Victoria McHalick: The Taming

Reviewed by PENELOPE BIEDER

Wellington writer Victoria McHalick presents a world of back gardens and strange neighbours seen from the eyes of a small boy, in this, her debut novel following on from her successful collection of short stories, The Honey Suckers. Hamish Harrison lives in a shabby house with his financially-strapped postgraduate student mother Sylvie and his three beloved pets: Snowflake the rabbit, Minnie the guinea pig and Jean-Paul the goldfish. What Hamish really wants is a dog, but he is far too sweet a child to say so. Sweet and sensitive, but extraordinarily curious and observant.

Next door in the big house, someone is playing a grand piano, and through the trees at the back of Hamish's garden, a new family is moving in. Soon Sylvie and Hamish are invited over to the house-warming party.

In a clever, seductive novel about the end of innocence, McHalick dishes up satisfyingly substantial doses of good and evil. At times the good is in danger of becoming a bit "goody-goody" and the evil sometimes a little too signposted, but the story that Hamish tells breathes with life, warmth and wit.

The huge risk - or gamble - the author takes is using the potentially irritating device of a child's perspective in an adult novel, but it is quite simply overcome by spare, beautiful, effortless writing.

An occasional lapse into cuteness perhaps, especially where the pets are concerned, is soon rescued by a strong storyline and the living, breathing, all-too-flawed people who swirl in and out of the boy's life.

Hamish notices every little thing (except the very events that are leading him into danger) and soon he finds a partner in spying in Geraldine, the youngest of three girls from the new family through the trees at the back.

He and Gerry live in a wonderful world of intrigue, and to McHalick's credit, she maintains a delicate balance between fantasy and reality as the end of childish daydreams loom. His mother Sylvie is blissfully unaware of the dramatic sub-plots in her small son's life - she has her hands full coping with studying, paying the bills and fending off admirers.

Hamish's world, and the novel's, is almost claustrophobically small, and it should be a relief when the action briefly moves to the oceanfront cottage of his grandparents, but the jolly grandparents are, to me, the only small part of the novel that does not quite work. Here, sentimentality is piled on to drive home a few home truths and the story briefly falters.

This is an assured, fearless novel and, while it unfolds in the calm heart of suburbia, it is not afraid to confront a backyard heart of darkness, too.

HarperCollins, $24.99