Shonagh Koea: Yet Another Ghastly Christmas

Reviewed by SIOBHAN HARVEY

"If the insoluble horror of how Christmas could be imagined was turned into a piece of architecture it would be a bathroom, Evelyn imagined. Even the noises of the plumbing in such a room would encapsulate her own quiet anguish."

When Lady Barker sent stories back to England in the late 19th century, she evoked elements of a strange land. Through long, comic narratives such as A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters, her distant readers took mental journeys to places beyond their normal comprehension, found insight and meaning in an array of comic incidents and idiosyncrasies. There is a flavour of Barker and her Christmas shenanigans in Shonagh Koea's new novel, Yet Another Ghastly Christmas.

For a start, readers make a cerebral expedition to somewhere exotic, outlandish and amusing. It is the world of widow Evelyn Jarrod. As Christmas looms, she fends off unusual invitations from friends, strangers and unsavoury types. All are eager to shed the guilt of seeing her spend the day on her own, yet none want her as their guest. Instead, they vie to pair her up with someone - anyone - else.

Beneath this cruel benevolence, Koea crafts a personal landscape of further contradictions, the most peculiar and extreme of which are the friends.

There's Jen Clark, whose life is an endless tiz-was of cosmetic surgery and retail therapy.

Diametrically opposed to her stands Andrea. She calls Jen vulgar, defines herself as an eco-liberal and is an aficionado of ethnic wares and classically designed brands, especially anything steely and Swedish.

What Koea cleverly draws from these characters is a universal truth: that, like most opposing forces - communism v fascism, Holden v Ford, Coke v Pepsi - there is a point at which the extremities meld and appear indistinguishable, oppressive, bland. Essentially, Jen and Andrea are stereotypes, people who have typecast themselves through the lives they so ardently lead.

Here, too, Koea skilfully depicts a sense of the real Evelyn. Under attack from both sides, she is a literal dead-centre, trapped in the most vapid of relationships with people who won't let her escape. Even when, like a wild animal too long constrained by its cage, she stands up for herself, still they turn up at her door or phone her, blithely seeking to secure her a mate.

In these pages, we also find a bleak but realistic yuletide. Hung upon linguistic baubles, a mish-mash of social and cultural classifications, Christmas becomes a time when these adults attempt to secure their largesse through the company they keep, or in the excesses they gift themselves.

So, Christmas becomes entwined with notions of karma and kismet - Jen receives her inevitable come-uppance; Evelyn gains salvation through perseverance and ignoring the advice of supposed dutiful friends. If, like a professionally wrapped gift, the ends are tied up a tad too cleverly, it remains well worth finding out what's inside the cover.

Random House, $26.95

* Siobhan Harvey is an Auckland writer and tutor.