Tina Shaw: City of reeds

Penguin $24.95

Review: Elspeth Sandys

The question at the heart of this troubling, cleverly crafted novel is: does life have any meaning, and, if it doesn't, how do you go on living?

This is a bleak tale, though relieved by flashes of humour (much of it surreal), and illumined by writing of impressive descriptive power.

The story centres round the lives of the three Purefoy sisters - Beth, Clare and Louise - born and raised in a small New Zealand town somewhere close to Auckland.

The sights, sounds and smells of the town are brilliantly evoked, as is the cast of eccentric characters: the clumsy but curiously noble Mrs Kray; the shadowy Mr Willow, who may or may not be certifiably insane; the unnamed Marshall boy, whose answer to the question at the heart of the novel is two failed suicide attempts; Marty, the girls' father, Vietnam vet and abandoned husband; the oddly named Tupolo, who becomes Clare's lover.

The interweaving of past and present makes for confusion at times, but as the sisters move from the town of their childhood to the larger arenas of Auckland, San Francisco, and Afghanistan, a pattern does emerge. Whether this pattern contains the answer to the novel's central question only the reader can decide.

One of the strengths of City of Reeds is the way in which its author extends the search for meaning into the three vastly different societies traversed by the sisters as they follow their individual destinies. Beth becomes a nurse and travels to Kabul to work for the Red Cross. Lou, whose dream is to make and spend as much money as possible, settles for a job in real estate in Auckland. Clare becomes a doctor, and lives for a time in San Francisco, where she absorbs its culture, copes with its dangers and survives an unfortunate love affair.

But all three find their way back, at one time or another, to the mangrove-fringed town of their childhood.

The only person who escapes is their mother, who abandons her young family for new life and love in Queensland.

In City of Reeds, as in Tina Shaw's previous two novels, disparate places and people are linked, the common denominator being the fragility of life.

In her brilliant capturing of fleeting moments the author contrives to reinvent the recent past (the novel spans the last three decades of the 20th century) so that it seems both familiar and exotic.

Without revealing too much of the plot, I would say that the weakness of the novel is that it is really only Clare who emerges as a three-dimensional character.

The tragedy of Beth's life is hinted at rather than explained. And Lou is too thinly drawn to be be more than a shadow at the edge of Clare's field of vision.

But if the novel is read as Clare's story then these criticisms become irrelevant. In Clare's commitment to her family, her search for love and her desire to heal, the struggle to make sense of a violent world is movingly played out.

The novel ends on a note of fragile hope. But the words that stayed in my mind were those spoken by the Marshall boy: " ... life is just an illusion and the only truth is that you've gotta keep moving."

* Elspeth Sandys is an Auckland writer.