David Hill on the two biggest-selling novels of the year
Jenny Pattrick and Deborah Challinor both have a following. It's a curious term: should be approbatory, but is often used to dismiss an author working in a populist genre, whose readers are assumed to be undiscriminating obsessives. In the case of these two writers working in the genre of historical fiction, it affirms that they're well worth following.
Pattrick has indicated that her latest novel Harbouring may be her last book. Say it ain't so – and I scamper to stress that I'm not intending to pressure Dear Author. I know several writer friends who decided it was time to hang up the laptop. But it was Pattrick's fiction which convinced me that19th century New Zealand could be made alive and absorbing. Since her best-seller The Denniston Rose, I've approached our fictional past with anticipation rather than apprehension. Pattrick shifted my view of the whole genre.
Christina Sanders' lively 2020 novel Jerningham took a cool look at the colonising, conning Wakefield brothers, and they feature again in Harbouring: imperious, stiffly principled Colonel Wakefield, and fearless, feckless Edward Gibbon Wakefield. The former summons the book's main character, Huw Pengellin, from “the din and fire and brimstone” of a foundry in Wales to procure supplies for a ship which will make “the natives” of Aotearoa civilised and the Wakefield brothers very rich. Huw leaps at the chance. He leaps at a lot of things during the story, Māori maidens included. It tries the patience of his wife Martha – a name biblically associated with stoicism and domestic toil – but she too sees the chance to escape their “pig-pen” life.
Meanwhile, over in the new colony, tall, sharp-tongued Hineroa is enduring a parallel slavery, her iwi massacred and subjugated by invaders with muskets from the North.
So far, so busy. So credible, too: the voices are authentic and subversive. This is a tale told not by the toffs, but by those whom a certain political leader might describe as bottom-feeders. Conflicts internal, external, domestic, social, philosophical and bloodily physical kick the plot along.
From a country crammed – bloated in some ways – with tradition and social strictures, characters assemble in a land which to them seems raw and new. They have to learn different ways. Some adapt. Some stay arrogant and ignorant. Ill-mannered settlers get an authorial kicking. Pattrick has some nice mischief with those who concede that though the natives are uninformed about most things, they know a good gun when they see it. At the same time, she doesn't flinch from the savagery of Te Rauparaha's campaigns. Relationships within and between races form, flourish, fray, while, over half a decade, Wellington edges up and out, separates into snooty or squalid bits.
Pākehā (as in Welsh, mostly) and Māori meet and sometimes merge in a variety of ways, not always to their mutual benefit. Magnificent, dangerous ships come; ancestral land is measured and sliced
It's all narrated in vigorous, lucid prose. Characters do converse in modulated, grammatical sentences a good deal of the time, which you can probably blame on the Victorians. The odd bit of dialogue stands still while it gives a condensed guide to time and place. It's a conventional style, and I use the adjective approvingly; there's no straining after dialect or archaisms. Pattrick has written thousands of pages in her years on the job; she's got a professional's awareness of which notes chime and which clang.
The plot drives on. Pākehā (as in Welsh, mostly) and Māori meet and sometimes merge in a variety of ways, not always to their mutual benefit – “These days there is much sickness”. Magnificent, dangerous ships come; ancestral land is measured and sliced. A Mission is built, and a garden established: “a pleasant place....stream....bush....gently sloping land." Petone aka Pito One seems destined to be the new town's CBD.
Sex rears its purple head, while consumption lifts its pale face. Dramas come shouldering in, with just an occasional whiff of melodrama. “The New Zealand Death”, as in drowning, features. So does a genuinely shocking hanging in the bush. Much happens, and it's competently placed and spaced. Many of the good end optimistically; a number of the bad don't. That's always satisfying.
Pattrick knows how to include her research so that it's a background wash rather than a foreground blob. Those who wants good hard facts in their fiction (how peculiar) will find them. A multi-layered cast is adroitly controlled; you become rewardingly invested in the principals' arcs and ends. You also wish to smack the newcomers who intend to teach Māori “the Christian ways”. Harbouring is a big, bold read.
*
And now to Deborah Challinor, and her latest historical novel The Leonard Girls. I heard and saw her at a lit festival last year, speaking in front of an overflowing audience. For 60 minutes, she moved from Powerpoint to Q & A to reading to disquisition. And, my deahs, the research! If I find a fact lying in my narrative path, I kick the cheeky bugger into the bushes. Challinor finds and verifies not just dates and places, but architecture, cuisine, song titles, calling cards, even lingerie.
Okay, so do other writers of historical fiction, and in some cases, their narratives end up crushed and whimpering beneath the weight of it. But here's another tradie who knows how to make it part of the mix. The Leonard Girls brings the jolt of realising that your – mine, anyway – years of youngish adulthood now qualify for historical fiction.
It's the very end of the 1960s. The Vietnam War blunders on. Rowie Leonard (pro-NZ soldiers, partially pro-conflict) heads for the battlefields as a nurse. Little sister Jo (vehemently anti-this war) heads for the streets as a protestor. So it's sibling confrontation, always a promising source of plot power. In this case, it starts with the very first paragraph, in Smith and Caughey's cosmetics dept.
The opening 10 pages bring more confrontation, plus a double amputation; you're unlikely to yawn during this narrative. But Challinor knows how to keep it nuanced as well. The starting spat is accompanied by recognition that one's antagonist is also “generous and kind”. On a larger structural level, Jo falls for Soldier Sam, which can't be a random choice of name, while Rowie grows distressed and disillusioned.
Some nifty plot devices. Jo is also a singer, folk stuff mainly. (More conflict – with Sam's musical preferences.) She gets invited to entertain the boys in Vietnam, which brings her closer to swain and sibling. Both of them, meanwhile, are realising that local people are not at all thrilled to host them.
Little kids in the street offer cigarette lighters and sisters. Jo struts her stuff in mini-skirt and go-go boots. Rowie meets an Aussie chopper pilot and a no-bullshit Matron. Codeine helps with the trots. Ocker audiences receive a stern press. Sam goes on danger-packed patrols and beer-packed furloughs. Satisfyingly, there's learning on both sides; Jo even reconsiders her crusading vegetarianism. And likeable men die.
Do they smack of cultural appropriation? Maybe. But I reckon authors have and should have the right to try characters from outside their own culture / ethnicity
An epilogue points the characters forward, a bit like a Dickensian curtain call, while an author's note sets them even more firmly in their historical context, with room for Agent Orange and unfortunate experiments at National Women's Hospital.
The Leonard Girls lets you watch a professional using the tools, trusting the reader, warming to her own stuff, trying something on the edge of her comfort zone – in this case, the intricacies of a “big, loving” Māori whanau. Do this and Pattrick's Hinerau smack of cultural appropriation? Maybe. But I reckon authors have and should have the right to try characters from outside their own culture / ethnicity. Yes, yes, they should also be liable to criticism if they do it badly or inappropriately, but as you'll hear many such authors muttering, “So what's new?”
Challinor makes a commendable job of her blokes. Sam is staunch, susceptible, sensible, a good fulcrum in the plot, even a snappy dresser in his civvies: “good black drainpipes, pointed-toe leather laceups”. Ah, memories, memories.... The blokes' banter comes across as authentic, especially between Sam and cuzzie Eddie.
The writing feels a tad adverbial and adjectival sometimes, but I have this feeling that fans of historical fiction like their language on the sonorous side. The political, military, ethnic backgrounds occasionally squat stolidly in the narrative current, but I have this other feeling that aforementioned fans also like aforementioned solid facts with their fiction.
TS Eliot once wrote, “History has many passages, contrived corridors.” Right on, Tom, baby; now add cul-de-sacs, congested roads, dangerous corners. The fiction of Jenny Pattrick and Deborah Challinor travels a lot of them.
Harbouring by Jenny Pattrick (Penguin Random House NZ, $36) and The Leonard Girls by Deborah Challinor (HarperCollins, $32.99) have respectively held the number 1 and number 2 positions on the best-seller fiction chart these past five weeks, and are available in bookstores nationwide.
