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Skilled story telling

26/8/2020

Mellons Bay
by Suzanne Singleton

A good book reveals itself in the first paragraph. Mellons Bay did exactly that. I needed to know more about the people, whose stories it told. New Zealand’s early settlement history came alive for me.
Knowing it was about people who built a township anyone can visit today made the story all the more interesting. It reminded me that Auckland started as muddy tracks, horse-drawn carts, and simple buildings. It was built on hard work. Author Suzanne Singleton put people on that landscape and drew us into their lives.
Those early settlers had no choice but to succeed. There were no government hand-outs if they failed. And going back meant returning to famine and civil war.
The novel opens with a statement about life being a journey. Mellons Bay is all about journeys on many levels – physical, spiritual, and emotional.
The story starts with William Mellon. He is a surveyor for the military in Ireland. He marries Harriet and they sail for New Zealand with their five children.
They were author Suzanne Singleton’s great-great-grandparents and I was filled with admiration for them. She tells their story in a compelling, compassionate way, focusing on the main events of their lives and avoiding getting bogged down in detail. We share their heartaches and triumphs.
The personalities of both Harriet and William bring this story alive and I found myself absorbed in a topic that is often crushed by a mediocre recital of facts and figures.
The Mellon family’s life was built on journeys, the longest of which was the four-month sea voyage from England. This voyage was full of hope. They left behind poverty and struggle to build a better life in New Zealand. However, who we are comes with us wherever we go. This was true of William and Harriet. William was the solid army surveyor and Harriet was the entertainer with a beautiful voice. William was literate and Harriet illiterate. Two divides they could not cross.
They settled in Howick. The town that is there today was built by people like them.
While having to recreate the characters from sparse data Suzanne Singleton filled in the gaps using her imagination. This was especially the case for Harriet, of whom there are few records. In filling the gaps with what she imagined happened puts flesh on their bones, adds humanity to the story and separates the story from a mere account of an early settler and his family. They were people of their time shaped by the political and social environment.
There is no question life was tough.
How they make it work is the journey we take under Suzanne Singleton’s skilled story telling makes for a very pleasant journey indeed.

Review by Suraya Dewing
Founder, Stylefit

Title: Mellons Bay
Author: Suzanne Singleton
Publisher: Wily Publications Ltd
ISBN: 978-1-927167-41-0
RRP: $34.95
Available: Paperback. Available in bookshops. Ebook coming

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Strong women in historical fiction

19/8/2020

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Shifting Currents
by Joanna Orwin

The two strong women who are the major protagonists in this novel, as well as the experiences they share, are based (the author explains) on actual early settler figures and events. The setting for the action is mostly northern Kaipara in the 1850s through to the 1880s, though there are also scenes set in Nelson and Auckland.
The physical difficulties faced by these women – one, Lydia, is a Scot, the other, Eliza, is from south Yorkshire – are detailed, and the tension that exists between the two provides a theme that runs throughout the book. Lydia has a shameful secret that she fears Eliza either knows or will be able to guess – a secret concerning the paternity of her youngest child, a daughter. Both women are married and have children, and the relationships between the women and their families also play a major part in the story.
As their personal histories unfold, the reader is also kept informed of important developments centred on the ever-increasing number of new settlers, and their relations with the local Māori.
Carving out clearings from the forests on the banks of the Wairoa River, the newcomers engage in a variety of activities, including tree-felling and milling, gum-digging, growing cash crops and raising dairy and beef cattle, and establishing other commercial enterprises of one sort or another. Naturally, such activities result at times in considerable and permanent environmental degradation. Clearing the forests leads to a great increase in the number and severity of floods, for example, and the use of fire causes the devastation of local wildlife as well as destroying centuries-old stands of kauri trees. Some of these occurrences are described in vivid detail.
Although the personalities of the two central women in the story and those of their families, are imagined, it seems that their main movements and life events closely follow those of the historical figures on whom they are based. Lydia develops a personal relationship with the wife of the dominant Māori leader in the area, Te Tirarau; and her daughter, Hannah, finds comfort in the company of the children of Te Tirarau’s people. Meanwhile Eliza pursues life downriver, becoming an astute commercial operator and rising through the social ranks – the ambition that impels her.
There are scenes and descriptions in this book that are not only involving but sometimes very moving. One of these is an affecting description of the grounding of the ship that brings Eliza and her family from Nelson to Auckland – a scene that also informs the reader of Eliza’s extraordinary courage and determination. Others revolve around the unforgiving and cruel treatment by Lydia’s (second) husband towards Hannah, her illegitimate daughter. Then there are those that demonstrate the developing sympathy and understanding between Lydia and Eliza.
This is a book that many will find interesting mainly because of the historical detail; but others will likely become absorbed by the contrasting personalities and fates of Lydia and Eliza. It is also a well-presented book, clean and error-free, and altogether a worthy addition to the ranks of New Zealand historical fiction.

Review by Tony Chapelle

Title: Shifting Currents
Author: Joanna Orwin
Publisher: Joanna Orwin
ISBN: 9780473519247
RRP: $35
Available: Trade paperback, available at independent bookshops or from Nationwide Books Distributors

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Beautifully presented book

12/8/2020

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A Lifetime in Galápagos
by Tui de Roy

Tui de Roy was one year old when she was taken to the Galápagos islands by her parents who were seeking a warm place to live a self-sufficient life. She grew up there, she tamed the herons and finches as playmates, the mangroves were her playgrounds, marine iguanas and blue footed boobies her companions, frigate birds and Galapagos hawks circled above her, and seals and sea lions played on the rocky shores. While other children were exploring cities, she walked across the arid volcanic cones, and marvelled at the giant tortoises she met.
When she was eleven she borrowed her father’s camera and began to record her surroundings, and this extraordinary book gives us the record of 50 years of her photos.
The pictures are accompanied by a narrative that explains what is happening in the photos and makes the book far more than just a collection of birds and landscapes. She gives us lessons in ecology and the inter-dependence of species, both on land and under the sea.
Of particular interest are the photos taken from the same vantage point 50 years apart, showing the changes that have taken place, some as a result of natural processes, but some showing the changes that introduced species have made.
Tui de Roy seems equally at home in the water as above it, and some of the best photos are taken beneath the surface. Her encounters with whales, her fruitless attempts to capture a booby at the moment of transition from mastery of the air to mastery of the water (1/2000 of a second) which were not fast enough, her patience following an ancient iguana called Abeulo, for days at a time – all show her love for the animals and her mastery of photography. In the case of the iguana, Tui was cut, grazed and battered by the surf and rocks, but for Abeulo it was part of his daily life and had been for decades.
This is a beautifully presented book, one I am proud to own and will refer to again and again. I consider it would be a marvellous gift for a lover of nature or photography.
The only criticism I have is that I would have liked a map included, because each photo mentions the name of the island it is taken on and I had to open a map on my iPad to follow along. I felt it was important to do this as it was the variation between animals and birds on different islands that was a major factor in Charles Darwin arriving at his theory of evolution.

Review by Harold Bernard

Title: A Lifetime in Galápagos
Author: Tui de Roy
Publisher: Bateman Books
ISBN: 9781988538211
RRP: $59.99
Available: bookshops

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A winning formula

5/8/2020

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While the Fantail Lives
by Alan Titchall

This novel is set mainly in 1962, at around the time the world held its breath as the Cuban Missile Crisis played itself out. As the author reminds us, being a country of relative insignificance half a world away from the place where a nuclear war might well have begun didn’t shelter us from fear of the possible consequences – not even in the remote dam-building settlement just north of Taupo where the action takes place.
Such towns and settlements have been an important feature of New Zealand’s social and economic history (Otago and West Coast mining communities and railway villages of the nineteenth century, for example, and the forestry and hydro settlements of the twentieth), and it is good to find a novel that describes so well the conditions of life in such places.
This particular community is inhabited by a variety of people from around the world – as well as New Zealanders (Māori and Pakeha), the novel features a German and a Russian, Australians, English and South Africans, a Welshman, and a mysterious Harley-riding American. Most of the main protagonists are haunted by incidents and memories of the War, which had concluded only some seventeen years earlier, and which had been one of the principle reasons people found themselves in this hydro town.
In fact, several of those protagonists had shared in frightful experiences during that war, unresolved incidents that come to a head in the course of the story. There is a great deal of coincidence involved in these people ending up together in this little community, but the author has us believing that it is not at all impossible that things could have worked out this way. The actual wartime incidents are revealed mainly in the narratives given by the people involved to the narrator of the story – an eleven-year-old boy called Roberto Smith. They are harrowing incidents, and reminders of the inhuman brutality of war.
There is an element of the other-worldly in the book, centred on the narrator’s attempts to nurse back to health a white fantail he has inadvertently injured (his deep concern at having done so makes for a cracking start to the story). If it dies, he is told, human tragedy might follow. In this regard, a forest-dwelling and possibly malevolent spirit from local Māori lore plays a role in elevating the tension at key times.
All of this amounts to absorbing, exciting reading; but even more rewarding is the deft way that the author draws his flesh and blood characters. Here are people, male and female, we can all relate to and (even in the least likely case) have real sympathy for. They are opinionated, occasionally funny, and they have their weaknesses; but they are always interesting.
The narrator being an eleven-year-old, this novel could possibly be characterised as ‘young adult’ – though certain descriptions and themes might be problematic for some. It is certainly a novel that adults would enjoy. Strong, familiar characters, surprising developments as well as vivid descriptions of ordinary life in a 1960s rural community, and action aplenty – it’s a winning formula.

Review by Tony Chapelle

Title: While the Fantail Lives
Author: Alan Titchall
Publisher: Devon Media
ISBN: 9780473517403
RRP: $24.95
Available: bookshops

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Skilled story telling

Strong women in historical fiction

Beautifully presented book

A winning formula

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