Gail Pittaway
Wonderland by Tracy Farr (The Cuba Press, 2025), 310pp, $38
For all the fanciful elements in this gentle and whimsical novel—triplets exhibited in a fairground, their three incubators a spectacle; a beached whale; and, most unlikely of all, Marie Curie taking refuge from scandal and recuperating from ill health in Miramar in 1912—the setting is factual. There was indeed a showground in Miramar, coincidentally now the base for the Wētā Workshops and the wonders of imagination that they bring to life and screen. Showground images and effects appear throughout this novel, like distorting mirrors, offering reflections and fleeting glances. Miraculously, the real show on this ground lasted from 1907 until 1912; doubtless, by then no longer a wonder, its chattels worn and tawdry.
Originally from Australia and a runner up for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and several other literary prizes with her first novel, The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt, published in 2013, Tracy Farr has lived in Wellington for several decades and claims Miramar as her home base. The manuscript of Wonderland won the NZSA Laura Solomon Cuba Press Prize, which accorded Farr this fine publication by The Cuba Press. The book’s cover photograph from 1907 is of Wonderland’s giant water slide, depicted with a hand-coloured lake, against a background of the then barren hillsides of the Miramar Peninsula.
Farr threads radium-like shimmers of brightness through this narrative, which is often told in fragments, using the alternating voices of various girls and women. At the heart of it is the wonder of identical triplets Oona, Ada and Johanna (called Hanna). Collectively, the three tell of their lives with their precocious seven-year-old voices. How ‘The Lady’ came to live with them, through the suggestion of Ernest Rutherford, their mother’s scientist colleague. Of how they are given whole days to play together, unsupervised on the beaches and spaces of their suburb, while their father negotiates and plans for the reopening of his great project of the showground at Wonderland. Of how their mother sleeps through days after night shifts at Newtown’s maternity hospital, in order to fund the family’s dwindling finances.
Their mother, Matilda Loverock, or Matti, is a qualified doctor, a graduate of Otago University, who is allowed to practise only in obstetrics in those early years of the twentieth century. She is a devoted doctor and proud of this charge. Matti’s former Havelock school friend Ernest Rutherford, who esteems her intelligence and achievements, has asked her to give Madame Curie a hiding place. Where better than on the other side of the world, so far from Paris, upon a beachfront that is hardly inhabited? To add weight to this arrangement, Farr prologues the book with news articles telling of duels fought and the ignominy of scandal for Madame Curie as one of the world’s greatest scientists of her time.
At first the voice of ‘The Lady’, known internationally as Marie Curie, is in fragmented thoughts, lines drifting over pages: recollections of her husband’s horrific death in a street carriage accident, or of her own daughters growing up in the care of her sister while she hides from the scandal of taking sexual comfort from her colleague Paul Langevin. She had been named publicly in the divorce proceedings as a co-respondent and in subsequent inflammatory press articles. Langevin even challenged one journalist to a duel. Already famous for her scientific inquiry, Marie Curie’s world has turned against her, and she is simply seen as an evil Other Woman. These scandals, court cases and considerable public anger have driven her into seclusion, while her own relentless commitment to her work as a teacher and researcher has caused her health to suffer, eventually causing kidney failure and requiring an operation and long recuperation. This is not the cancer she will later die from, but an illness Dr Matti can treat by administering pain relief and gently encouraging her with nourishing food.
Matti’s story is told in the third person. Having graduated in New Zealand and begun work, she has saved enough of her earnings to travel to America to meet a Dr Couney, who has invented the Living Infant Incubator. However, this real-life obstetrician’s invention is seen as too expensive or complicated for hospitals in New York, and he has taken the unusual step of exhibiting them on Coney Island as a sideshow. There, Matti sees the value of incubators for delicate babies and returns to New Zealand with three. After meeting and being captivated by Charles Loverock, the showman and proprietor of Wonderland, their mutual passion quickly leads to partnership and marriage. Soon, in the incubators, they display the greatest wonders of all, their triplets. As the girls have matured, Charlie has trained them up as feature performers of his fairground, with variations of the ‘Three Little Maids from School’ song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado as their starring act.
Gradually the triplets charm their way into the room and the heart of the Lady. Their vitality and childish conversations draw her thoughts away from the loss and scandal as Matti also works to rest and heal her. They tell her of their world, their outings and adventures. Sent outside by their father, after rousing calisthenics with him on the beach, their only instruction for each day is that they are not to go into the Seatoun tunnel. They follow several routines, often beginning with a visit to their old family mare, named Ernest Rutherford because she has the same kind eyes and large moustache shown in photos of the great man. They might then encounter some of the neighbours and identities who make up their community. There is a French hermit called Louis who sells fish and smells of old kelp. And one of the show people, Jane Deere, a cameleer, who can ‘tell apart’ between the triplets; and there’s Mrs R. Wilma Reid, their mother’s great friend, also skilled in healing, whose frequent exclamations invoke the Holy Family as well as ‘Saint Katie Sheppard’.
So, a theme acknowledging early feminism runs through the novel, from the rowdy discussions between Matti and her friends—her ‘cronies’—to reflections on society’s treatment of Madame Curie as a woman, beyond being acknowledged as a great scientist. Finally, this theme returns in the Coda, where the girls separately explain their divergent lives as women.
Through Matti’s care and nursing, Madame Curie gains strength and begins to engage with the delightful triplets, listening to their stories, enjoying their songs and linguistic misunderstandings as much as she struggles with the strange English of the remote New Zealanders. There are many linguistic puns and malapropisms in this novel. Currie mistakenly thinks the covered porch at the front of the house is a Miranda (a wonder), while the prayer for bed the girls are encouraged to say frightens them as a strange beast might. It features the magical phrase ‘Nawal Amy’, as in ‘Now I lay me down to sleep’. Marie Curie is puzzled by the name on a tin of boot polish, given she is Polish herself. The girls hear their father greet Hermit Louis with an unusual greeting they believe is ‘bone-jaw’, and Curie is also intrigued by the name of the location she finds herself in, ‘Worser’ Bay—could it be a comparative term?
The recurring chants and games of the three little girls run in charming counterpoint to the lives of the three main adults. There is a touch of Mansfield’s ‘At the Bay’ in their conversations with each other and others, which makes them most appealing narrators. Gradually the reader, along with Madame C., begins to distinguish differences in behaviours and preoccupations between the three. They believe the promotional material that claims ‘WONDERLAND CURES ALL ILLS’ and hope that they might visit it with the Lady, so that she can be restored by the sights: the helter-skelter; the Japanese tea-rooms; the Katzenjammer Castle or the ‘house of horrors’; the hall of mirrors; and the ‘fantastic Fernery’, their favourite place.
Although not a narrative voice, Charlie Loverock features as having a larger-than-life personality—one for whom Matti still feels passion, despite his impractical approach to the mundane. She realises he is too optimistic and is struggling to understand the financial problems he has brought upon them. He insists on spending his time planning to reopen the closed showground and entice townsfolk to pay for entry and sideshows once more. But, by 1912, the novelty and crowds have worn off. Finally, a compromise is found—one last night, and the staging of a Winter Gala, including a concert and fireworks. ‘The three little girls from Miramar’ practise their routine and prepare their costumes.
Crowds do gather, especially to watch the fireworks over the harbour in the dark sky, as yet undimmed by street and suburban lighting. In a flash of one of Farr’s exquisite touches of lyricism, we are given a description of this spectacle from the point of view of Madame Curie the scientist:
I did not expect the beautiful laboratory smell. Gunpowder, sulphur, perchlorates. Nor was I prepared for the chemistry of colours. Barium green, copper blue, sodium yellow, strontium red. This boundless laboratory is the sky above us … All the people in the crowd are colourless, yet brightly brilliant. They seem almost to phosphoresce, as if underwater, or to glow as if shone with ultraviolet, or the rays of light, of pure sunlight … I am mesmerised.
The Winter Gala night is a turning point for all, and, after a catastrophe, Matti collapses. Having supported Charlie and the girls and her guest for so long, she now becomes dependent on her visitor for support and healing. The chapters reflect this switch as Matti’s voice abruptly becomes one of fragments, while Madame Curie’s text turns more solid and coherent.
With this technique of shifting perspectives and fast, short chapters, Farr has created a quickly moving narrative. Although most of the plot is internalised through the changing points of view, especially variations in understanding, it ultimately makes for satisfying storytelling. The ‘what if’ question of having such a person as Marie Curie convalesce on our shores is no less unusual than to hear of actual visits by other famous identities from around that time: British royalty and literary figures such as Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw and Rudyard Kipling—who could have been describing Wellington as much as Auckland with the phrase ‘last, loneliest, loveliest, exquisite, apart’ in his ‘Poem of the cities’.
This unusual and pleasing novel itself conveys a wonderland of historical depth, set against the dominant presence of the weather in the shores and seas, the slopes and hills of Pōneke, where ‘the wind smells of nothing and everything, of ocean and faraway and the bay outside our door’.
GAIL PITTAWAY is a writer and lecturer, now part-time, at Wintec, Hamilton. She has published both creative work and academic papers, and has edited an anthology of writing on gardens and a book of academic essays, Minding the Gap, for the Australasian Association of Writing Programs, among other works. She is a regular reviewer of books for Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon programme and a drama critic for Theatreview website.
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