In Lloyd Jones' The Fish, a wayward daughter gives birth to an unusual child

Lloyd Jones. Photo / Supplied

The Fish
by Lloyd Jones
(Penguin, $36)

In Lloyd Jones' The Fish, a wayward daughter gives birth in a foetid caravan by the sea. The baby is different — so markedly different that his grandfather refuses to hold him. Our narrator, the child's young uncle, watches his family shift to accommodate their strange new kin, their Fish.

Jones' previous novel, The Cage, was an unsettling commentary on the murkiest parts of human nature — the way we can acclimate to terrible conditions and grow indifferent to brutality. A rich allegory, the novel takes place somewhere faintly recognisable as New Zealand in a dystopian future, and contrasts its detachment against a deeply affecting darkness.

In The Fish, the same allegorical tone pervades (with its accompanying vagueness), only this time it grows frustrating. Readers may spend the entire novel wondering what the hell is going on with "the Fish".

His "fishiness" is exaggerated in early chapters: a piscine odour overwhelms his mother's tiny caravan and, on several occasions, he is alleged to have gills. Descriptions of the child — alternately referred to as him, our Fish and It — focus on his wide mouth, his loping movements and bulging eyes. Our narrator says, "It is a fish, yet we have to pretend it isn't."

Given the mystery surrounding the baby's conception, you could be forgiven for suspecting some deepwater tryst has taken place, a la The Shape of Water.

Jones includes occasional detail to help root us in time and place, mainly Wellington in the 60s: Norman Kirk is leader of the Opposition; chocolate milk has yet to reach our shores. While the novel's premise is strong — material lack, intolerance and dysfunction meet at the birth of a unique child, in the airless confines of an old caravan — little else about The Fish is particularly stark, and the emotional pretence of the novel doesn't ring true. We're told that "mostly" family members "dote on the fish because we cannot offer its mother the same". This doting is largely mentioned in summary rather than shown in scene.

The climax of The Fish borrows its emotional heft from the Wahine disaster, and it is a gripping segment, deployed in the final third of the novel as a convenient exit for a major character. This is the third family member that Jones has rinsed from the manuscript — washing them away before readers can demand they be given some real agency, or that tensions lead to any consequence.

It is easy to dispose of these characters because they are so passive. The Fish is voiceless for much of the novel. His grandfather mutely accommodates the unnamed daughter's substance abuse. When the depressed matriarch takes a solo trip to Greece, the Fish goes walkabout, and our teenage narrator sits at home, inertly wondering if either will come back. At another point the narrator takes his own trip to visit his distant elder sister. When she stands him up, he lingers in doorways for a few days before returning home and never speaking of the trip again.

Perhaps Jones is interrogating some retro Pākehā impulse to swallow difficult emotions? A cultural hangover from their stiff-lipped forebears? This would be clearer if the characters were more specific and singular.

The Fish might have examined our capacity to love and be ashamed of someone in equal measure, and how that shame stings in the gut precisely because love is its source. Ultimately, the narrator seems indifferent to the humanity of his nephew. In moments of tragedy, his youthful musings — "will I ever see the sun again? Or a flower, a fruit tree in blossom?" — read as fake or overwrought. The novel, too often, is the story of unexamined depths.

Reviewed by Cait Kneller

Cait Kneller is an Auckland writer and bookseller. A longer version of this review will appear at www.anzliterature.com