Zoë Rankin’s twisty and dark debut about a family raised in the South Island’s West Coast wilderness gets off to a promising start.
A traumatised and hungry child emerges from the bush and is found in the only shop in the remote village desperately looking for food. The discovery is “the second most interesting thing to have ever happened in Koraha”.
The child, who at first refuses to speak apart from giving her name, bears an uncanny resemblance to another child who disappeared 20 years ago – the novel’s lead protagonist Effie, who now lives in Scotland where she works in mountain rescue.
This ambitious debut is told through two alternating timelines, one in the present day and the other focused on 20 years earlier, which details a young Effie’s experience growing up off the grid with her family, headed by a taciturn, difficult father. They live in a small hut set deep in the bush and rarely venture into Koraha, a fictional town inspired by small settlements on the West Coast.
As we meet the family, Effie’s mother – who has just given birth to a baby boy – dies. Effie’s father is distraught and soon leaves the family to fend for themselves.
Although Effie is her father’s favourite, even she has noticed a change in him. “Dad’s bad days had been getting worse. Sitting in silence. Drinking till his body slumped. It always happened just before he left, like an anger bubbled up in him and he had to leave before it burst out. The winter made him worse, too.”
Rankin, who is Scottish but moved to New Zealand 11 years ago, writes in a foreword that she has had an abiding fascination with losing oneself in the wilderness.
“In a modern world, where every movement is recorded, there exists this wilderness at the bottom of the earth where you can disappear. Where you can live off grid, concealed within the endless shades of green.”
Her knowledge and experience of the bush, both its dangers and its beauty, are captured with an eagle eye.
A distrust of the world beyond the bush seems to be the reason for the family’s exile, but the father’s deteriorating mental health puts them all in peril as he buries the mother and disappears.
A family friend soon moves in to look after the children in the father’s absence. He does return sporadically with food, but his presence always brings with it an undertow of menace.
The contemporary timeline, meanwhile, has the adult Effie returning to Koraha after being alerted by the sole policeman in the town to the child’s uncanny family resemblance, especially her striking green eyes.
There’s a lot going on and Rankin, for the most part, manages to draw the various plot lines together with dexterity. There are moments where the narrative stretches credibility or is frustratingly vague, and at 375 pages, there’s perhaps a little more novel here than necessary.
A romantic subplot involving Effie and the local cop feels a touch strained, though descriptions of the family’s daily life in splendid isolation – both the good and the bad days – early in the novel are a highlight and perhaps deserved more page time.
These quibbles aside, The Vanishing Place is a solid debut, an evocative off-the-grid thriller with a memorable finale that marks out Rankin as a writer to watch.
The Vanishing Place, by Zoë Rankin (Moa Press, $37.99), is out now.
