Just over two decades ago, Bill Manhire and others established the IIML, Victoria University of Wellington’s creative writing school. Every year since, potential authors are scattered across its courses from undergraduate to PhD like dragons’ teeth. Some spring forth as fully armed and sometimes already published writers.
To strangle the simile further, a number of those blaze bright in the literary firmament: Sue Orr, Tayi Tibble, Ashleigh Young, the occasional male (mostly in scriptwriting), a couple of promising youngsters called Chidgey and Catton. Others are more like meteors: a brief flash, then …?
Kate Mahony is one of the school’s latest debut novelists. Secrets of the Land explores themes of identity and dispossession, which are busy topics in local fiction just now. Think Michael Bennett’s Better the Blood, Airana Ngarewa’s raw, and real The Bone Tree.
Imogen was a journalist, so when she’s stopped on a Melbourne street by a crinkly-eyed stranger who tells her that her dead grandfather isn’t (dead, that is), but is in danger, how can she resist? Off she goes to coastal Taranaki and a farm where bull calves are stolen, suspicious hedge fires lit, spectral processions cross the paddock at 3am, and grumpy Grandad won’t move.
A history of confiscation and colonial brutishness darkens the land. We hear more of it via Michael, Irish refugee and reluctant soldier 160 years ago, and from Aoife in the 1970s, another who can’t live easily among entitlement, rampant monoculturalism, rural thuggery and the same mysterious stranger who accosts her daughter in Melbourne.
It’s a carefully assembled book. To mangle a metaphor this time, you’re always aware of the splicing and dovetailing of narrative viewpoints, right up to the closing journal excerpt. It’s an often-tried technique, appropriate in this case, and Mahony moves adroitly among her three protagonists. Each has her/his own voice; parallels and echoes are clear but not laboured.
The privileged get a bad press. Strugglers and strivers get sympathy. That always appeals. There’s a selection of puppyish or coltish love affairs among the young; Michael even rescues a damsel in distress. Reconciliation and liberation flicker in various forms.
Injustices past and present are acknowledged, and Mahony works hard to ensure the messages don’t clog the movement. I don’t believe it’s a spoiler if I mention a crammed climactic scene with hostages, guns, lightning flashes, a non-corporeal figure from the past and a Poirot-talky denouement.
It is attentively researched and respectfully rendered. The writing swells towards the adjectival sometimes – “an impenetrable shroud” and “a foreboding air” appear in consecutive lines – but is mostly clear and competent doubleplus. It has a capably controlled big cast; you’ll want to both pat and punch Grandad Jack. Will Mahony prove one of IIML’s stars or one of its meteors? The former, I hope.
Secrets of the Land by Kate Mahony (Cloud Ink, $29.95).
