Dementia: it’s a terror of our times. And more and more, it’s in the tales of our times. It’s a topic that means an author faces immediate problems. How to build a narrative order for lives of accelerating disorder? How to show meaning in confusion? If writing a novel is a continuous balancing act, how to maintain that balance when participants’ perceptions lurch and topple?
In Tina Shaw’s latest, instantly absorbing story, Maxine finds that “normal stuff has been slipping lately”. Passwords and car rego numbers elude her. She needs to check her phone diary a lot, even if some of her entries make little sense. She’s only 58, but the implications are clear – and scary, especially to edgy daughter Rose, who’s having her own issues with over-organised hubby Paul.
Mysteries form from the start. What does Maxine mean when she tells Rose: “You can’t save them all”? Who and where is Jade from years ago? Why is brother Renfrew in trouble? Who is the weird cleaner from the Whakatāne Police Station? What about Ruth’s little Lotto win?
Things accelerate quickly. So do Maxine’s affliction and Rose’s desperation. After just one day, mother is banging on daughter’s door at 3am. By the following afternoon, she’s far from home.
An ex-lover appears, nice but small-town. So does a gender-changed neighbour, digging a hole in dress and gumboots. We meet lots of battlers: honest, violent, despairing. And several types of mother, from the “you take them” through the “I want her” to the “I wish I had”. Attack, flight, defiance on a rural road, the kindness of strangers feature. Love, exhaustion, fear have their place. Maxine goes missing rather a lot.
So there’s plenty of drama, and just a few flickers of melodrama. The elder protagonist’s dark and enigmatic past gets signalled pretty energetically. The coda is a clever and genuinely chilling fusion of reconciliation and revelation.
Shaw has put in the hard yards and years of writing; this is a book of craft as well as art. She knows how to do the hidden dovetails: episodes slip into place; characters are moved deftly and unobtrusively. The writing is tight, packed, pleasingly unpretentious. The author cares for and controls her characters – always a good mixture – and convincingly evokes the mash of bewilderment, clarity, deviousness and devotion that Maxine’s mind has become. There’s a biographical-cum-autobiographical element to A House Built On Sand that invests it with an extra authenticity and poignancy.
There’s clever wordplay as well, while a mind swirls, and “[t]he past comes running at me like a sand-jumper at the Olympics”. A clump of “angry panthers”? Agapanthus, of course. Going for a “riding joy”? You can guess. On another level, there’s the “avidity” of those who want details of Maxine’s decline. It’s the perfect word.
Shaw’s book won last year’s Michael Gifkins Prize for an Unpublished Novel. You can see why.
A House Built on Sand, by Tina Shaw, ((Text, $40) is out now.
