Felicity Price, Gillian Ranstead: Split time & A Red Silk Sea

These two New Zealand novels could not be more different. It would be uncharitable to say that Split Time is shallow — it's more like a quick splash in a swimming pool. By contrast, A Red Silk Sea requires scuba gear and courage to dive into its turbulent waters.

Split Time is Felicity Price's fourth novel, and the slick style and polished plot reveal the author's experience. The main character, Penny Rushmore, spends much of her life driving around talking on her cellphone. She is being pulled in several directions: between her squabbling teenagers, demanding PR clients, and a mother who is exhibiting the beginnings of Alzheimer's. She is also trying to lose weight, and find out what her husband is up to on his "working late" nights.

Penny is the classic high-achieving, multi-tasking superwoman who finds it hard to say no or to ask for help. As a result, she's not coping. The pace is lively, the dialogue peppy, the story eminently readable, although I felt like shaking Penny because of her lack of assertiveness.

A counterpoint to the main story is a collection of letters that reveal the life of Penny's great-grandmother, who was a leader in the women's suffrage movement. There are some parallels between the two women's lives: the great-grandmother is also squeezed between the demands of children and an ageing mother, but mostly the letters feel disjointed from the main plot, a device rather than an integral part of the story. More could have been made of the family history connection here.

There is little of substance to savour afterwards, but Split Time is well-written for its genre: light, entertaining and satisfying, with minor intrigue and dramas.

However, if you want something to get your teeth into, Gillian Ranstead's A Red Silk Sea is a much more challenging read. Like many first novels, it is ambitious and crowded with characters. It begins with a dramatic suicide. Laurie's death is the catalyst for her friend Cam to unravel their shared past as teenagers in a small South Auckland community where violence of all kinds was the norm: parents beating up kids, men bashing or raping women, groups of teenagers ganging up on each other, fuelled by alcohol, anger, jealousy or revenge.

There is also a mention of historical violence of that area — a battle at the long-forgotten pa.

Cam and Laurie are drawn together as friends, and share the feeling that the violence around them is wrong. As soon as they are old enough, they escape to the city, but the legacies of the past continue to haunt them.

Halfway through the book is the story of Laurie's mother Kathe, who spent time in a concentration camp in the war, which explains her reactions to violence years later. Although we see through her eyes during her life in Germany, in New Zealand she is more distant in the third person. Like the historical flashback in Split Time, this one is vivid but disconnected from the main story.

The back cover likens this book to Once Were Warriors, and it is just as raw and disturbing, although it doesn't have such a concentrated punch. Gillian Ranstead shows how difficult it is to challenge, or simply to opt out of, the culture of violence, that both Maori and Pakeha are subject to it, and that the way out of it is through dialogue and sharing stories. I look forward to more from this talented writer.

* Philippa Jamieson is a Dunedin writer.
* Split time, Harpercollins, $27.95
* A Red Silk Sea, Penguin Books, $28