Jenny Pattrick: Heart of coal

Reviewed by ANNE GIBSON

This second novel from an artist more widely known for her jewellery-making follows her first, commercially successful foray into publishing - The Denniston Rose, which sold 13,000 copies, making it last year's second best-selling New Zealand novel, after Witi Ihimaera's The Whale Rider.

"I have to pinch myself," Pattrick says on the line from Wellington. Publishers rejected her first two books, which still live on her shelves, and she's still taken aback by her subsequent success.

The lives of the early settlers and coalminers in the isolated town of Denniston, which was accessible only by cable car up a terrifying incline, are the central feature of The Denniston Rose, which opens in 1882. Heart of Coal is set some years later at the turn of the century, and chronicles changes at the incline with a road opening up and the dismantling of houses from Denniston and their rebuilding at Waimangaroa, at the base of the incline.

The focus of the first book is based more on history, the remoteness and severity of the environment and a miners' strike, combining the area's fascinating past with a fictional overlay. But the second book is concerned less with history and more with following the emotional life of the characters, and Rose in particular, as they grow into adulthood, romance and marriage.

Coal has become a link between Pattrick's jewellery and writing interests. She made the gold-rimmed coal pendant heart which appears on the front of Heart of Coal - not out of Denniston coal, though, which is "much harder and glossy and you don't even get dust on your hands when you touch it", but out of a kind of coal which fractured easily, "because I wanted it to look a little scarred". Friends at the isolated Denniston settlement, now a ghost town, have posted Pattrick lumps of coal from the incline so she can begin to fashion true Denniston jewellery but, at 67, Pattrick admits to arthritic hands and not being able to spend five days a week working at "the bench".

Instead, she is part way through a third novel, linked to a character from the first two but with no aim to create a true trilogy.

Film rights have been sold for Pattrick's two books, and talk is of recreating part of the ghost town and expanding its tourism potential, but the writer is happy to let directors, script-writers and set builders take over the past.

A graduate of Bill Manhire's creative writing programme at Victoria University of Wellington eight years ago, Pattrick's first unpublished novel was about the relationship between two elderly people, based partly on her mother. Her second unpublished novel was also based on family life. After two rejections, she went to hear Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx speak.

"She was growling away in that voice of hers, as she does, about not writing what you know about - write about something quite outside what you know and that's what I did."

A West Coast holiday took Pattrick to the ghost town, where she studied the engineering marvel of the incline and got the idea for the books.

Pattrick's interest in Denniston continues and she mentions a celebration due this month of 125 years since the incline was built in 1879. Her Denniston novels have caused an increase in visitor arrivals to the area, still accessible up an 8.1km winding road at the back of the township of Waimangaroa.

* Random House, $26.95