This debut novel seems to come from a far more practised hand than a newbie. Wellington writer Jennifer Trevelyan has hit the jackpot with her nuanced, appealing tale. Set for a global release with leading publishers, film rights optioned and the writer signed up to a stellar British literary agent, the novel has caused a stir. It is easy to see why.
At first glance, A Beautiful Family could be just another piece of New Zealand gothic. A missing child, an unfaithful wife, a lost and bewildered husband, a rebellious teenager, a drowning, a threatening neighbour and untamed nature are among the usual ingredients of our national subgenre – but the book transcends it to become much more than that.
A great part of the novel’s success is the narrator. Ten-year-old Alix is instantly adorable, a bright, curious and brave kid who loves and is loved by her family. It is 1986 and she is away on holiday with Mum, Dad and teenage Vanessa. The exorbitant cost of renting a holiday home now prohibits most families from long summer holidays. But 40 years ago it was possible for a family of moderate means to occupy a bach for a month.
Readers old enough to remember this era will recall how the long weeks slowly spooled by in a haze of beach, barbecues, sand, salt, quarrels and laughter. Children had adventures, formed alliances and enmities; adults lay around in the afternoons and partied at nights. Alix’s family are away for five weeks, and on Mum’s insistence, at a place “where there are people”. Earlier holidays, also true to the pre-wholesale coastal development era, were in spots as isolated as the family could find, where they had whole beaches to themselves. This holiday is more social, with friends from Wellington also enjoying the summer there.
Trevelyan doesn’t name the location except to tell us it is not far north of the capital. Many will picture Waikanae on the Kāpiti Coast, for its long wild beach and poxy lagoon, described by Alix as “… black; clogged at the edges with a mix of rotten branches, flax roots, weeds and mud. A lurid green slime grew in places.” It is at the lagoon that Alix meets her holiday friend, Kahu, who is in possession of an enviable long forked stick (for lifting the slime) and “whose brown skin was pale in places where it had burnt and peeled”. Everyone is sunburned, no matter their natural skin colour. Kahu is appealing – serious, kind and thoughtful, a child as much loved by his family as Alix is by hers.
Alix and Kahu set out on a daily quest to find a child who long ago went missing from the locale. This gives Alix respite from spending time with 15-year-old Vanessa, whose “favourite thing in the world [is] her own body” and who is always ready to put her little sister down and humiliate her. In Trevelyan’s hands this, surprisingly, doesn’t make her unlikeable. Vanessa is flush with hormones, experimenting with sex and shoplifting, led astray by a wiser, harder friend, and drinking until she throws up. We’ve all been there.
Mum and Dad, too, have their problems. Dad tries to keep track of his wife and daughters, not always with success. Mum is trying to write a book – the heavy typewriter came with them, banging and clanging on the car journey – and going for long, clandestine beach walks. After devastating news, she disappears into the bedroom and writes flat out, ignoring her troubled family. Proof, perhaps, of having a splinter of Graham Greene’s “ice in the heart”.
The 1980s’ setting brings us mention of “raging feminists in Wellington”, television detectives Starsky and Hutch, Alix’s beloved Walkman playing Split Enz and the Eurythmics, and beach fashions of the time. The holiday spot setting is also authentic, with its clustered baches and sometimes raging, dangerous sea.
It is tricky to pull off an adult novel with a child narrator. It requires a certain amount of largesse on the part of the reader, who understands the signs and picks up clues ahead of the narrator. In less skilled hands, there is a risk of cutesie-pie talk and action. Trevelyan never falls into that trap. Alix’s honesty and courage are innate, her misunderstandings sometimes comic and often affecting. She has a strong streak of decency, which carries her through the dangers she encounters.
In dodging a gothic-style payoff, A Beautiful Family is perhaps in the end about avoiding culpability. Simply structured and vividly executed, the novel deserves all the success coming its way.
