At a time when “pandemic plots” are featuring more frequently in fiction, Amy Head turns to an earlier disaster, one that was local not global: the Christchurch earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. The linked stories in her new collection examine the texture of daily life when the ordinary has been profoundly disrupted, if not entirely dismantled.
The ruins and rubble of the inner-city cordon may have been the stuff of nightly news bulletins, but Head is more concerned with the shipping containers, the bollards, the wonky paths and abandoned houses of the suburbs where people are trying to carry on, navigating their way without the landmarks that used to orient their lives. “I’m all right as long as I’m upright,” one character says, articulating what many in these stories embody: a persistence that is not quite optimism but a simple desire to endure, requiring more than a hint of courage.
Rebuilding and resilience are worthy goals in a devastated city, but there is no escaping that some things are gone for good. An awkward first date with a stranger – what better symbol of hope? – triggers intrusive memories of “damage, silt and mud she couldn’t trust. For weeks, nothing clean, nothing straight, over and over again, relentless. Not now, she told herself.” Head brings compassion, without mawkishness, to these post-quake lives where grief and trauma rise to the surface at inconvenient times – like liquefaction – blocking tentative steps towards new beginnings.
A recurring character in these stories is 20-something Flick. She is embedded in an extended family that rallies when the quake hits, quick to offer her lasagna, a hot shower, a spare bed. At the same time, she is adrift, unsettled. Even without earthquakes, Flick’s life was a little precarious, not yet anchored by career or a secure relationship, juggling study and unfulfilling work, uncertain about her future. When lectures resume “in hastily arranged new venues, tents in some cases”, Flick doesn’t return to university: “According to one of the counsellors at the student health centre, what Flick was doing was reassessing her goals in light of recent events.”
In a new flat and a new job, Flick contemplates a relationship with an architect who is passionate about new technologies in disaster recovery, but she has history with her ex, Luke. They grew up together, have stayed friends, stayed in Christchurch. One night, Luke and Flick go to investigate whether her grandmother’s abandoned house has been occupied by squatters when a powerful aftershock hits. Not for the first time in these stories, characters assess the strength of the shock and where its epicentre might be, a knowledge gained from painful experience, but this time Flick also registers a sensation “like being shifted on a life raft, on vast swells of energy”.
Writing about the aftermath of a natural disaster presents a problem: as the US writer Tom Bissell recently put it, when a horrible tragedy occurs on a grand scale, what is there to explore artistically other than the fact that it was terrible? Head’s answer is you look for signs of life, however small, however fleeting. Her stories never offer a pat happy ending. Instead, they show how a new awareness of how our vulnerability might open up perspectives we couldn’t see before. A character returning to Christchurch after years away asks her sister Bron how the city is looking. “I quite like it,” Bron replies, “You can see further. You can see the hills.”
Signs of Life, by Amy Head (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30)
