KEY POINTS:
The whaling life, in all its drama, is marvellous material for novelists. In 2005 Fiona Kidman recreated early New Zealand whaling in The Captive Wife. This year sees the excellent Thor's Tale, a young-adult novel by Janice Marriott about a whaling station in 1915 South Georgia.
The Blue - first novel by Wellington writer Mary McCallum - is set in 1938 on a remote island in the Tory Channel, and focuses mostly on a whaler's wife, Lilian. She lives on Arapawa Island with husband Ed and her younger son Billy. Slowly, we are introduced to a closeknit community - Ed's cousin Owen; Gunner, the Italian whaler; Lilian's troubled son, Micky; and the men who work the boats. For three months of each year, these men hunt the migrating whales, while the women tend the home fires.
The domestic makes an intriguing juxtaposition to the violence of the whaling scenes. Both are vividly drawn. Two main stories gradually take on importance: Lilian and her place on the island; Owen and his Annie. Between these two stories runs a thread of tension, which becomes more significant as the novel progresses.
McCallum has a nice turn of phrase. About Lilian's taciturn husband Ed: "Every season he took on the guise of a whale to fight a whale, perpetually sluiced and sodden, looking at the world through a curtain of water."
Lilian's life is a barren one tending her chickens and unresponsive husband. She seems to hide in her domesticity. Ed himself is haunted by the past; he came back from World War I a changed man. "He was ruined in a way she couldn't understand." Lilian went ahead and married him anyway, though nearly turned back at the church, instead meeting Owen for the first time. McCallum has the skill to sketch such tense scenes with gentle subtlety.
Domesticity is also a source of comfort. During the war, Owen starts reading Lilian's letters aloud to Ed in the trenches. A group of men soon gather. A letter about the making of a fruitcake takes on special significance: the domestic world, which the men are missing, is still going on back home.
Initially it is the whaling, with all the obvious danger and excitement of the hunt, which seems to dominate the novel. "All of a sudden the water curled in on itself and a whale rose up so close Gunner could see the criss-cross scars on its skin."
But in the end The Blue is really Lilian's story. Although set in 1938 her story could be entirely modern. The question asked, I think, is how do you live with your mistakes?
- Penguin Books, $28
* Tina Shaw is an Auckland writer.
