BOOK REVIEW: Tina Makereti’s first two novels had historical settings but The Mires is set in a just-distant future, where refugees are arriving in a post-plague New Zealand to escape the “Great Heat” in the Northern Hemisphere. The main characters are three mothers who live in a small block of home units on the Kāpiti Coast. Sera, a recent arrival from an unnamed European country, is welcomed by Keri, a Māori single mother of two, and offended by Janet, “one opinionated old lady” who hypocritically believes people should “stay where their culture belongs”. Keri longs to “make a community out of this neighbourhood, like they did back in the day. Why not actually get to know the people they lived beside?”
The mires of the title include the actual local swamp on which “this tidy suburbia” has been built and the metaphorical ones, “the filth, the hate, the sludge, the evil, the mires of the world”. Janet’s son Conor, a 30-something wastrel, has descended into one: he moves home to operate a one-man cell of online hatred from the spare room. He’s in thrall to a charismatic leader signing up similar grievance-fuelled loners, all working for the vague cause of “a homeland and freedom for white people”.
The novel’s plot tumbles towards a planned day of terrorist action all over the country, including Conor and his home-made chemical weapons. The only one who understands the depth of his darkness is Keri’s sensitive, stubborn teenage daughter, Wairere, who – as her name suggests – is more comfortable with the world of water than the awkwardness of school. If there’s a “certain friction in the air”, Wai has the dangerous gift of seeing “what’s going on inside” other people.
The novel’s setting is specific and textured: Makereti is strong on both domestic spaces and the natural world. It’s frustrating, then, that almost everything about the background and culture of Sera, husband Adam and daughter Aliana – their “home country”, as Sera implausibly thinks of it – is vague. Sera, a point-of-view character, is descended from “people” who “come from dry mountain territory” and then moved to “the cities below”. The country they’ve fled is “in Europe” though they had to travel north, not south, to reach the sea; they lived in a city that “stretched more than an hour’s travel in every direction”.
When Janet mentions Ali Baba, Sera thinks “wrong culture, entirely”, and it seems as though they may be Jewish. Sera and Aliana have Hebrew names. Adam, the swamp tells us, is “named for the Christian and Jewish and Muslim first man” and his “people have been wandering a long time”. Sera tells Janet “the name her country is given in the English-speaking world” but this is not shared with the reader. Their rituals and beliefs are kept largely off-stage, like most memories that predate their ordeal as refugees. Sometimes, Sera “is back in the past, trying to conjure the taste and smell of that world”, but those tastes and smells are not revealed. For the other point-of-view characters, we learn much more, about fathers who beat and bullied, of a daughter who has married into a Christian cult, of tūpuna, of Sydney, of Ireland. We learn names. To strip most of that specificity from Sera’s point of view means she and Adam – blameless, beleaguered – feel like representatives of the displaced rather than complex individuals.
The voice of the actual mire (“Swamp Mother”) is the book’s linking narrative device. The unit block denizens are like “everyone who belongs to my swampy waters, no matter how far they and their ancestors have travelled”. Māori, Pākehā, tauiwi: all are now of this place. Some iwi and hapū were once refugees, and Keri has spent 12 years in Australia, “another life in another country that wasn’t her home”. Sera, Keri feels, “is the one person she can think of who has come out of exile, like her, and who has known shame and hunger”.
Staying in the place you belong isn’t an option for people who’ve been “at the centre of a flood, a fire storm, a terrorist attack”. In The Mires, a novel of messages, this is perhaps the most controversial: that outsiders can belong here, and that all of us – just like that – can become outsiders, whatever our whakapapa. “I have no borders,” says the swamp. Even a bigoted Pākehā like Janet “is my daughter as much as anyone”.
The Mires sounds the warning: humanity may try to pollute and control and build over nature, but while nature may be damaged, it remains mighty. “Swamp runs beneath everything ... even though you have drained and paved and dammed us,” as the swamp says. “Just watch how we rise after an earthquake, reclaiming the land with our wet.”
The world existed before people, the novel reminds us: the swamp was “primordial twitching ooze” and “prehistoric reptilian bird lands” before it became an “ancient food storehouse”. Nature is better off without us, but without nature – and without community – we can’t survive.
The Mires by Tina Makereti (Ultimo Press, $40.00) is out now.
