Paula Morris: Hibiscus Coast

Paula Morris' second novel opens shrouded in pre-dawn mist. "By six in the morning, a shingle sky squeezed rain across the suburbs in fitful bursts". Strange shapes move through the dimness, slowly emerging as ...

As newspaper delivery boys, in fact, doing the early morning rounds.

It's a nice effect, presenting the streets of Auckland as an enigmatic, nebulous landscape and then attaching that air of mystery to something which turns out to be entirely prosaic. It tells you the opposite of what it first appears to be telling you: not that things are safely ordinary despite any passing moments of mystery, but that appearences deceive, and you can't trust them.

Which is one of the book's central ideas. This is a story about art forgery, and also about identity and the ways in which people fail to see beneath the skin. The art forging is done by Emma Taupere, a young New Zealander of Maori and Chinese descent. Despite her astonishing gifts as a painter, Emma has no sense of her own value or of where she fits in the world. To New Zealanders she looks Chinese; to Chinese she looks and sounds foreign.

When her friend Siaki offers her the central role in an ambitious scheme to replace two of the Auckland Museum's most famous Goldie paintings with copies and sell the originals on the black market, Emma agrees without thinking through either the moral implications or the possible consequences. A string of unlikely events involving her emotionally damaged cousin, an old friend's K Rd bar, and a flower delivery van soon tip Siaki's plan out of kilter, and Emma finds herself running, perhaps for her life.

Actually, "soon" was entirely the wrong word for that last sentence. A better one would have been "event-ually". Morris is an impressive writer, sure and sophisticated in her command of language, and tosses off penetrating observations about human nature with an enviably casual air. But it all goes largely to waste, because of a fundamental error in the book's construction: too many flashbacks, not enough momentum.

Why does Emma make the bad choices she makes early on in the story? We find out on page 317, after many trips down her personal memory lane, slowly making our way to the point of revelation. Meanwhile, the forgery story is proceeding at glacial pace, because of all the flashbacks. It picks up speed and becomes interesting about halfway through the book, but that's too late.

Morris could have carried this novel comfortably on the strength of Emma's backstory, had she been more forthcoming with it. Likewise, the art forgery plot has no weaknesses except its failure to serve as more than a staging post for Emma's recollections for so much of the book.

Had Morris taken a cue from her own opening pages and let things emerge from the mist a little faster, this could have been a grand read.

* David Larsen is an Auckland reviewer
* Penguin, $28