One of the interesting strands that come through this carefully researched first novel is the pleasure Minnie gets, both from caring for most of these babies and infants - and from travelling to the various cities of the South Island to collect them. She travels by train, often buying a first-class ticket, paid for by the rejected child's relatives. She enjoys being treated like a lady by the conductors and relaxing back on the comfortably upholstered seats of old-fashioned trains. And the joy of a night in a pub, far from her home, The Larches, where the floors are covered with grubby sacks and the babies, toddlers and children demand her every moment, is something she craves.
I'd expected the book to have been written with enough sympathy for Minnie to make it easy for readers to like her. This didn't happen. De Bazin gives Minnie a sly, deceitful, rather cruel, character. She appears to loathe the girl who assists her at The Larches and is thoughtlessly hard on Carter, the 10-month-old she uplifts from Bluff. This is the child she plans to adopt-on almost immediately to a woman in Gore, but overdoses with laudanum, seemingly by mistake.
Many slices of this relentlessly grim story explain Minnie's terrible start in life in the tenements of Scotland and are possible explanations as to how she ended up. According to de Bazin's account, her father was dreadfully abusive. The family followed religion of the unkindest, scariest kind.
Her two sisters, including Isabella who she loved dearly, died as children, probably from cholera. Her mother died, in agony and witnessed by Minnie, from cancer. Her father replaces her within three months with a wicked, red-headed stepmother who sends her mother's treasures to the pawnbroker.
Minnie, who had been born brave and pugnacious, takes on the vile Scottish schoolteacher who refuses to teach the girls in his class to read and write. She takes on the boys, the bullies and the ghastly stepmother. She also does the unforgiveable and allows Freddie, the only person who treats her kindly, it seems, to pull up her skirts.
So it is a lone, rejected young woman "with a bump" who boards the ship to Australia and then to New Zealand.
Although she invents herself a doctor husband who died prematurely, so escaping the "unmarried mother" label herself, Minnie undoubtedly had a hunger to help unmarried mothers. But de Bazin's story tells us that her main drive to take in illegitimate children was a monetary one. Times were exceedingly tough. She wanted the cash.
This is a complicated book on more than one level. I found the structure unhelpful, as it so predictably sliced between past and present. This is one book which could well have started at the beginning and gone on until the end. Almost everyone in New Zealand knows Minnie Dean's fate. And if they don't, the book jacket will surely remind them. What I was looking for was an impression of the character of Minnie Dean that would help me decide if she was a heartless murderer, or the victim of a cruel and antiquated justice system.
Although I'm in no doubt that she was strung up for crimes which today would probably get her 10 years in jail at most, my personal jury is still confused. It would have helped if, despite her obvious faults and hideous errors of judgment, the writer had made Minnie Dean a more likeable character.
Certainly it is a tough ask, to tell Minnie's side of story for her without condoning the horror of what she did, but de Bazin could have been more generous. Even Minnie's wretched circumstances didn't make me feel sympathy for her and I think she deserves that.
Carroll du Chateau is an Auckland reviewer.
