Enclosures

Direen’s latest novel Enclosures is infused with restlessness: its interlocking stories move between France, Iraq, Wellington, and some of the wilder sections of the New Zealand coast. Like Direen’s 2006 novel Song of the Brakeman, which was full of frightening allusions to Guantanamo Bay, Enclosures is unified by the theme of imprisonment. Its characters often seem determined to escape the oppressive governments and obsolete and encumbering codes of behavior that threaten to overwhelm them.