Paula Morris: Queen of beauty

By PENELOPE BIEDER

A stunning debut novel from a young Auckland writer, Queen of Beauty had me mesmerised from the first words of a prologue introducing a gentle story that moves from New Orleans to Auckland and back, and shifts through different time zones as well.

With great skill Morris has the central figure, a shy but sharply observant young woman, Virginia Ngatea Seton, reflecting on her family and friends both from the helpful perspective of distance and, subsequently, from very close up indeed.

Virginia is living a pleasantly routine life in New Orleans when she makes plans to return home to Auckland for younger sister Julia's wedding. It is her first visit to family in five years and she will spend four weeks with them over Christmas. She has changed, but then so has her family.

Virginia is the sort of person who has been allowing life to happen to her, mooching along in a passive way, and working as a researcher for a self-important New Orleans historical novelist, Margaret Dean O'Clare, who lives in southern splendour surrounded by lackeys.

Virginia's job is to provide her with story ideas, to be a sort of literary hunter and gatherer, "unearthing names and dates and maps and photographs. She was to find pieces of history ... for Margaret to pick from, like cards in a deck." In some ways Margaret is an ideal employer, vastly rich and benign. Virginia can work in cafes, in bookshops and libraries, and the job conveys freedom of a dangerous sort. It's a honeyed trap for Virginia's own aspirations.

She has flatted for three years with Bridget, who gives tours of the French Quarter, and Jake, who has a car but whose licence has been suspended for nine months. Virginia has the use of his car and can visit eccentric Arthur, who runs a wonderful secondhand bookshop and made me think of a rather better-tempered version of the proprietor on the television series Black Books.

When Bridget and Virginia hold a party in the shop for his 40th birthday, they decide that he can pretend it is some sort of book launch.

Arthur is surprised but genuinely compliant: "He stuck close to his desk, admittedly, and insisted on ringing up the last sales of the day himself ... "

New Orleans is an extraordinarily good setting for a young New Zealander of Maori and English descent. Her research reveals the darker history of slavery and its echoes down through the years and when she returns home it is to hear her own family stories of ownership, dispossession and loss.

As she learns about her family, Virginia is, of course, getting to know herself. Back in Auckland she can see her overseas life more clearly. There is never any question that she will return, but she does realise that "she has been going along with everything for years. She was the inventor, the master, the Olympic bloody champion of going along with things."

With its enchanting stories of friendship and love, Queen of Beauty is a nostalgic journey into a lost world. While Morris writes with great affection and empathy for her huge list of characters, she never slides into the sort of cloying over-fondness that can tarnish so many novels of family legends.

It is Virginia with her dry wit and sharp researcher's eye who binds all the stories together and it is Virginia's haunting grace and humour which provide a rich, almost spiritual anchor in this masterful work.

Queen of Beauty was the winner of the 2001 Adam Foundation Prize, awarded each year to a student in the Master of Arts in Creative Writing programme at Victoria University.

* Penguin, $26.95

* Penelope Bieder is a freelance writer.

* Paula Morris joins English author Philippa Gregory and Fiona Kidman, Fiona Farrell, Stephanie Johnson and Pat Rosier for the World Book Day Aotearoa event "Dare to be Wicked" on October 10. Contact the Women's Bookshop, ph 376 4399, for information and tickets.