The Kaikōura Coast, State Highway One: brother and sister Alex and Amy snarl and bicker on their road trip south. Photo/Getty Images
The Kaikōura Coast, State Highway One: brother and sister Alex and Amy snarl and bicker on their road trip south. Photo/Getty Images
The Telling Time P.J. McKay Polako Press ($35) Reviewed by Rosetta Allan
Pip McKay, author of The Telling Time.
P.J. McKay's debut novel opens in 1958, in a sardine factory in Yugoslavia — a scene so confident and immersive that UK author Sebastian Faulks selected The Telling Time as the winner of this year's international First Pages Prize. Gabrijela isa young woman living on the Adriatic island of Korcula. Much is idyllic, like summer swimming in crystal water and picnics on the shore, but working for the family's fishing business – and Tito's economy – is not an easy environment for a girl who aspires to more than canning sardines and the long service of married life.
The Telling Time.
Gabrijela's life changes forever when she's exiled to New Zealand, a country that looks "ironed out, flattened", where her secrets can remain hidden. Sent away by her father for a reason we learn much later in the novel, Gabrijela surfaces in Auckland suburbia, in a tight-knit "Dally" community to work as an underpaid housekeeper. Her new life offers unknown luxuries—like an electric stove—but familiar expectations. "I'd travelled half a world away," she realises, "and ended up with the same chores." While Gabrijela warms to her new Auckland life — or perhaps slowly thaws — she's not immune to hypocrisy and judgment about her past.
The novel is a coming-of-age story not just for Gabrijela: her Auckland-born daughter, Luisa, is the novel's other narrative line. Luisa sets off in 1989 for her OE, including a trip to now-splintering Yugoslavia to play "mystery cousin" — a reunion she's keeping secret from her mother. Frustrated by the silence around her mother's exile and the relatives she left behind, by the profound estrangement between past and present, Luisa is a Croatian Kiwi who scoffed at the Dally Club activities of her youth but now "wants to live and breathe and see for herself".
But Luisa's travels to the land of her mother's birth have unexpected and disastrous consequences: too late she realises "the rules are different here". In a country still mourning Tito, and about to explode in sectarian violence, Luisa is a naive New Zealander informed only by Dally Club conversations. "The politics at home seem like child's play," she thinks. She and fellow backpacker Bex are exposed, unprotected young women too far off track in an older, harsher world. The vulnerabilities of being a woman are, in fact, at the core of the secrets both Gabrijela and Luisa end up carrying.
McKay's debut explores two different eras and communities in unsentimental detail, its research spanning generations and time zones. The races in late 50s Auckland are as vivid as a Communist Party ball in Dubrovnik, or a rowdy bar in 80s Macedonia.
The Telling Time is reminiscent of Maxine Hong Kingston's classic The Woman Warrior: daughters set out on a discovery of cultural heritage, intending to understand their mothers, and therefore themselves. McKay's two storylines explore unravelling the secrets, necessary if the past is to lose its grip on us, and if mothers and daughters are to replace silence with truth.
Rosetta Allan is the author of two bestselling historical novels. She lives in Auckland. *This review was commissioned by the Academy of New Zealand Literature and a longer version will appear on anzliterature.com.
State Highway One Sam Coley Hachette, $35 Reviewed by David Hill
This debut novel by New Zealand-born, Australian-based Sam Coley has already won an award and much acclaim. So it should; it's a cracker.
State Highway One, by Sam Coley.
Alex of Auckland has lost both his famous, fickle, film-directing parents, abruptly and calamitously. He heads back from Dubai, and with twin sister Amy starts a road trip to see if they can find their pasts, themselves, each other. Given that the siblings are on sulking and spitting terms more often than speaking terms, it ain't going to be easy.
Cape Reinga to Stewart Island: a straightforward itinerary but tortuous progress, a sort of Pork Pie noir with fewer funny bits. The millennials' opening day sets the tone – 140km/h on the straights, hung-over and semi-washed, he in a crumpled suit and no shoes; her in black, fag in mouth, "like runaways from the world's worst high school ball". Not your Happy Families holiday.
They snarl and bicker southwards, brand names and playlists scattered as they drive. Alex may be home, but he doesn't feel that way. Self-indulgent and cliched? It seems so at first, but one of Coley's achievements is his measured, inexorable unpeeling of the compulsions and anguish that burden his young anti-hero. Alex begins as a privileged yet neglected Jafa brat, builds into an affecting, wounded emblem.
Their hectic, sleep-deprived, substance-ingesting drive – he's hoping to catch a flight back to the Middle East – takes them via collision, freezing rain and blood loss on the Desert Road to a Cook Strait ferry where massed throwing-up rules. The roads to Ōamaru are blocked; the little Mirage is falling apart. They career on, abandoning each other briefly, swerving into crime and confusion, hurtling towards a semi-reconciliation and the final stages of obsession either side of Foveaux Strait.
The dynamics between vulnerable, wounded brother and confident, domineering sister power the plot. You won't like them, but you'll feel swelling compassion for them. You'll also appreciate the mordant humour that flickers through their relationship. Savagery morphs into sudden splutters of laughter.
The narrative flicks between past and comparative present. We get flashbacks to other summers and hopes, family firefights, Alex's lovers both local and exotic. Events crackle with tension and brood with loss. Voices occasionally lapse into cod-Barry Crump tones or Creative Writing 101 displays, but never lose their power. Coley's damaged duo can't let each other go, and won't let you go. I'll be happy to drive along with him in his next novel.
