Kaye Kelly: Cross the River to Home

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

The wild West Coast is emerging as an engine room for the kiwi imagination. Last year Jenny Pattrick's phenomenally popular The Denniston Rose made full use of its qualities of isolation and bad weather, and the breathing space it has historically offered for extravagant, fragile dreams and new life. Felicity Price's Dancing in the Wilderness occupied similar territory (and don't forget that New Zealand classic, Blackball, about the birth of trade unionism in that once-bustling, now much emptier place).

British author Rose Tremain set her latest novel, The Colour, on the goldfields near Hokitika.

And now Kaye Kelly, who grew up on the Coast, brings us a story of the thwarted, derided love between an English immigrant shopkeeper and a half-Chinese woman, a market gardener, set in 1870s Charleston and Stafford, a tiny, now-deserted place just north of Hokitika. Published under the same imprint as The Denniston Rose, it contains the same light blend of historical detail and romance.

Kelly has chosen to explore issues of racial prejudice and community bigotry. Shocking examples of racial hatred and suspicion sit alongside the fear even members of the dominant race have, that somehow public opinion will turn against them. We are all vulnerable to the pack, Kelly implicity reminds us.

Her story opens with the near-rape of half-Chinese Fong Mai and the assault of her blind grandfather Fong Hoy. Their rescue precipitates a chain of events and relationships involving a doctor (a burgeoning ophthalmologist who may be able to save Fong Hoy's sight) who has a damaging secret, his wife Poppy, Poppy's younger brother Henry, recently arrived from Britain, Poppy's mercurial former business partner Ben, and a villainous sea captain.

All are victims of set ideas in one way or another — Fong Hoy's bigotry against Henry, for instance, and his insistence on Mai's marriage to a Chinese man (who turns out to be a no-good drinker, gambler and wife-beater) set things in the direction of tragedy.

Kelly has not developed Pattrick's sure touch, and her storytelling voice falters at times, as she tends towards the melodramatic to overcompensate for weaknesses in her character development.

But parts of the story are really exciting, and the story certainly pulls us along to its moving, hopeful conclusion. An ambitious addition to the growing body of lighter reads reflecting our tireless fascination with history.