Kate Duignan: Breakwater

By GILBERT WONG

This accomplished first novel captures the reader from the first page, thanks to good concise storytelling and characters that are so solidly formed that most readers will immediately experience a sharp reminder. These characters speak and act very much like people we all know.

Ella, a first-time university student, finds herself pregnant to a boyfriend she never envisaged a long relationship with. A country girl, whose mother died when she was a child, Ella is lost and adrift in Wellington.

Tess befriends her in the uncomplicated way these things happen at university and she brings Ella to the shelter of her home like a stray cat. Louise, her mother, can't help but bond with her new lodger, largely because she herself brought up two children, Tess and Jacob, on her own after fleeing an abusive relationship. Meanwhile Jacob's best mate Chris feels a certain sexual hankering for Sally who he had always regarded as his oldest and best female friend.

In other hands these parallels might seem forced and, at best, quality soap, but Duignan enlarges her themes to summon up that time in a family's life when the children are turning into adults.

For both children and parents there are contradictory tugs: the need to move on to another stage of life opposed by the sense of loss of a way of life that is changed irretrievably. In Ella's case there is the much greater fear and joy of early parenthood, the struggle to rearrange priorities that will also never be the same as those before motherhood.

Duignan handles these delicate themes gently, while providing a strong narrative drive in the form of near-tragedy that calls to mind the best television drama. I don't want to make silly comparisons, but I kept thinking of the drama series This Life which dealt with the cusp of adulthood so well. There's less sex and fewer jokes, but Duignan's first novel proves that she is already an accomplished writer who has a good grasp on the interior lives of contemporary New Zealanders.

Publisher: Victoria University Press, $24.95

* Gilbert Wong is the Herald's former arts and books editor.