Emma Neale: Little Moon

By STEPHANIE MISKELL*

Emma Neale, aged 32, is hailed as one of the influential new wave of young New Zealand women writers, alongside the likes of Kirsty Gunn, Emily Perkins and Catherine Chidgey.

Little Moon is her second novel. It immediately attracts attention with its captivating cover, a Chagall painting of dream-like celebration and precariousness, and its intriguing opening line: "I was the girl who killed her brother."

The narrator, 24-year-old Julie, has lived for seven years in Auckland, in self-imposed exile from her family and past.

The location of her early life is frustratingly inexact: it sounds like Wellington, but has pointers to Taranaki.

Comparing herself to Scheherezade of the Arabian Nights, who was compelled to tell stories to save her life, Julie feels she must retell the painful story of her childhood because "I had finally grown afraid of what I would lose if I didn't start".

Two developments bring about this decision to confront and understand the past: receiving a revelatory letter from her mother ("annunciation of strange past news") and starting a relationship with someone who deserves to know the cause of her nightmares and fear of the mirror.

This someone, Carey, is like the grounded one of the pair of lovers in the Chagall painting, lightly anchoring a floating woman by the hand, and the novel, we realise, is the story she tells him "piece by piece" to stop herself flying away.

"Little Moon" was the name 5-year-old Julie gave her new brother, Paul, with whom she discovered a telepathic-like closeness. Baby Paul died as the result of an accident, for which Julie was held responsible.

If a sense of identity is essentially shaped by memories, then Julie's self-awareness is forever defined by this shattering experience. Time is no healer for her.

The subsequent years with her grief-stricken and over-protective mother and detached, at times hostile, stepfather serve only to further intensify her sense of loss and isolation.

The experiences described in the novel are those of a child and adolescent, but the sensibility through which they are conveyed is decidedly mature. This is most strikingly evident in Neale's extraordinary gift at metaphor. She uses language like an alchemist, transmuting the base metal of words into the gold of imagery - "the scaldings of realisation", "light brimming from windows in oblongs of corn-gold", or describing Julie, aged 5, trying to get the buttons through the holes of her sundress: "little pink tongues through stitched smiles, and poking my own tongue out to show them how".

Many of the events of the novel are painful and joyless and Julie's reflections on the evasiveness of the past question the consolation of memory. ("Then is stained by now, now is stained by then.")

Yet Little Moon succeeds as an eloquent celebration of life's hope and connection: "The moon will always be there."

Vintage

$24.95

* Stephanie Miskell teaches English at Northcote College.