Rachel O’Connor
The Mires by Tina Makereti (Ultimo Press, 2024), 320pp, $39.99
Water and the devastating consequences of water running out or running over permeate this novel and the destinies of every character in it. I commenced reading The Mires in Auckland’s sodden winter on a day dominated by severe rain and flood warnings. I finished the book on a midsummer’s morning in a village in rural northern Greece, where the temperature was already 41°C, the dusty air stifling, the surrounding fields baked bone-dry. The locals, descendants of refugees displaced a century ago by shifting powers and borders in Asia Minor, lugged plastic-bound packs of bottled water home with them along with the daily loaf of bread. ‘We all pay a water bill here,’ an elderly woman grumbled, ‘but even when it comes out of the pipe, you can’t drink it. So—we pay again.’ Although The Mires’ blurb sets the story in the near future, it felt unarguably contemporary and uncomfortably real during my reading of it—we are already in a world in which water, whether it be too scarce or too plentiful, seems to command every aspect of human existence.
In the first brief chapter of this novel, Keri, unaccompanied except by the ‘ancient and imaginary selves’ she allows to flare into being, gives birth to her daughter Wairere, a baby whose eyes come ‘not from darkness, but from before the dark existed’, and have a disconcerting, soul-searching effect on those at whom she stares. This establishment of Wairere’s otherworldly nature is immediately reinforced in the following chapter, narrated in faintly mystical diction by the all-knowing swamp itself, where Wairere, a girl ‘neither child nor woman yet’, seeks refuge from her adolescent conflicts with her mother in the ‘meeting point between open seas and solid land, in the seam of sky and earth, between what you think you know and what you don’t.’ The centrality of Wairere’s relationship with the swamp clearly signals the novel’s urgent ecological message. Despite her youth, Wairere understands something that most of the world seems to have forgotten: ‘Swamp is the place of cleansing—her microbes, bacteria and fungi, her peat, her tussocks, reeds and harakeke, the clever kūwāwā and purei plants. Her rich mud and hungry invertebrates, her sludge and sediments.’
Wairere’s mystical qualities, her intimate connection to the wetlands that sustain her, and indeed ‘every life form that needs water—every body that walks the earth, two or four or eight-legged, every creature that flies above it, every plant and tree and patch of ground, every frog and fish,’ and the climactic impact wrought by the harnessing of Wairere’s latent power notwithstanding, this novel is above all an exemplar of social drama and social realism. Wairere is a very real kid whose battle to reconcile her inner self and her only partially perceived and comprehended abilities with the external demands of family and school skillfully reflects the angst experienced every day by so many youngsters in today’s complex and confusing world. Her mother’s life story also addresses head-on a range of recognisable societal concerns; a single parent dislocated from her wider whanau, Keri’s existence is a daily battle to provide for her children, ‘turning herself in knots to pay the bills, and satisfy the welfare and benefit ghouls’, and to keep at bay both the memories of past relationships, failed and violent, and the current loneliness and despair that threaten to submerge her.
Despite her struggle to survive in the material world, Keri knows where and what she is from and lives proudly in Aotearoa. In contrast, the nosy next-door neighbour she knows as Mrs B., who is descended from ‘a long line of women who were likened, in all the different centuries in which they lived, as much akin to old boots’, and whose own marriage, mercifully over, had been a sad saga of bullying and abuse, dwells firmly in a small white version of New Zealand. Inside the values that Janet Bloom ‘keeps proud in her chest, is a subconscious constructed by a certain upbringing, a certain cultural sphere, a certain way of seeing the world shaped by generations and generations of white communities being pushed into a world that wasn’t theirs, convinced of the primacy of their way of life.’ She and Keri maintain an uneasy neighbourly truce but keep a mistrustful distance from each other.
For both these women, then, the arrival of Sera and her little family, climate refugees from an unspecified land where water has now disappeared entirely, shakes them out of their accustomed states of thinking and being and presents them with unprecedented challenges and opportunities for growth and companionship. The hopefulness engendered by these new relationships is soon darkened, however, by the unexpected return home of Mrs B’s adult son, Conor, who has been dangerously radicalised by a largely online alt-right movement and is committed to making his mark on a world that he feels has failed him.
In short chapters narrated in the present tense, which sway constantly between varying points of view and between disparate times and locations, the telling detail of each character’s life history is revealed, unfolding by degrees a map charting the evolutionary journey that has led each to their current set of beliefs and insecurities. It is an ambitious undertaking that carries the reader through childhoods and marriages, between migrant processing stations, Australian apartments, social welfare offices, White Supremacist camps and clandestine cells, yet always circles back to the swamp, to Wairere’s Swamp Mother, who ‘takes all the dirt and grime of the world into her generous body, and returns her children to the world refreshed.’ And as is the way with all natural forces, the swamp and the rain that feeds it manifest the potential for destruction alongside their lifegiving power. As Wairere observes, bog ‘can be blacker, and more treacherous, than regular swamp. It can pull you down, suffocate, infect.’ And too much water can be just as disastrous as too little.
In this small and unremarkable community, Makereti thus sets in play a veritable catalogue of social pressures and strains, anxieties and malignancies that fester and bubble in isolation in every neighbourhood in the world, but when caused to collide inevitably trigger a conflagration, and result in incalculable, horrible harm.
It is the uniquely perceptive Wairere who most clearly senses the threat that Conor presents, a ‘man bringing others with him, but only shadows, and something more, something very bad.’ Although she struggles to identify or articulate the nature of the looming peril, Wairere somehow knows that she needs to ‘protect her family, when the time comes. The time of what, she can’t be sure, but she feels it as plainly as she feels the bite of the wind in her ears, as surely as she hears the harakeke seeds rattling in their stems. It’s coming.’ And of course it does.
The mounting tension and suspense engendered by this combination of circumstances and personalities are both compelling and convincing, the elements of the developing plot are drawn together with a deft hand, the climax is well-crafted and explosive without ever tipping into melodrama, and the ending is original, substantial, and thought-provoking. All hallmarks of a well-constructed novel and a satisfying read. Yet it is the truthfulness and sensitivity with which the characters’ backstories are woven and through which their attitudes and actions become so human and comprehensible, even as they disturb and repel, which I feel to be the triumph of this book. It is no easy feat to take on the starkest stereotypes of an uneasily blending society and give them real life. That Makereti has done her research is particularly evident in the detailed documentation of Conor’s troubling road to radicalisation, yet this seldom becomes overtly informational and always serves to shape a believable character for whom one can find, if not sympathy, at least a degree of compassion. His mother, Janet Bloom, also acquires very credible agency, ultimately uncovering the degree of self-perception and courage required to ‘take out and examine all the days of her life with her son’ and to find ‘herself wanting.’ Here, the swamp adds a caveat that in the final pages of the book offers a wide-open window and a question: ‘It is unwritten whether this wanting will take her in one direction or the other. Whether she will be able to sustain the unease long enough to become more than she is, or whether her discomfort will cause her to weave elaborate narratives as a protective shield.’
Truly traumatic events, whether precipitated by manmade decisions and actions or by natural tendencies and forces, or by a deadly combination of those two, inevitably transform lives, and people, instantly and forever. It is how we respond to that irreversible shift, how we rise to meet the painful challenges of grief, of loss, of betrayal, and of exhaustion, which define us and make clear to us and to our community who we really are, and what we are capable of. Tina Makereti’s The Mires is a brave and original effort to examine what makes us, and divides us, as a nation and as a human race, and to confront the humbling, disquieting degree to which we are subject to the power of water, the moving liquid firmament of the earth which enables every aspect of life, and may always, easily, wash it all away.
RACHEL O’CONNOR is a writer, teacher, and reviewer from Christchurch. She holds a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Auckland, and her fiction and non-fiction have been published in Greece, Ireland and New Zealand.
Leave a Reply