern’s plea that we be kind to each other during the pandemic. I was reminded of Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood and Fiona Farrell’s The Deck – both also influenced by political events and by Covid. Kind didn’t fill me with the same sense of entrapment and dread as those books, I was relieved to find. The many flashbacks took you out of claustrophobic lockdown and into complex lives, and out into the countryside too, from Christchurch to Arthur’s Pass to the Bay of Islands to Australia – and even to China in flash back. I was also reminded of Kamila Shamsie’s Best of Friends, as the main part of the story is about the life-long friendship of two women growing in self-knowledge perhaps, or perhaps not.

The cover blurb describes the book as satirical, which it is in a way, but not so the characters become types (with exceptions) rather than credible. Some embody rumours and suspicions which abounded during covid about criminal activity, illegal migration, and Chinese interference or culpability. Many show various ways of being kind and how that can be aspirational but also misguided and possibly lead to choices which cause life-long regret.

In the Author’s Note at the end, the author thanks her husband for ‘a certain plot point’. Which one? There are so many twists and turns. I feared I would lose track of the story lines and characters but they all linked together in increasingly suspenseful ways and soon I was completely into it, reading in my egg chair into the warm evening when it began to rain lightly and got too dark to see. I finished the last couple of pages as I cooked dinner.

On to the next book! Something a little more sedate perhaps, to be kind to myself, before I tackle the brutal demands of more literary fiction.