KEY POINTS:
GIRLIE: A NOVEL
by Gillian Ranstead
(Penguin $28)
The prime mover of populations from their home to the far-flung corners of the earth has always been competition for scarce resources, especially land. And that's why, paradoxically, the element that most peoples and nations have in common is the experience of division, of displacement, dispossession and dislocation.
Thus it was that when Maori encountered the various tribes of Europe Scots, Irish, Dalmatians, Protestant French they were able immediately to empathise with much of what constituted for each a distinct identity.
Grief, nostalgia for a remembered home, the cupping of protective hands around your language, reverence for your ancestors and for the stories passed down from generation to generation and binding all together: these were the common ground upon which each group stood, even when you were discussing your differences.
It is this shared experience that is at the heart of Gillian Ranstead's second novel, Girlie. It's about the cradle of blood ties into which the main character, Mara Duine, is born and to which, as she grows up and becomes more self-aware, she returns. The Duine family are of Highland Scottish stock, displaced from their lands after the battle of Culloden.
The line is brought to New Zealand by Dhomhnuill, a seaman who jumps ship in Wellington harbour in 1839 after hearing a Scottish tune being played on a pipe by a Maori. Dhomhnuill is accepted by the pipe-player's whanau and raises a family of his own amongst them on gifted land.
By the time Mara is born her name is bestowed by her great-grandfather, Dhomhnuill's son, and means "the sea" in Gaelic in the late 1850s, the gifted land has been converted to freehold to attract development funds from banks who will not lend on Maori land. The moves to convert the lease to freehold mean a rift has developed both within Mara's natural family and between them and their Maori benefactors.
It happens that this sad fact is just one of a whole constellation of unlucky stars that attend her birth, for Mara also has the misfortune to be born fatherless to a mother who is more interested in pursuing a career in journalism than in being a parent. Mara grows up in the care of her extended family, at a time when that family is poised to be forced from the land by a combination of tragedy and natural calamity.
As the author's note following the narrative indicates, Girlie is more of an artist's impression of her own family history than a work of pure imagination (and the title is followed by the words "A Novel", lest there be any confusion). For this reason, many of the storylines and some of the characters are shadowy and half-formed, as the focus is firmly fixed on the greater picture, namely the resilience of blood bonds in the face of the sheer destructive power of circumstance.
Appropriately, perhaps, the best-drawn character is the land, the secluded valley in which Mara grows up, with its river winding through a gorge with precipitous walls that her mother has sourly christened The Immensities, after the immensities of birth and death between which we are all trapped.
By far the most striking feature of Girlie is the power of its prose, which weaves imagery back and back upon itself to form the kind of lacework of intersecting loops and convolutions that recur throughout Celtic art.
In places, the long, mesmerising sentences sound ceremonial, like incantations, like the stories learned on an elder's knee and haunting you, half-remembered, half-forgotten, as you grow up, biding their time and waiting for their moment to reclaim you as one of their own.
