Author(s): David Coventry

Novel | Aotearoa Fiction | Read our reviews!

Performance is a self-portrait like no other. David Coventry takes us into his experience of ME, a debilitating systemic disease which took hold in March 2013 but has roots in his childhood.

For Coventry, ME radically overturns the rules of time, thought and embodiment – an experience which has shaped the writing of this book. Through an illuminating blend of life transcription and deep imaginative projection, he shows how placing fiction into the stories of our damaged lives can remind us of who we are and who we might have been, even when so much of us has been taken away by illness. 

From a mountaineering disaster in Kaikōura to a literary encounter in Austria, a country mansion to a volcanic archipelago, this novel is a strikingly vivid, at times disorienting series of journeys, stopovers and emergencies that take in the world, one in which Coventry is often an outsider, even when at home in Wellington. With purposeful unreliability and flashes of humour amid pain and searching, Performance takes us into a space where ‘reading’ itself fails as a description of how we meet the text. This is a generous, unforgettable vista of life within illness.

"David Coventry's new novel is informed and formed and de-formed by his experience suffering from ME, an illness of chronic systemic dysregulation that makes ‘normal’ life impossible, fractures the supposed link between the self and its biography, narrows and distorts the focus of awareness, and disestablishes comfortable conventional notions of the ongoingness of time. Dealing not much at all with the half-life of bed and sofa that is the main occupation of the chronically ill, the book is rather a multi-stranded literary performance of remembered travels, conversations, stories and encounters, seemingly Coventry’s own or those of persons close to him, burning with moments of great vividness and intensity yet also constrained by the blockages and blanks imposed on narrative by his illness, which reaches backwards through the medium of his memory to the whole of his life and beyond. Coventry’s illness is an unconsented catalyst to ways of writing freed from the performative conventions of literature and into territory where the urge to impart sense and form burns where both sense and form are impossible. The book contains much that I found compelling, thoughtful, memorable, and disconcerting. It is a unique contribution to the literature of illness." —Thomas

‘Like all great art, Performance defies paraphrase. This novel is a staggeringly ambitious work that few writers or scholars could conceive and probably only one could enact. It locates David Coventry in a genealogy of modern and postmodern writers including Virginia Woolf and Thomas Bernhard, whose illness intelligence is part of what makes their work innovative, important, and unforgettable.’ —Martha Stoddard Holmes, author of Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victoria Culture

‘A masterpiece of narrative disintegration with a deep psychic grip on the reader – a book whose design not infrequently had me exhaling in both profound affect and aesthetic astonishment. A monumental achievement.’
—Tracey Slaughter, author of Devil’s Trumpet and Conventional Weapons

Read Thomas's interview with David Coventry: 

David Coventry’s first novel, The Invisible Mile, won the Hubert Church Award for Best First Book at the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. It was also published in the UK and Commonwealth by Picador UK, and the USA and Canada by Europa Editions. It has been translated into Dutch, Hebrew, Spanish, Danish and German. His second novel, Dance Prone, was published in 2020. David received an MA in Creative Writing in 2010 from the International Institute of Modern Letters, and he was the recipient of the 2015 Todd New Writer’s Bursary from Creative New Zealand. In 2022 he completed his PhD exploring the complexities and impossibilities of living a creative life with ME/CFS – a project which was selected for the 2022 Dean’s List, and forms the basis of Performance (2024). He was the 2022 Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence at the University of Canterbury.

Cover photograph: Henry Coventry, Tararua Lodge Fire, Mt Ruapehu, 8 August 1954
Cover design: Simon Waterfield