Christine Johnston: The Shark Bell

By MICHAEL LARSON

Christine Johnston's first novel since winning the Heinemann Reed Fiction Award in 1991 is set in Dunedin, in 1969, around the daily lives of a collection of families in the St Kilda beach area.

The bulk of the narrative is told through the eyes of Edmund, an 8- to 10-year-old. He details acutely the pain and progress of a boy of that age, a pain that is compounded by his being new in town, and without married parents.

His mother, Hazel, has made a dramatic escape from a violent relationship in the mid-North Island, absconding with a local tradesman to a new life at the bottom of the world.

Understandably, in reaction to the social mores of the time, which in Dunedin seem to be more 1950s than late 1960s, she keeps to herself. So Edmund has few playmates and uses his vivid imagination for entertainment.

He is drawn to the sea and, in particular, to the shark bell that stands proud - and silent - on the pier.

The ocean's mystery and ever-changing moods provide him with much-needed solace in his unpredictable existence, and he enters an almost dreamlike state in his musings at the pier.

"It isn't a waste of time, this sea-watching. It is leading to something, but I don't know what," he says early on as he starts to realise the hold it has over him.

The previous summer a young surfer had disappeared after a suspected shark attack. This event, which starts the book off, haunts Edmund. He wonders if he'll ever hear that bell, and what sort of chaos and confusion it may summon.

When his time comes to use the bell, it is a pivotal moment in the novel, a climax of unravelling that we always suspected was just around the corner.

Johnston plays with the flashback motif - it's like reading a news headline, then filling in the detail over the next few days. This works wonderfully as Hazel's past slowly surfaces. The other people who drift through the narrative and touch Edmund's life are also handled in this way.

His foreign friend Jacob has mysterious secrets from wartime Europe, as do Mr and Mrs Zacek next door. When Clara Zacek reveals her husband's true occupation in Nazi Germany, and the way they met, it is both moving and frightening.

The characters are exquisitely and realistically drawn. Their pasts provide the novel's present.

The way their lives touch in this small community is done without faux-drama or sensationalism. In fact the whole book has a strange calm, like that sea, although one never feels totally comfortable, knowing some secret will soon rise from the depths of someone's past.

It is the setting that makes it. Having spent time at St Kilda, I found it easy to feel the way it was 30 years ago, so well is it painted.

Johnston tells us that even in suburban New Zealand it can be immensely difficult for so-called ordinary people to just get by. That may not seem like a wholly original observation - and it's not - but this is a beautifully crafted and poignant take on that theme. Wonderful.

Penguin

$29.95

* Michael Larsen is an Auckland freelance writer.