Quinine by Kelly Ana Morey
Huia, $35
Kelly Ana Morey has set her latest novel in German East Niuguinea (now Papua New Guinea), a place where she spent a number of years as a child. The award-winning novelist has created a world out of research, imagination and a touch of personal experience that captivates and disturbs.
In 1903, Marta Mueller, an artist and historian, leaves Vienna with her husband, Bernard Schmidt, for his copra plantation. She leaves behind "the taste of snow", a wilful sister and a sister who paints herself further into madness. She finds heat, unfamiliar vegetation and birdlife, and a craving for adventure.
Marta has entered, also, a marriage of convenience in order to step out of a predictable life in Vienna into an unpredictable life on the other side of the world. In this new setting she can transform herself into a rather different woman.
The two men in her life remind me of the character triangles in the novels of Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters. Bernard is socially awkward, slightly stupid, a little plain and having sex where he ought not (the neighbour's wife). Royal is the dashing hero, socially at ease, smart, intuitive and having sex where he ought not (with boys).
This is a novel of many layers. There is the vivid sense of place that Marta catches in her watercolours of plant and bird life.
There are the dynamics of different cultures: Samoan, Australian, German and Niuguinean. As the narrative bears us towards World War I and beyond, in some quarters the attitude towards the Germans changes. Germans are arrested and plantations will be confiscated.
Morey twists the prism of good and evil. She casts light on the difficulties that arise when you are born in a country responsible for reprehensible things, as in the case of the Germans. However, she casts scant light on the Niuguineans. They remain on the fringes doing things for the colonists and being dealt to.
There is also the complicated layer of love. It is complicated not just because the love relations in Quinine are complicated, but because the novel raises a number of questions about the representation of love.
Royal proposes to Marta to safeguard her plantation and because he is attracted to her mind. Love branches out into a division between mind and body where Royal lusts after the houseboy's body and favours Marta's company. This might create a dynamic storyline, but it felt like a new edition of the old narratives that made slaves and women bodies and little else.
Curiously, there is no judgment from Marta. Although the "boys" could be a matter of semantics where boy might mean young man as women are often referred to as girls. Perhaps the key event in Marta's past shaped her future behaviour - from the desire not to have children to a willingness to make do without physical relations to a reluctance to cast judgment.
Morey's new novel does many things. It brings an old world to new and fascinating life. It creates a female character knotty enough to be recognisably human. It leaves us to grapple with what is right and what is wrong and all the shades in between.
Paula Green is an Auckland poet and children's author.
