Sue Orr. Photo / Supplied
Loop Tracks
by Sue Orr
(Victoria University Press, $35)
Sue Orr's first novel, The Party Line (2015), was a coming-of-age story, notable for its honesty and humanity, realistic evocation of a past era and lovingly created, believable setting and characters. Loop Tracks is her second novel, set in Wellington, and shares many
of the same characteristics.
The narrative moves smoothly between two time schemes. In the earlier, we meet 16-year-old Charlie, short for Charlotte, who has the misfortune to fall pregnant in 1978, when safe legal abortion was once again briefly unavailable in New Zealand. The Auckland clinic had been closed, not to reopen until 1980. Fictional Charlie (and thousands of real women) were forced to anticipate a lonely and expensive procedure on the other side of the Tasman.
Charlie has had sex only the once and believes, as many girls did then and possibly still do, that loss of virginity and fertilisation are mutually exclusive. Orr puts Charlie on an actual Pan Am flight that really was delayed and bases this part of her story on the real-life experience of a friend. During the delay Charlie gets off the plane and does not get back on it.
She "goes away", as we said then, gives birth to a son, and gives him up for adoption. This part of the action is lightly handled, perhaps because for the bulk of the book, set in 2019 and 2020, it is a long time in the past. When we meet Charlie again, she is in her late 50s, has not had any other children than the boy she gave away, but has had the care of teenage grandson Tommy since the time he was a preschooler.
