Frances, the benighted wife, is the only daughter of a devoutly Protestant family living in late nineteenth-century Dunedin. The novel opens after her death and proceeds by way of flashback to narrate the circumstances of her unexpected marriage to a shadowy Canadian-born evangelist called William Hammond. Frances’s grieving brothers already had their doubts about Hammond, not least because he effortlessly siphoned off his wife’s share of the family fortune within a few weeks of the nuptials. But their suspicion is multiplied exponentially when they learn that Frances has died of ‘uterine inflammation’ in Kingston, Jamaica, only months after both her infant children mysteriously perished.

As must have often been the case in those days, the bad news comes by letter some time after the event. In ‘their craving to discover the truth’, Frances’s family have to rely on ‘a medley of second-hand sources’. This task is not made any easier by the extensive globetrotting that the con man Hammond and his unfortunate spouse crammed into their short married life: Melbourne, Auckland, Honolulu, Tokyo, Vancouver, Juneau, even Guatemala. The atmosphere of each city is vividly evoked, suggesting that the author spent some long hours in the archives to flesh out his intercontinental narrative.

Not surprisingly then, travel is the novel’s most important theme. For Frances, it is the surest means to escape her stultifying small-town life (one of the best passages in the book affectingly conveys her despair at ‘the prospect of empty years’ stretching ahead). For Hammond, mobility serves a more practical purpose, enabling him to sidestep the authorities, as well as affording him fresh opportunities to fleece gullible investors and guileless widows. Even minor characters pine for a distant imperial ‘home’ they have never seen. In short, the ‘longing’ of the title invariably involves wanderlust of one kind or another.

Reid scores a considerable success in recreating the hard-scrabble frontier towns of an age that is increasingly alien to our own. Hapless harlots, narrow-minded burghers, incompetent doctors, psychotic prisoners – the reader encounters a pageant of nineteenth-century lives here, most of which seem nasty, brutish, and short. No doubt this command of historical detail derives in part from the author’s professional expertise (he is an eminent academic). An afterword points out that The End of Longing is loosely based on actual events; Reid, in fact, is distantly related to the historical Frances. From these extratextual comments, one can surmise that the novel’s interest in discovering the truth about the past originated in the author’s own efforts to unlock some family secrets.

Mysteries persist, however, especially apropos Hammond. As a leather-lunged virtuoso of the pulpit, the fictional Hammond ingratiates himself with Protestant congregations all around the Pacific rim. But his god-fearing respectability is merely a cloak to disguise some serious misfeasance. For decades he has been swindling members of his various flocks. Worse, he may have played a part in the sudden deaths of his two earlier wives. Frances is able to learn little about these and other stains on his character. For her, so much of Hammond’s past remains, in Rumsfeldian terms, a known unknown.

Murderers are either born bad or just end up that way. Hammond, the narrative implies, falls into the second category. If he is indeed a killer, then his evil would seem to have its roots in the impoverished boyhood he spent in backwoods Canada. The novel memorably describes the cruelty of his early years – father killed by a kicking horse, mother exploited by a vicious neighbour – which is then presented as a motive for his subsequent criminality. Hammond appears to be seeking some form of vague retribution against all the smugly religious settlers of rural North America, since these were the sort of people who hypocritically stood by while his family endured various misfortunes. On the whole, this is not convincing, especially when it leads Hammond to debate spiritual matters with either Christian do-gooders or his own blighted conscience. Such rhetorical hand-wringing tends to try the reader’s patience, as does the melodramatic bookishness of both central characters, who are wont to spout Wordsworth or Shakespeare in moments of crisis.

These misgivings aside, The End of Longing generally presents a realistic portrait of a bleak world. There are some unexpected comic touches: a Protestant boarding house is said to have an air of ‘relentless cheerfulness’, while a fat-bellied man walking down the street is likened to ‘a human wheelbarrow pushing himself along’. Frances eventually sheds her nomadic disposition; the yearning for the novelty of travel is supplanted by one for the security of home. Though her destiny is clear from the outset, there are still a few twists and turns in the road ahead for Hammond. Not all desires, the novel recognises, end in the grave. Without the endurance of some kinds of longing, truths would remain undiscovered and fictions uncreated.