Published by Penguin Books New Zealand, 2010

With 950 huts in a nation the size of Oregon, huts are a vital part of New Zealand’s landscape and imagination.  What I loved most about this novel, in addition to this it’s sensitive portrayal of the life story of a quiet poet-butcher named Boden Black, was an even quieter main character: the “Far-light hut”.

I can’t think of another novel in which a hut is an important character, though there certainly may be some…..

As a child Boden experienced an elegiac epiphany on visiting the Mackenzie country near his home in Fairlee, on the South Island. Thus began a lifetime love affair with the landscape of his region, and with words — which he gradually learned to wrestle into poetic expression that eventually won him national recognition.

Also as a youngster, on a rare vacation trip with his parents, he glimpsed his first hut in a sublime landscape painting at the grand Hermitage lodge on the slopes of Mt. Cook. On that trip Boden fell in love with the mountains. Later, in his early twenties, in the 1950’s, he took his first solo trip away from home to help a team of mountaineers build a hut on the flanks of Mt. Cook.   This was a seminal experience in his development as a poet and as an effective, if extremely reticent, social being.

As a hut builder he learned to negotiate a wider range personalities and motivations during this three-week building project.  He was paired off as a work partner with an equally quiet, older man, Walter. While the others went on a supply run and their return was delayed by a snow-storm, Boden and Walter spent three days trapped in their snow cave quarters. They haltingly exchanged life stories. Boden eyes were opened to unfamiliar aspects of society, to the larger world of New Zealand letters, and to difficult moral dilemmas. He also discovered that he had learned more carpentry skills than he realized from a kind neighbor. He loved the quiet rhythm of work and the gradually emerging shape of the hut. He climbed his first mountain, Mt. Cook, with Sir Edmund Hillary and another remarkable mountaineer. And as a hut builder he was inspired to write more than ever before, eventually producing the poem for which he was later best known.

The Hut Builder is a beautifully written novel more focused character than plot. It is a coming of age story that follows an orphan through a life of discovering who he is, where he came from, and what he loves.

In an interview in the New Zealand Listener, Laurence Fearnley says that she was frustrated by not being able to get her earlier work published outside New Zealand:

When I asked why, I was told what I write is ‘too New Zealand’ for international audiences.” She sighs. “I reacted strongly to that. I know I should have listened to the feedback then written a book set overseas, which might have reached audiences in Europe and America. But I thought, ‘Stuff you, I’m going to write a book which is so New Zealand that anyone who isn’t a New Zealander won’t understand half of it.’”

Yes, it is a New Zealand novel of place and character, but with wide human scope and broad appeal. I think I was able to understand more than half of it!

Seriously, the book is a very good read and its N.Z. roots do not limit, but rather illuminate it. It includes wonderful descriptions of New Zealand landscapes, and features a number of evocative factual and fictional characters. After winning the fiction category of the 2011 NZ Post Book Awards the book was shortlisted for the international 2010 Boardman Tasker Prize for mountain writing.

I love the way the fictional “Far-light Hut” that Boden helped to build as a young man — which is based on the actual “Empress Hut” on Mt Cook — comes to his rescue many years later. While in the throes of a moral dilemma, Boden unexpectedly encounters the hut in its second life as part of a museum of New Zealand mountaineering. It has been relocated to become part of a problematic national park interpretive center that is about to be dedicated with the help of one of Boden’s poems. The old hut gives the old man what he needs to decide what part he should play in this evolution on a beloved landscape.

by Sam Demas, February 2016