Tasha HainesThe Peastick Girl by Susan Hancock, (Black Pepper, Melbourne, 2012) pp. 483, $39.99.
The biographical notes at the front of The Peastick Girl say that the author began writing fiction under the ‘pressure of exile’. Having read the book, I find that the notion of ‘exile’ is embedded in the story.
‘The peastick girl’ refers to the remnants of Teresa Matheson’s family garden and to a childhood back when the garden flourished. The story is intrinsically about Teresa, recently returned to Wellington after five years in Melbourne. She is emotionally burnt out because of past traumas that have caught up with her. Teresa proceeds to wander around in a perpetually cold, wet and windy Wellington having dreams, ideas, epiphanies, hallucinations, and experiencing acute anxiety about her inner and outer world:
‘Bands of yellow light are striking down from black clouds, the dark is rising and the land tumbles crookedly towards it as if about to fall into the abyss.’
‘Even here the fern said airily, things will change.’
“The true life is absent.’ But we are in the world.” “‘So we are,’ she thought. ‘That’s our tragedy.’ Trapped in the world.”
“It is all only a dream, the world is a dream.”
“The world is a fable.”
She is an exile within her own life.
The story includes the point of view of each of Teresa’s sisters, both of whom are more likeable and colourful than she is. Mollie, the eldest, is pregnant, skinny, over-burdened, a practicing Catholic and a weary feminist who wears high-heeled shoes around the house. Cass the youngest is a devout ‘feminist’, but also naïve and very childish. And there is the awkward, intellectual and obsessive family friend Hugo, who once had an affair with the girls’ mother and ‘now’ also with Teresa. And there is Dorothy, the eccentric alpha feminist, who is having a fling with Mollie’s husband and likes to use terms like ‘phallic hypnosis’.
Because of Teresa’s presence back in Wellington, the topic of the girls’ dead mother comes to the fore, becoming an undercurrent that ebbs and flows. I expected this to build to something climactic, but even when some of the mystery is finally solved it all falls rather flat under a whole lot of unrequited expectation. The potential for exploring and developing the relationship between the sisters is another lost opportunity.
The plot summary in the review by Fia Clendinnen of The Australian Book Review on the back cover of The Peastick Girl is punchy, but culturally and geographically misleading: ‘New Zealand life — a world of men, Rugby, feminists who feel they’ve lost their way, Russian émigrés and powerful but disaffected Maori Women.’ The ‘New Zealand life’ in The Peastick Girl is ‘greater Wellington life’, with a smidgen of time in Taranaki at the end. It would be a very different book if it were set up north, or way down south, because the greatest character in this book is the punitive yet wildly beautiful Wellington landscape. So it is not ‘New Zealand life’ per se, but windy hilly, artistic, literary Wellington life. And it is not a world of men, but a world of neurotic women; the only rugby-heads in the story pass through briefly as an awkward interlude, a gratuitous kiwi-ism for an elsewhere audience. And I’m not sure what makes the women ‘feminists’; they are emotionally immature, powerless, and very needy of men. Also, it should read ‘disaffected Maori woman’, not women as there is only one.
Hancock has an incredible prowess for dense and attractive descriptions of landscape, weather, and melancholy psychological states. But at the same time the narrative is weighed down by these passages that do little to help the plot progress, and in the end made it difficult for this reader to hang on to or care about the story or the protagonist as much as I cared about those sensuously described locations. The Wellington of The Peastick Girl becomes both a place longed-for and a place of entrapment: it is a grim place of unforgettable character.
The various descriptions add to a catalogue of beauty and desolation that the author is describing about this place for what seems primarily an Australian readership. But the constant ‘pakeha stole the land’ sub-text is a prickly and heavy-handed way to develop the idea of sadness and loss in the natural world. That particular loss is analogous of Teresa’s loss: of her mother and of her memory. However, novel-wise, the treatment of the ‘bad pakeha’ sub-text has little to do with the protagonist’s quest and much to do with the author’s editorialising.
At the Melbourne book launch, author Marion Campbell introduced The Peastick Girl (see the transcript on the Black Pepper Press website). Her review is in itself an elegant piece of prose that endorses Hancock’s style and intent. Campbell has approached the book as if it is a prose poem, and in many respects it is better read that way: with expectations of a traditional narrative arc suspended (if you, the obliging reader, can) and all images and descriptions to be experienced and enjoyed in fragments, rather than relied on to add information to a developing story.
If you rely on finding a semi-traditional narrative arc, as I did because of the shape of the first few chapters, then there is an awkward tension between the figurative and concrete imagery: lots of abstract lyrical outpourings that turn abruptly into plodding ‘gumboots-in-the-mud’ plot practicalities and simple dialogue, then sudden lift-off into more waxing lyrical. Of course there is nothing wrong with quick shifts in tone, but it did seem at times as if Teresa’s intense internal monologue belonged in a different story entirely to the family drama.
The simple non-linear plot, though, does enable the author to attend to her sub-text, wherein she knits together a patchwork of pakeha guilt and Maori sadness reflected in many a grandiose metaphorical landscape description, for example: the ‘apocalyptic light shining over the harbour…’
The book is described on the cover, and at Black Pepper Press, as ‘tragi-comedy’, which constitutes a curious choice of epithet. The only tragedy I could find was in the (underplayed) sibling estrangement and in the poor long-suffering land that has to play host to such a nutty band of miserables. And as for ‘comedy’, well, it’s not a word that I for one would apply to this book. The premature death of the mother might be a tragedy in a different novel, but it is not pivotal enough in this story to become the tragedy it might want to be.
There is some interesting cultural exotica in the form of the moody Russians who are shown to be a regular part of Wellington’s nocturnal life – including, mainly, Nikolai, Teresa’s ex who haunts her: part-ghost, part-man. The continual mention of things Russian, odd though it is, does connect New Zealand with the world at large and reveals national characteristics by way of cultural contrast. The Russians provide a symbiotic connection to Maori, because both are people who have been ground down or ‘broken’.
The only Maori with a voice in the book is a young woman called Rangi. Rangi is mystical, and stands like a rock at the edge of the sea wearing a huge long coat reminiscent of a cloak of feathers. She cares not for trivialities like closing her mouth when she eats, nor for small talk and other such dishonesties. Everything she does and says can be pinned back to her people’s great loss. She is utterly devoid of a sense of humour, is perpetually making a film, and just sort of appears from time to time like the projection of a bad conscience or a dark omen. Rangi is ultimately a cartoon character, staunch archetype that the author has made of her.
At one point, late in the book: ‘Teresa thought: she should have listened to Rangi more carefully for who are more watchful than the Maori, more attentive to treachery?’ The motif of ‘New Zealandness’ is a distracting preoccupation, which regularly interrupts the story to provide dubious contextual information for a non-New Zealand reader. It also seems to aim to establish fairly and squarely the author’s perspective about New Zealand’s anthropological history: ‘Something needs to be said about the genus, shed. New Zealand is covered with them’, and ‘Our culture, she thinks, is like a wasp from within the body of another creature in which it has cruelly bred itself’, and ‘We’ve built up a good jail system for the people we’ve betrayed.’
Teresa comes out of a seizure saying: “We signed up a treaty in which we described ourselves as allies of a sovereign people and then we broke it. That’s what we did, we lied. The treaty was a lie.’ And ‘It is a bad country,’ said Nikolai.
I cannot say I enjoyed this book, with its rambling monster landscape, its disturbed, self-obsessed characters, and its preachy authorial undertow that regularly steers the story off into a socio-political commentary. But I can say that I admire the attention to detail of place and weather, the diversity yet connectedness of the female characters, and the author’s elegant poetic sensibility. I also admire the grand vision Susan Hancock must have had to write this book. It is epic in scale, and epic in the volume of psychological issues it touches upon. It is also deeply personal: the mention at the beginning of the author’s own ‘exile’ – whatever and wherever that may have been – acts as a touchstone when reading this book. And while all fiction is personal to an extent, this book reads as a labour of love, which gives it a certain mana.
Finally, near the end, Nikolai (back from wherever Russian wraith-men hail), tells Teresa ‘You are half my soul’ and she tells him, ‘You are my soul’. At this I let out a groan, having hoped right through to page 481 that Teresa would make some progress. But perhaps there is hope (for the willing) in the last three words: ‘To be continued …’
TASHA HAINES has a Masters Degree in Fine Arts from Elam at The University of Auckland. She was a lecturer in fine arts and design in Melbourne and Wellington, the manager of a fine art dealer gallery in Auckland, and is now a writer living in Wellington.
There is a factual error in this review: Fia Clendinnen provides only a quote on the back cover of the book, relating to the author’s previous short story collection, ‘Sailing Through the Amber’ – that is, “a lyrical, understated intensity of emotion that is almost unbearable to read”. The other text on the back cover of ‘The Peastick Girl’ is a quote from the book itself, followed by a normal publisher’s blurb. Perhaps this is a case of “not judging a book by its back cover”.