Patricia Grace: Dogside Story

By ELSPETH SANDYS

The release of a new novel by Patricia Grace has to be one of the more significant events in our literary calendar.

Dogside Story, coming on top of an impressive body of work - prize-winning novels, short stories, children's fiction - has already been hailed as a "powerful, page-turning read" and, in Michael Gifkins' words, as a work which provides "a snapshot of what it means to be Maori in the year 2000 ... and how different this is from what it means to be a European inhabitant of Aotearoa."

With these "appetisers" before me I approached Dogside Story with a heightened sense of anticipation. Like many Pakeha New Zealanders I wrestle with the issues, as they confront me in my own life, of bi-culturalism, and I felt confident Grace would have much to say to me. In part, this expectation was fulfilled. The large cast of characters (I stopped counting after 30) are almost all Maori, living, or connected to, a rural community on the east coast of the North Island, dealing with the problems that arise in their daily lives in a recognisably Maori way.

The trouble lies not with the material, but with its organisation.

The novel begins well. The myth of two sisters who quarrel over a lover, and end up living in different settlements on opposite sides of a tidal river, promises much. The contemporary story will surely echo this foundational myth in a way that will shed light on where Maori are today, and what the future might hold. But such echoes as are heard in the chaotic and often confusing tale that is Dogside Story, are so faint as to seem irrelevant. The two sisters who inhabit the contemporary story, Babs and Amiria, bear no resemblance to the sisters of the myth. And so the promise of a story that would connect Maori to their past, and might, in addition, indicate the shape of the future, is lost.

Unravelling the plot of Dogside Story from the weight of what often seemed to me to be irrelevant detail, was no easy task. However, towards the end of the novel the bones of the story began to show through, and there was some wonderful writing: " ... there was what took place before dawn on the first day of the ... new century ... and then what took place soon afterwards - soon after the sun didn't rise to the big photo opportunity, instead hiding itself giggling and wobbly ... behind its cloud screen as the earth turned."

Grace has a marvellous ear for contemporary speech, and her empathy for the young is reflected in dialogue that only rarely fails to convince. But it's often hard to know who's speaking, or whose point of view is being put across. And a flatness in much of the writing - a sameness of pace - dulls tension.

Reading the last half dozen chapters, when the one-legged Te Rua's fight to keep his daughter, the central element in the plot, is finally resolved, I got a glimpse of what this novel might have been, had the narrative been allowed to proceed unimpeded by so many diversions. That said, it occurs to me that Dogside Story's failure to fulfil this reader's expectation of what a novel should be, may be its very point. In which case I will be the first to acknowledge my mis-reading.

Penguin

$34.95

* Elspeth Sandys is an Auckland writer.

* Patricia Grace is a guest at the Auckland Writers' Festival this weekend.