Sue Wells: Nearly Twelve

By CHERYL SUCHER*

In her first novel, Christchurch city councillor and radio talkback host Sue Wells has imagined the voice of an 11-year-old girl whose passage to adolescence has been horrifically stunted by loss, sexual torture and emotional abuse.

Nearly Twelve nearly fulfils its bold ambition to give voice to its silenced heroine, but credulity is often strained by the author casting relentless brutalities upon her tragic creation, unintentionally transforming her into a figural representation.

Nearly Twelve begins on the eve of the unnamed girl's 12th birthday. She is speaking to us from a comfortable hospital bed where she is happy but restless with persistent memory.

Comments she makes about how she enjoys being there, even though for years her grandparents "made me come here and see Mum - I'd pray to Jesus that I wouldn't end up a loony like her in a place like this" give the impression that she is in a psychiatric facility. She is not. She is in a children's ward of a country hospital.

Such confusion of detail is minor, but its persistence creates a frustration that can be excused only by the fact that the narrator is a traumatised child. This premise, while fascinating, adds confusion to an already dense narrative packed with fragmented, nightmarish episodes.

To compound this difficulty, point of view also moves at random. Sometimes the narrator speaks with the perceptive acuity of an adult, other times with the searing vulnerability of a very young child.

However, the protagonist hints at the reason for this inconsistency by telling us that she is a highly intelligent child whose gifts are beyond her years and thus threatening to all but her beloved father. Later on, a doctor explains the recurrence of her regressive flashbacks.

While this is certainly believable, the narrator's declaration that she can remember as far back as her mother taking her infant milk bottle out of the fridge is not. Also, for much of the first part of the book, the author has a tendency to turn up the visceral volume of her prose to match the violence of the described action. By aiming for verisimilitude, she sometimes turns melodrama into alienating caricature.

Having said that, the book's last act motors towards a dazzling conclusion that ties up all loose ends and heartbreakingly explains all that has come before.

Though occasionally giving in to overwriting, the drama is finally allowed to unfold in its own astonishing time. The voice of the protagonist is shocked into simplicity, servicing the story she is compelled to tell and not simply underlining her compulsion to tell it.

In a recent interview, Wells said, "This is not my story, but a story which needs to be told. We should never forget the statistics surrounding the sexual and physical abuse of children in New Zealand."

All writers are driven to tell stories important to them. Some, such as Sue Wells, are driven to tell tales important to the society that wishes to bury them. Though difficult to read and greatly flawed, Nearly Twelve tells an important story that should not be ignored.

Tandem Press

$24.95

* Cheryl Sucher is a Dunedin writer.