Shaw's German idea comes to fruition

Tina Shaw

Public and private have different meanings in Berlin. "So many people!" laughs Tina Shaw, who spent 2001 in the city on the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writer's Residency.

"I loved it a lot. But a very different kind of living. People all around the whole time, you can't really go out into the backyard and relax in the sun. Very urban. Even the building I was living in had a courtyard, and we had a trendy cafe — it was very public."

Shaw applied for the residency because she had "a German idea" she wanted to develop into a novel — which eventually became The Black Madonna (Penguin, $28). It let her write a very different book from the one she might have produced had she stayed here. "That sense early on in the book that someone's always watching you — that came from spending time over there. Winter was like that in a different sense, very claustrophobic. It would be dark by four o'clock."

The person being watched in Shaw's book is Luise, a lonely woman in 1935 Berlin, whose husband has abandoned her because she can't bear him a child. Desperate to distract herself, Luise decides on a whim to carve a Madonna and Child, an icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus. Luise pours all her desperate longing for a child into the carving, and somehow in the process the Madonna becomes infused with the ability to work miracles.

"I'm really not sure where the Madonna came from. It's one of those things that just popped into my head and worked its way into the book."

Shaw, who was raised Catholic but no longer believes, sees the Madonna as, "representing the power of the female, that bond between mother and child".

Appropriately enough, the first of its miracles is that Luise becomes pregnant — though not to her husband. She meets a visiting black American wrestler, and falls in love with him, shortly after which he falls foul of the Nazis and disappears. Luise finds herself expecting a racially mixed child in the least racially tolerant city on Earth.

"She doesn't get the nice white German baby she wanted initially, and her whole life changes because of that. A little bit of irony there."

As it happens, becoming a mother was a turning point for Shaw in quite a different way. "I'd always wanted to be a writer, right from when I was a kid. I had this book — I still have it now — called To Be A Slave. It was a fictional account of black people in southern America. I was so moved by that book."

The power of fiction to transport you into other lives, other worlds, seemed both magical and admirable to Shaw. "At some point I made the leap and decided I wanted to do that as well. But I wasn't quite settled enough to make it work. I'd been travelling overseas, didn't really know what I was doing with myself, I was doing a lot of different things. Just being at home, being a mum, just gave me that confidence, I guess."

At the point where her daughter was born, Shaw had been writing on and off for years, producing stories, "goddawful poems", and a journal. "When I was at high school I discovered Frank Sargeson and I read about how he kept a journal. I didn't know how you went about this whole business of writing, but I thought, okay, I could do THAT."

But it was during her time at home with a baby that she started thinking seriously about what writing involved.

"That was the first time I actually started working on my craft. I'd write a story and work on it, trying to improve my writing the whole time. I spent many, many years doing that."

Her first novel, Birdie, was published in 1996. "But before that I think I'd drafted out three other novels ... it was really a long learning process."

The Black Madonna is her fifth, and you can tell it is the work of someone with a great deal of confidence in her own abilities. The book manages to be structurally complex without becoming at all convoluted or difficult to read. It follows not only Luise, but also the Madonna she creates, which changes the lives of a host of minor characters. Finally, the book tells the story of Luise's son, who returns to Berlin at the end of his life, hoping to discover what happened to his father.

"A lot of the book built up over time. I went through many different drafts, experimenting and playing with different ideas, just trying to get the right one. Often when you are writing a novel you do it by feel — it's like being blind and you're feeling your way forward."

Shaw is currently writer in residence at Waikato University, working on a collection of short fiction and several other projects. The residency runs for one year. And after that? "Oh God, I don't know. I'll have to get a real job."