Lucky Bastard, by Peter Wells: Vintage Books/Random House $27.99 Peter Wells' first book, Dangerous Desires, was the official 1991 ‘coming out' moment for New Zealand literature. At last we had a major writer who was gay and who was writing openly about gay themes. It was a culturally significant moment and, in Wells' hands, an artistically significant one. Few New Zealand writers can now equal Wells' range, which has moved, seemingly so easily, from collections of short stories to novels, memoirs, anthologies, and essays, with even a late illustrative career to factor in. Not to mention the movie, the short films, and the documentaries. The one thing they all have in common is that they all have their origin in an acute gay sensibility. Their subjects, their vision and their styles have all arisen from the experience of being gay. He speaks for us, about us and perhaps most importantly – about the way we see and experience the world. His latest novel, Lucky Bastard, is no exception. With each new work, Wells reinvents himself and, with increasing frequency, the particular genre in which he has chosen to work. Following Iridescence, Wells' 2003 novel of secrets, cross-dressing, and 19th Century Napier and London, which could, arguably, be said to be the greatest Victorian novel written in New Zealand, Lucky Bastard is yet another new departure for the writer. To call it a ‘post-modern' novel is to do it a disservice, but it does conform to the undercuttings of the contemporary novel: what we assume at the beginning is not what we know at the end. From its opening in the brilliantly-evoked, tawdry world of the Allied victors in post-war Japan to its climax in a familiar contemporary rainy Auckland, Lucky Bastard is a page-turner as Wells attempts to unravel one of the central human mysteries: how the past, and our illusions about it, create our present being. Lucky Bastard has, as its basis, the story of Eric Keeling, a former Japanese prisoner of war who later becomes an investigator of war-crimes in Tokyo. Keeling's experiences resound into the future, when his gay son, Ross, and his daughter, Alison, a London-based financial market executive, are faced with the Keeling's impending death at the age of 80, just as academic historians and TV current-affairs programs are turning over some of the questions concerning his last war-crimes case. It is a book of unending revelations, where nothing is as it initially seems. Wells deftly peels back the layers to depict a world of vivid erotic complexity, global power-currents, moral conflict, generational mystery, and family lineage, as the ramifications of one man's actions sixty years in the past are investigated in the present. Wells' style is deceptively simple. Lucky Bastard is as readable as a thriller or a detective novel as it strips back the illusion of explanation - whether it is the stories we all make of our own lives, the more official histories, or the in factoids presented by current affairs reporting. But Lucky Bastard is not just a programmatic novel of theme and examination. In his works, Wells has always demonstrated perhaps one of the sharpest senses of observation in contemporary New Zealand writing. Lucky Bastard is a sensual delight as hangovers, shoes, smells, Tokyo streets, voices, sex, mangroves, rain, tactile sensations, New Zealand suburbs, and food, are all satisfyingly and memorably realized. His social observations of our contemporary world are no less sharp, whether their focus is a somehow very familiar woman current affairs presenter, the world of long-term gay relationships, or the role of texting in modern life. It is a vivid book and a satisfying one. But Lucky Bastard is also a novel that must have a particular meaning to anyone gay in New Zealand. It has always been Wells' gift to simultaneously present books that have a universal appeal to the open-minded, but to also grant a gay and lesbian audience another additional experience. It isn't just the fact that gay sexuality sinuously winds through the book in its characters, their actions and their situations - and Wells has always been a great writer of gay sex situations - but rather that the whole novel mirrors one of the fundamental acts of gay psychology and the basis of our sensibility. All of us are born into a families and a culture that possess a heterosexual story and history. All of us, in order to be ourselves as gays or lesbians, must confront these stories and histories and transform them into something relevant to ourselves. As Lucky Bastard so ably demonstrates, there is also an unprecedented act of creation involved in this process. It is often a brave and sometimes lonely reworking of the given world but this singular act of revision and remaking lays bare many of the mysteries of human being our heterosexual brothers and sisters seldom discover. If Dangerous Desires was a ‘coming out' announcement, Lucky Bastard is ultimately deeper and more satisfying reflection upon what is really involved in the creation of a gay sensibility. It is a mature and integrated work and marks something of an artistic precedent for Wells – instead of being the subject of the book, gayness, for want of a better word, becomes the method. Wells' increasing body of work is rapidly establishing him as New Zealand's pre-eminent writer and it is becoming an unavoidable fact that if we are to make sense of contemporary New Zealand life – whether gay or straight – he needs be read. However, as he has repeatedly proven, most recently with Iridescence and now with Lucky Bastard, it is clear that it is not so much a duty to do so, as a very great pleasure. David Herkt - 1st October 2007