Kay McKenzie Cooke
The Secrets They Kept by Jenny Lynch (Mary Egan Publishing, 2024), 296pp, $38
The front cover of the novel The Secrets They Kept shows a fair-haired, baby-faced young child with somewhat anxious blue eyes. Recalling similar haircuts and styles from my own childhood, I can easily place the era as mid-twentieth century. A torn line cuts diagonally through the face, and beside it is a braided, watery wash imbued with darkness and shadowy light. Is this symbolic of some threat that may eventually, insidiously, engulf the child? Or does it symbolise increasing revelation?
Before even opening the book, there is a sense that this will be a novel about repressive secrets and the harm they cause. A clue is also in the title’s use of the third person pronoun ‘they’ with its implication that the secrets referenced are those being kept by others, not by whoever is the subject of the novel.
The Prologue lets me know what I am in for:
It is a question of my own identity. In turn, that leads me to a thought so dreadful that I can barely bring myself to acknowledge it. Was I—as a small child—merely an innocent player in my mother’s tragedy? Or had I been something more?
What specifically drives the narrative of the novel is a mystery that both the main character—and the reader—long to have solved. Our curiosity about what the truth is keeps us turning pages. Author Jenny Lynch’s narrative style utilises the first-person point of view, written mainly in a retrospective, past tense, to give voice to the narrator, Helena Anderson. Descriptions of the challenges and circumstances that Helena encounters introduce us to the life of a young girl in late 1960s New Zealand—specifically, Mount Eden, Auckland—and continue through her transition into young adulthood in the early 1980s:
I have no memory of my earliest years. None at all. My life began, or rather my memory of it, about two weeks before my fifth birthday. It was a Saturday afternoon in January of 1969 …
Helena’s account of her rather stifled upbringing in a household that adheres to the strict routines of God-fearing principles successfully complements the slow unravelling of this book’s underlying question.
Helena’s search for the truth is hindered at many turns. Lynch portrays her as a ‘naturally inquisitive child’ who is either continually discouraged from asking the questions she longs to ask about her mother’s identity or blocked from receiving any revealing information that may have escaped her grandmother’s gatekeeping. We learn early on that Helena’s paternal grandmother, whom she calls Nan, had an intense dislike of Helena’s late mother, her daughter-in-law, Eve. Why did she hate her so much? This is a query that waits to be answered in the final chapters. Nan is Helena’s main caregiver. Helena’s father, Bryan Anderson, is a doctor who, while fond of his daughter, seems like an emotionally distant secondary caregiver. He is often described as preoccupied with both his work and the sadness stemming from the unexpected death of his wife:
I learned later that my mother’s death had changed his personality. Previously a reasonably outgoing person, he withdrew into himself. Work became his main focus. You could say it took over his life.
Helena’s grandmother is an imposing and stern, almost regal figure who suppresses any affection she might feel for her granddaughter. It’s hard to tell whether this withholding of tenderness comes easily to her. What we do learn is that she goes out of her way to shield her son from too much proximity to his small daughter. Because she bears an unfortunate strong resemblance to her mother, the grandmother believes that if her son becomes too close to his daughter, it will only exacerbate his grief. Naturally, this restriction is to the detriment of any father-daughter attachment. Our sympathies for this lonely child quickly build:
Despite the obvious disadvantages, I do not think my girlhood years were altogether unhappy. I was a self-sufficient child and, once I’d learned to read, I was content to immerse myself in the magical worlds of Christopher Robin and Beatrix Potter’s improbable little animals. Which was just as well, since Nan did not encourage friendships with other children.
Through plainly told descriptions of circumstances, we feel empathy for Helena as she negotiates her way around the unquiet secret that dominates her life. The unsolved mystery of her mother’s identity, and by implication her own, casts a looming shadow that Helena is both obsessed with and forced to ignore.
The setting of home, church and school is described largely as stultifying, dominated by the disciplines and restrictions of religion and that crippling, twentieth-century impulse to keep up appearances. Lynch’s emphasis on the role that church and religion played in Helena’s family and social life could well be a description of what was a fairly normal part of New Zealand society before youthful rebellion and civil unrest caused a decline in overall church attendance throughout the Western world.
Lynch adds authenticity to the book’s setting in time with its emphasis on Helena’s adherence to her Christian beliefs. This side of Helena’s identity is maintained throughout, and as the story progresses, it reflects the gradual evolution of her faith as she explores other more creative aspects of the spiritual—such as hypnotism, fortune telling, and an interest in psychic phenomena.
When describing the pursuit of religious enthusiasms, Lynch often brings in subtle humour. An enjoyable description of Helena’s young neighbour Kylie and her conversion to Christianity at a youth camp is one example. Kylie’s subsequent fervent declarations include praying for her family’s pet parrot to stop swearing so that it won’t go to hell when it dies.
As a young child, Helena used her vivid imagination to try to bring her mother to life in an attempt to cope with the painful truth that she didn’t know who her mother was or even what she looked like.
What little she does find out fails to quell her suspicions that a terrible truth lies behind her mother’s disappearance. Among her efforts to uncover what happened to her mother are the two visits she makes to the beach at Manukau Harbour, where her mother drowned. Here, the author offers us an evocative glimpse of the flora to be seen on Auckland harbour’s coastline:
The earth path alternated between steep and relatively gentle plateaux as it wound its way between coprosma, lacebark, karaka trees and punga toward the shore.
When young, Helena fondly imagines her mother as someone she could aspire to emulate:
Aunt Bernice had said that she had my colouring. That meant Mother must have had fair hair and pale skin like mine or maybe like Marilyn Monroe’s … Now I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to be a glamorous actress like Marilyn Monroe.
At other times Helena wonders if her mother was, in fact, a bad person; someone who had betrayed her father and their marriage and mercilessly abandoned her daughter. She also struggles with feelings of guilt, questioning whether she was somehow responsible for her mother’s demise. Her frustration and fear are palpable as she grapples with the tangled, frightening shadow that only unrevealed secrets are likely to cast; especially secrets kept close by others who are unwilling to divulge.
As she grows into adulthood and gains more of a sense of her own identity, Helena finds work as a journalist. The quest to find out the truth about her mother now becomes less obsessive. The tentative thwarted attempts she’s made up to this point have been discouraging and felt futile. Consequently, a sense of disappointment squelches the zeal she’d previously felt for dogged pursuit of the truth.
Helena’s energies turn to becoming independent and carving out a career along with, possibly, marriage to her boyfriend, Gerald. When an opportunity to travel to Canada arises, Helena is eager to take it up. Lynch uses this portion of the book to describe how Helena breaks free from the moralising attitudes that had previously held her back. Experiences and people she meets force her to re-examine her previously-held attitudes towards sex, alcohol and other such pleasures. Some lively writing reflects Helena’s personal testing of previously uncrossed boundaries.
After returning home to New Zealand, Helena’s life appears settled. However, events gradually lead her once more towards that much sought-after revelation—the truth behind her mother’s disappearance and identity. What is finally revealed is surprising, even a little shocking. And totally unexpected. Exactly the satisfying conclusion one expects from an entertaining read.
KAY MCKENZIE COOKE (Kāti Māmoe, Kāi Tahu) lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin. She is the author of four poetry collections and of three novels set in Western Murihiku Southland. She is at present working on her fourth novel with the working title, Yellowhammer Summer.
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