Michelle Elvy
Light Keeping by Adrienne Jansen (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2023), 238pp, $37.50; Secrets of the Land by Kate Mahony (Cloud Ink Press, 2023), 270pp, $29.99; The Bones of the Story by Sandra Arnold (Impspired Books, 2023), 43pp, USD$9.99
Each of these books has a sense of time passing, of impermanence. There is wreckage and survival. All of them explore questions around isolation and community. And in all of them, there is both darkness and light.
Adrienne Jansen’s novel, Light Keeping, tells the story of lighthouse keeper Bill and his wife Annie and how their lives change starting in the mid-1970s when they lose their son and his wife in a terrible car crash, and their grandchildren Jess and Robert come to live with them. Change dominates this narrative: the changing world of lighthouses, when all around Aotearoa they were being de-manned in favour of automation; the changing reality of their family; the changing landscape around the cottage where the family lives. The lives of these characters are confronted by circumstances around them; they are not actively trying to change but rather holding on, and here we are confronted with the sorrowful truth of an underlying helplessness that permeates these lives. Early on, we read about Bill and his lighthouse duties, ‘Time’s running out for him, for them all’—and we believe it. Jansen paints these characters and the landscape lovingly and with reverence.
There are two storylines, one taking us to 1977–1985, when Jess and Robert reside with Bill and Annie, and 2019, when we see Jess and Robert as middle-aged adults, coping with a past that is still there, sometimes darkening their lives and sometimes reviving a bit of connection between them, albeit a problematic one. The mystery of their lives is something Jess and Robert are examining. When talking about their parents, Robert asks Jess if she remembers them, and she says ‘Some.’ To which he replies: ‘Well, you were older than me. I’ve got a bunch of memories, they’re like photos, they’re what I go back to all the time, but they’re all I’ve got. There must be so much more.’ This idea of something more—of the past being murky but so important—is what this book is all about: the way lighthouses have been an important part of our landscape, now lost; the way memories fade and all we have are objects to sustain a tenuous connection. Jensen moves between the two periods and allows the reader to glimpse both, bringing the stories together. Bill is a storyteller, among other things; we have a sense that the stories hold people together, even if outside forces have damaged their lives.
At the centre is the lighthouse—there on a rocky promontory with steep cliffs and bashing waves. The land at the edge of the sea figures centrally in this story, and the edge may be a metaphor for the lives of everyone here. Here’s an excerpt from the opening page—painting this world at land’s end and giving atmospheric suggestion to all that follows:
The air is full of sound. The boom of the sea and wind, a child calling ‘I’m back’, a melody picked out on a piano, gravel cracking under car tyres. The lighthouse keeper’s voice saying, ‘There’s a story about the first keeper, how he went out in some ferocious weather …’; and a woman’s voice saying, ‘We’ve heard it all before, Bill!’ Laughing.
Then, silence.
Kate Mahony’s title Secrets of the Land indicates that her novel, too, is closely connected to place. Mahony goes back to her Taranaki roots, with the story set around Ōkato. Like Jansen, she traverses place and time with her characters, and there is mystery in how the stories come to light. In this case, there are three time periods, from 1860s Ireland and New Zealand to the 1970s in New Zealand and then the current frame, taking place in 2018. It begins in Melbourne, where the central figure, Imogen, is accosted on the street by a man who tells her that her grandfather (whom she’s assumed dead) is in trouble. This takes her to New Zealand, where she discovers Jack is very much alive—but yes, as the stranger told her, in trouble. The story that ensues moves between Imogen’s mother, Aoife, who came to the region in the 1970s, and Imogen’s desire to find out more about the tensions over the land where her grandfather lives.
There are parallel stories of new acquaintances and fragile friendships: Imogen meeting the people in and around her grandfather’s land, and Aoife arriving in New Zealand as a young girl and navigating the difficult and sometimes cruel spaces inhabited by school-age children. Mahony moves back and forth in the timelines, and the same characters take shape in each of these settings. We gradually see themes emerge that drive the narrative: trust and mistrust; history and truth; storytelling depending on whose advantage it suits. Ghostly elements occasionally intrude—Imogen soon realises this place has a past that will not let go. In this way, Mahony engages with current and important ideas around identity and place, ownership and colonisation. The connections between Ireland and Taranaki create dominant threads.
While love and mutual support prove to be important themes in Jansen’s Light Keeping—suggested by the title itself—in Secrets of the Land we have acerbic characters who do not trust each other, who push each other aside, who don’t always want to listen or see. It requires rigour to get to the bottom of things, and Imogen is forceful and inquisitive, donning her journalistic hat as she moves through the Taranaki terrain. And while the characters in Jansen’s novel must hold onto their past for survival, we see Imogen actively investigating as someone new to the scene: ‘I could feel the adrenaline race through me. It was like old times pulling out the threads of a mystery, finding out things bit by bit and seeing where they connected, getting the story.’ The story takes on a different feel—we are there with her, unpacking the mystery as she does, sensing how she feels as an outsider, while in Jansen’s story we are plunged more directly into the characters’ lives. And yet, we gain a sense of Aoife’s world in those chapters, and by the end of the book we appreciate how Imogen’s path has been one towards finding her place—finding family and a sense of belonging.
Sandra Arnold’s novella, The Bones of the Story, is aptly titled—it’s a slim book of connected stories, with the frame being as important as the stories. It also explores characters searching for ways to survive—in this case, a past they’d rather run away from. At the centre of the story is the death of the young boy Ralph, and the linking reflections are told by his friends—perspectives on the same event, each bringing something new to light. It’s not entirely clear why the families moved away after Ralph’s death, but what is clear is that each struggles with the event in different ways. Arnold writes of Ralph’s friends Deb, Joyce, Angela, Bryan and Martin using third-person narrative, while we hear his mother Ruth and brother Adrian, born after Ralph’s death, plus stepdad Kev, in first person. The parents, Ruth and Kev, bookend the other stories.
Through small scenes we see the day of Ralph’s death from various perspectives, with one of the friends as the main character in each. Here is how we first encounter each main character, and they are presented in this order in the book:
Deb: ‘Deb’s father sent her out of the house that Saturday afternoon because he was going to have a bath … She finished sweeping the yard, hung the broom back on its hook and ran down the street to round up the gang.’
Joyce: ‘Head flung back and feet raking the sky she soared higher and higher. Each upward thrust brought her closer to the horizontal bar.’
Angela: ‘Angela had been planning this for days. She would walk calmly into the shop, glide up to the counter, buy a liquorice strap and set off for the railway line where she would sit on a grassy bank and eat it. Once her mouth filled with the taste of liquorice she knew life would return to normal.’
Bryan: ‘Bryan’s dad always referred to his bad temper as something separate from himself. This usually happened after he’d belted Bryan’s older sister Tracy across the face for answering back …’
Martin: ‘Two months after the train incident Martin Freeman still hadn’t spoken a word.’
And so, we are introduced to Ralph’s friends and the domestic, emotional and circumstantial domains they inhabit. And when we come to Ralph, after seeing his friends, we find this opening line: ‘Ralph opened his bedroom curtains on a new day.’ Which of course is heartbreaking because we know this new day will be Ralph’s last.
Each of these young people is treated by Arnold as a person whose story matters—for their own part in the scene back then and for the way Ralph’s story is remembered and internalised by each of them over the years. And just as Jansen and Mahony connect across storylines, time frames and views, Arnold does this in a compact space, delivering a crafted character study about damage and healing. The storytelling is spare and poetic. The reader experiences the sounds, smells and tastes of youth. There is also the hint in each story of the life path that each of its main characters will take afterwards: Bryan becoming a ballet dancer, Martin an artist, Angela a teacher, Deb and Joyce social workers. Arnold knows how to open and close a scene, leaving the reader with the fateful sense of a bigger picture, a haunting atmosphere—resonances as important as anything else in small-form storytelling. When we come to the end of Adrian’s story, we hear an exchange between him and his mother about the disappearance of Ralph’s stepdad, Kev. These are the last lines of that story: ‘While I unravel this a blackbird begins singing on a branch of the pin oak. Its song rises into the darkening sky.’
In all three books, I had the sense that the scaffolding was sometimes too noticeable: we see how the author placed people in circumstances to arrive at the desired result. In Jansen’s novel, there is a connection to clocks and concepts of time, broken and repaired, that is perhaps stressed a bit too much. In Mahony’s novel, Imogen’s investigative reporter methods are sometimes too obvious in bringing clues to light. In Arnold’s tale, the story is forcefully set out in an introduction and then neatly concludes with father-figure Kev; there’s a determinist formalism signalled, which is perhaps not entirely necessary to grasping the drama and meaning. But even so, these works of fiction call up questions of memory and responsibility, each exploring history through storytelling, each intent on revealing the variegated pattern made by the darkness and the light.
MICHELLE ELVY is an editor, manuscript assessor and creative writing teacher. Her books include the everrumble and the other side of better, and her anthology work includes, most recently, A Kind of Shelter: Whakaruru-taha (MUP, 2023). She edits at Flash Frontier and At the Bay | I te Kokoru.
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