Renee: Kissing Shadows

This explores familiar Renee territory. Loosely based on her own father's suicide during the Depression, it is material that Renee has previously dramatised in her 1985 play, Wednesday To Come. But although the play took a Pakeha perspective, this work is firmly focused on Maori.

Set in 1949 and 1934, there are parallels to Renee's own life: a Pakeha-Maori couple; a daughter going out to work at age 12; a mother who, after her husband's suicide, rears three children during the Depression.

It quickly becomes apparent that both Vivvie, and later her mother Ruby, have struggled with the mystery of why Cam committed suicide.

There are other, lesser mysteries: the love-hate relationship between Vivvie and Ruby; how Nanny Parehuia fits into the equation; the tension of a mixed marriage; the thread of anger that runs through the family. And why Nanny Parehuia was attacked and her tongue cut out.

Nanny's "ugly eyes" have been handed down to Vivvie, the eyes that are like "a message from the bones". Vivvie can't decide whether it's a curse or a gift. "But I know I don't really want it. I might have the eyes, but that's all I've got." Vivvie finds out in the end she has got a lot more than that. Perhaps her ultimate struggle is racial: "It was like I was standing on that bridge that spanned the gulf between Pakeha and Maori in Porohiwi. I wondered if that was the only place for people like me."

The female characters are strongly-drawn. There is the friendship between Vivvie and Ada, bonded by a paternal suicide in common. Ruby herself, so defiant and proud, going down to Wellington to identify her husband's body. And of course the mute, rather scary figure of Nanny Parehuia.

At her best, Renee's prose is lean and engaging, unfolding the story like peeling the layers off an onion.

However, no novel is perfect. To be picky, there was an awful lot of tea drinking (I now know how each of the main characters take their tea), and an irritating level of typos (hardly Renee's fault). Also, the section from the Wellington coroner's point of view feels slightly contrived, and to my mind stalled the impetus of what had come before.

Quibbles aside, this book is a cracker.


* Tina Shaw is writer in residence at Waikato University
* Huia Publishers, $34.99