Jenny Pattrick: The Denniston Rose

Reviewed by GORDON McLAUCHLAN

The Denniston Rose is a small, clever, fair-haired girl who arrives in the West Coast coal mining town of Denniston in the 1880s with her prostitute mother, becomes loved by all, and survives the most extraordinary hardship and deprivation, as well as brutal sexual abuse by her mother's second partner.

Then her mother takes her away while she works the wharves in Westport, the mining town mourns, and in the last page, Rose returns to the woman who had been kindest to her.

Surging around the story of the girl, also known as the Rose of Tralee, are historically authentic events that occurred in Denniston, and some of them are fascinating.

The mine was on a bleak, rain-swept plateau 600m from the coast and accessible only by a kind of cable car of coal bins up and down what was known as the Incline.

Some miners and their families were so terrified of the journey in the containers they stayed on the plateau for 20 years and more.

The first miners' strike in New Zealand was called there and when the workers won they physically ejected the scab workers who had taken their place. Denniston is now a ghost town and no wonder, if the site is as unremittingly miserable as this novel claims. Wonderful historical stuff.

Jenny Pattrick is a jewellery-maker, former chair of the Crafts Council and the Arts Council. This is her first novel and she clearly has writing skills. Some descriptive passages are economical and effective. A skinny man "unfolds his insect legs". Rose disappears into a crowd "like a silverfish in a box of handkerchiefs".

But as a novel, it is, well, a rollicking good yarn, which means lots of things happen and the narrative moves at pace. No mean feat and one that will captivate some readers.

But it is pure melodrama and the author never gets inside the characters, many of whom have "sunny natures", or are "fiery" or even "fierce". Some are all of those things at different times. They emote in predictable ways and then stop, like geysers.

The children behave more like small adults and the motivation of many of the characters is unconvincing. No one is indifferent to or ambivalent about anything. Some of the humour is unconscious.

All these things mean the novel is easy to read and easy to put down at the end without a single echo left in the head or the heart.

Black Swan, $26.95

* Gordon McLaughlan is a Herald columnist.