Kelly Ana Morey: Bloom

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

If you ever want a lesson in how hard it is to write a novel, read this book. I don't really want to say anything mean about it, as it shows so much promise and such terrific imagination and ambition - and yet, try as I might, I couldn't stave off increasingly intense irritation as I tripped over gaping plot-holes, crashed again and again into illogicality, and grew dizzy at the huge leaps of faith expected of me to keep up with developments.

Morey is a first-time novelist who had the unusual experience of submitting her manuscript, cold, to Penguin and being taken on. She thus comes out of left-field (the author note at the beginning of Bloom tells us she "was born in the Far North of New Zealand in 1968. She is, as always, between locations"), in the literary sense, not being part of what can be a tight-knit community, and I liked the idea that here was something absolutely fresh. And indeed it is: magic realism combines seamlessly with gritty actuality, ghosts with the living, and Morey's themes are good ones: of history's encroachment on the present, forgetfulness and memory.

Her field of action moves from a pornographic photo studio and the opium dens of post-World War I Auckland, to a pub in a fictional Taranaki coastal town called Goshen, up to the present day, which is where Bloom opens: in a seedy Auckland flat filled with stereotypical drifters and marijuana smoke.

The story is narrated by Constant Spry, a wannabe murder-mystery writer, and concerns the unconventional women in her family: Algebra, Connie's grandmother, Rose, her mother, and Hebe, her sister. There's also the spectral Nanny Smack, a HauHau witch, who watches the action as she crochets tomorrow's sky, kind Han, Algebra's Chinese companion, and a couple of no-good husbands who meet their ends in mysterious ways.

It all sounds good - a bit Isobel Allende-ish - but our belief is suspended again and again. Mysteriousness is all very well, but not to the point of confusion. A few more drafts, more attention to characterisation, entrances and exits, more careful movement between the different time-frames and rigorous editorial help could have worked wonders.

Penguin, $27.95