Whereas the Canterbury earthquakes brought people together, says debut novelist Jane Shearer, Covid lockdowns forced them apart. Photo / Michael Craig
Whereas the Canterbury earthquakes brought people together, says debut novelist Jane Shearer, Covid lockdowns forced them apart. Photo / Michael Craig
When New Zealand went into the first Covid lockdown three years ago today, scientist Jane Shearer started keeping a daily journal. She talks to Joanna Wane about how that and the trauma of the Canterbury earthquakes shaped her debut novel, and why rigid thinking remains dangerously divisive today.
Geologist JaneShearer had just pulled up outside a Christchurch crematorium for her neighbour’s funeral when a brick wall — or was it part of the building? — exploded, a few metres away. Her partner, Chris, looked up to see a power pole weaving wildly above them. Then the shaking knocked them both to the ground.
The couple had been back in New Zealand for only a few hours after a trip to Switzerland when the devastating magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck in 2011. Their skis were still strapped to the top of the car. Ripples ran through the lawn outside the crematorium as a swift 10-minute service was held for those able and willing to stay. Who knew, said the celebrant, when they’d be able to gather again.
By bike and on foot, Shearer, Chris and their teenage daughter Sarah eventually made their way home to Sumner. Some of what she saw that day would end up in her newly released debut novel, Broken is Beautiful: the elderly woman sitting on her walking frame at the side of the road, shivering, as she waited for her daughter to come. Rocks falling from the cliff face. A house in flames. Later, she learned a good friend had been killed in the central city when a building facade collapsed.
Shearer was no stranger to earthquakes, having grown up in Christchurch, and had a geologist’s intellectual understanding of them. “In theory, you know there’ll be a whole lot of aftershocks but, in practice, when you’re waking up every night as if somebody’s whacking the end of your bed with a sledgehammer, that’s quite a different experience,” she says. “It was seminal for me in bringing theory into reality and seeing what happens to a large group of people when they’re pretty terminally stressed.”
In her debut novel, Broken is Beautiful, geologist Jane Shearer draws on her own experiences living through Covid and the Canterbury earthquakes. Photo / Kerrin Burnnand
There’s a surreality about existence in a time of civil crisis, she later wrote in the introduction to her blog, Thoughts in Uncertain Times, which she began in March 2020 as New Zealand closed its borders against Covid-19 and went into a nationwide lockdown. Documenting her experience is something Shearer wished she’d done after the quakes and before the memory of events that were so vivid became blurred or lost over time.
While the sense of uncertainty was similar, she tells Canvas, the destruction across Canterbury brought people together; the pandemic drove them apart. “A significant part of dealing with the immediate trauma was the ‘earthquake conversations’, as people packaged up their stories into a tellable, manageable form, and the social cohesion created through all those interactions,” she says. “There were all sorts of things we could do for each other — cleaning up someone’s liquefaction or fixing their fence.
“The massive contrast with Covid was that we all had to stay home in our bubbles. You looked at other people as scary things, not as someone who’d feed you a meal from [the defrosted food in] their freezer. I really do believe that how open people are to other people has an impact on how their views mould over time. When you separate people, that’s what sends them down their own rabbit holes.”
Unfolding in parallel with the pandemic, Broken is Beautiful is structured in journal form from the perspective of Julia, a psychologically damaged earthquake survivor who’s become obsessed with broken things. So obsessed she joins a support group, where fellow compulsives include a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle fanatic, a tattoo addict, a doll-hoarding marathon runner and a guy who’s started eating the cat biscuits he feeds to displaced pets in the city’s red zone.
The theme of the book is the challenge of navigating friendships and family relationships across the ideological divide, from wild conspiracy theories and misinformation to polarisation over vaccine mandates, which becomes a source of conflict among Julia’s fictional support group. It’s volatile territory: a number of bookshops have refused to stock the novel because it addresses vaccination and they don’t want staff exposed to abuse from either side.
Shearer's debut novel explores friendship across the vax/anti-vax divide. Photo/design: Holly Dunn
Shearer notes it would be difficult to set a novel in Covid times without mentioning vaccines in some way. She ended one friendship after the pandemic exposed conflicting values too extreme to ignore but is also aware of how emotive and frightening much of the anti-vax literature can be.
The title Broken is Beautiful references the concept of kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery pieces in a way that highlights the “scars” to create a stronger, more beautiful and more resilient piece. “What was really important to me was writing a novel about how I want the world to be. Not from a Pollyanna perspective, but we have enough examples of how we don’t want the world to be. We need to tell stories that are possible and that give people positive options.”
For the record, Shearer was impressed by the Government’s clear communication and evidence-led decision-making in the pandemic’s early phases. Her support wavered when the official response remained rigid as the wider picture changed.
“To me, the wrong was enforcing the vaccine mandate when we had reached a 90 per cent rate across most of the country and already had a good indication that with Omicron, vaccinations [while significantly lowering the risk of death and serious illness] weren’t stopping transmission. I think that’s caused a significant part of the rift we’re now experiencing.”
Shearer sees it as a cautionary tale on the dangers of becoming entrenched in a particular position that supports your personal view, closing off new information. She believes society has been unsettled more than we realise by the pandemic combined with the realisation of climate change — the subject of her next book.
“We’re all struggling to know how to respond but when I wrote this novel, I wasn’t trying to come up with any answers,” she says. “It’s the discussions that are important, and the connections between people, because the only thing that’s going to move us forward in a positive way is community.”
