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Butler's Ringlet, Laurence Fearnley
Penguin
Reviewed by Jan Treliving-Brown (Courtesy of Taranaki Daily News)

Is Butler's Ringlet merely "a Southern man's search for love" - fine if you enjoy the Speights ads and can identify with an intensely lonely existence in rural Southland? Honestly, it's much, much more.

Laurence Fearnley has done an amazing job of exploring New Zealand's provincial male world. She deftly uncovers the nuances of men's camaraderie in a way I've never read before. Butler's Ringlet is Fearnley's fourth novel and she's in the final stages of completing a fifth, set in the Antarctic.

Warwick and Dean are our two Southern blokes. Intriguingly, Butler's Ringlet is a species of the endemic genus Erebiola butleri – it's a butterfly found only in the sub-alpine zone of the South Island. It's Warwick who collects moths and butterflies to fill the gap in his life after his wife and son give up on remote Central Otago and return home to Germany.

Though devastated, Warwick lives for his tiny community. He can't leave the land: "Over and over he pictured himself leaving ... His imagination stumbled only when he pictured having to leave his surroundings, the place where he lived. It confirmed, then, what he had already known, that it was possible to love somewhere as much as someone."

Dean is Warwick's buddy. He's more outgoing, more complex. Craving a wife, he goes for the obvious – a rural dating agency. Dean has far too much emotional baggage as it turns out. His father acts like the sergeant major, plus there's the terrible memory of Dean's part in his brother Andy's death.

At this point I feel like banging their heads together. It's only when Warwick's little family, wife Sabine and son Ecki, come visiting from Germany that Warwick and Dean are jolted into action. Surely Warwick wonders why Sabine opts to bunk in with Dean?

Butler's Ringlet is a wonderfully written novel about the fragility of friendship and hope. I enjoyed the unorthodox sprinkling of southern snapshots, the Clinton to Gore Presidential Highway in particular.