There are collisions between classes and cultures, including extreme racism towards Chinese people. At the centre is Bridie, a spoiled teenager from an upper-class family who is felled mentally after an accident on the river. Bridie, formerly known as Bridget McPhee, is sent to live with the Sisters at Jerusalem who, a few months later, are shocked to discover she is pregnant. Who is the father? When did it happen?
Pattrick, who lives in Wellington in a house perched above the Botanical Gardens, says she first became interested in the upper reaches of the Whanganui River when she canoed along it 15 years ago. "We had a party of five canoes and 10 people with only one of us who had ever been in a canoe before," she says. "It was terrifying. We didn't have a guide, the river is very strong and I didn't realise there were more than 100 rapids to negotiate. The man who hired us the canoes taught us how to paddle them in this easy pool in Taumarunui.
We were all shouting at our partners, getting everything wrong and going around backwards. Then we were off and five days later, we came out the other end at Pipiriki." She describes the river as "wonderfully quiet, very still, until you got to the helter-skelter bits" of the rapids. Her husband Laughton fell in at one point and cracked a rib but they continued on to Pipiriki.
There, she was fascinated to see remains of the grand old house, which Ngati Kurawhatia in association with government adviser agency Te Puni Kokiri tried to rebuild in the early 90s before running out of funds in 1994. It remains a boarded-up shell begging for restoration. After the river trip, one of her fellow canoeists gave the Pattricks a copy of Arthur Bates' 1985 book, A Pictorial History of the Wanganui River. "Looking through that, I was totally amazed to see how those river steamers could have got up those rapids, that the river could have been such a busy thoroughfare.
I think that was what really excited my imagination - a bit like Denniston. You go there now and there's nothing and then you see the old pictures of what a thriving community it was." Pattrick started researching for the book two years ago, reading newspapers, archives and history books. "I'd been reading about it for some time for my own interest then about four years ago I started thinking this could be my next book.
Then Random House suggested I might look at an illustrated version of Denniston Rose and Heart of Coal [the third book in the trilogy is Catching the Current]. That took a year out of writing this which was quite good because when I came back to it, I took out a whole lot of what I'd been thinking about - I think for the better." Her mastery of detail, such as describing the skills needed for the boats to negotiate the rapids, is impressive, making for an even more enthralling tale because readers feel they are receiving an authentic snapshot.
Pattrick credits her fondness for minutiae to her past career as a jeweller. "I love how things work, making small things and I am quite technically minded. When I am fascinated by them, I want to write about them." At the age of 71, the energetic Pattrick still cannot quite believe her luck - that since Denniston Rose's publication in 2003, she has become one of New Zealand's most popular contemporary writers. "I thought before that I was going gently into the night. I was very lucky that I wrote Denniston Rose at the right time. Before that, there weren't many New Zealand historical novels and Random House wasn't publishing any at all.
They took a punt with it and it took off like a streak." It hasn't all been plain sailing. "I was writing for about eight years before anything got published. It was very hard, I nearly gave up. To rewrite a book then have it turned down, you have to have the hide of an elephant. It would probably have been easier for someone of my age to give up. There were a few tears." There won't be tears, except maybe of laughter, at the launch of Landings this Thursday evening at Marsden Books in Karori. The Pattricks, who have long written musical shows for children, have put together a special song for the occasion.
"My husband has written a river boat song and all our family are singing it - our three children and four grandchildren." That includes her 14-year-old grand-daughter Georgia, who dressed up as blank-minded Bridie for the photo on the book's cover. "It's a bit of a laugh now in our family because she has now read the book," says Pattrick. "She says, 'Oh, couldn't you have made me nicer?' We just laugh and ask her to put on her blank face."
* Landings (Random House, $27.99, is in bookshops from Friday)
