Jenny Powell
Weathered Bones, by Michele Powles (Penguin Books, 2009), 299 pp., $25.99
Weathered Bones, by Michele Powles (Penguin Books, 2009), 299 pp., $25.99
This is one of the few books I have had dreams about. The sea in it ended up permeating my nights: images of a blue-black seething ocean — repetitious, insistent images that are as compelling to the reader as they are to its characters — dominate Michele Powles’ first novel.
Weathered Bones weaves together the lives of three women, initially unacquainted but about to become closer than they ever could have imagined. Eliza McGregor arrives in Wellington in 1840. Despite her initial new-immigrant expectations, life soon plummets from joy to the depression of a lonely grind at Pencarrow lighthouse. Her husband drinks his earnings, and her young children exhaust her spirit. The husband’s eventual drowning leads to Eliza herself becoming the keeper of the light.
This is a fascinating aspect of the book, historically speaking, as ‘Eliza’ was inspired by the true-life story of Mary Jane Bennett, appointed New Zealand’s first keeper of a permanent lighthouse at Pencarrow in 1858. Powles allows us the opportunity to ponder the difficult life of Mary Jane, who was surely one of New Zealand’s early feminists.
Drowning is a constant theme, a leitmotiv, in Weathered Bones. Flash-forward to the present day where Antoinette, an Eastbourne grandmother, is grieving for her recently drowned husband. Her children have left home and she now struggles to fend off a clawing emptiness. Grace, another Wellington-ite, should be content but isn’t. Married for ‘like’ rather than love, she attempts to avoid life issues and buries herself in her work at the Maritime Museum, researching one Eliza McGregor.
While the early chapters of Weathered Bones establish each character in her original setting, movement between characters is sometimes slightly abrupt. It’s when the women draw together that the novel gains momentum.
Eliza did not accept her own death gracefully. She has lingered in ghost form, her resistant presence gradually building in malevolence and solidity. She is the catalyst for Grace’s psychological demise. A haunting manipulator, Eliza’s egotistical desire to have her story told forces Grace into breakdown mode. Grace is admitted into the local psychiatric unit, where Antoinette is now employed.
Antoinette has developed a growing interest in floral art and painting, which in turn enables, and becomes part of, an intense focus on colour throughout the book: ‘bright saffron marigolds … red hot pokers … branches of small yellow peppers dripping over the greenery; everything with petals red, yellow and Buddhist orange.’ These energetic, emotionally warm colours of Antoinette’s flowers are in sharp contrast with the dominating colour of her workplace. The corridor is a sparse white; white walls are as ‘dazzling as teeth.’ There are white doorways, white nurses’ uniforms and the Doctor — Gary — beams his ‘too white’ smile. While white is associated with purity and mental clarity, it is also an intensely cold and unwelcoming colour. Given that the Eastbourne Residential Unit is a state-of-the art facility, it seems improbable that the canvas of white would be quite so emphatic. This seems to be poetic licence on the author’s part, as actually the concept of carefully designed, homely communities is a feature of new inpatient units, especially when they’re privately funded.
Treatment with Gary, who ‘reads’ his patients and fills in their gaps with new lines and chapters, doesn’t quite ring true either, but on the other hand it is here that Powles convincingly captures the terrifying interaction between the women. Eliza transfers her attention from Grace to Antoinette. Gary’s initial concerns that Grace was entering a psychotic episode give way to relief but, while Grace recovers, Antoinette then experiences a frightening psychological disintegration. Her immersion in paint, orchestrated by Eliza, is reminiscent of the true account of a UK woman’s psychotic breakdown and her immersion in paint and colour during that time. (See Mary Barnes’ Two Accounts of a Journey Through Madness.)
At one level, Eliza’s control over each woman can be interpreted as the key ingredient of a good haunting read. There is though, another possible explanation for this sequence of events, intended or not. In the medical model there is such a thing as a shared psychotic delusion, or folie a deux, where a delusional belief develops in an individual who is in a close relationship with someone who already has an established delusion. The content of delusions are similar. Perhaps the experiences of Eliza and her overwhelming world are not ghostly, but rather the manifestation of a shared psychotic delusion. Whichever interpretation you choose to make, the Eliza episodes are gripping and at moments totally absorbing, as if she’s reaching out from the ocean of the subconscious to wrap us and drench us in long tendrils of fear.
In Weathered Bones, the author makes the voice of history speak with an arresting and mesmeric register. Powles has skilfully resurrected the past and given it fresh and potent life. It is the combined strength of the trio of women in their vibrant Wellington world that leads the reader on an urgent page-turning mission, while the flesh of weathered bones forms and reforms, and bodies forth in dreams. Though not without flaws, this is thrilling and involving writing — and it left this reader with a shiver of anticipation awaiting Powles’ next novel.
JENNY POWELL is a Dunedin writer, teacher and researcher. She is the author of six collections of poetry, including most recently Vietnam: A Poem Journey (HeadWorX).
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