Monday, June 18, 2012

Owen Richardson reviews The Peastick Girl in The Age


The Peastick Girl by Susan Hancock

review by Owen Richardson
16 June 2012, The Age

This highly gifted novel... is given a lustre and intensity by her precise, musical prose, with its matchless evocations of the weather and the landscapes around Wellington and the fugitive subtleties of her characters’ inner lives.
Owen Richardson, The Age

Theresa has returned from Melbourne to her sisters in Wellington, partly to get away from her Russian boyfriend and his strange theories about the devil he thinks she has hovering about her. It’s a haunted milieu: Theresa’s mother died in mysterious circumstances some years before and her younger sister Cass also has a trauma in her past; there is also the question of Hugo, a friend to all the women whose exact relationship with their mother is hidden from them.

A brief summary can’t really do justice to the complexities of this highly gifted novel. Outside the family drama there are the historical wounds inflicted on the Maori by the pakeha, and the debates around the feminist magazine Cass works on, and the meeting of race and gender politics represented by Rangi; Hancock roams around the pubs and newspaper offices and university campuses.

And all this is given a lustre and intensity by her precise, musical prose, with its matchless evocations of the weather and the landscapes around Wellington and the fugitive subtleties of her characters’ inner lives. Hancock doesn’t like to spell things out; you have to be patient with this book and sometimes allow yourself to not be sure where it’s going. It’s her purpose not to tie everything up neatly and there are plot strands and themes that aren’t resolved. Tidy-minded readers may baulk at this, but it gives a sense that there is much more to this world and these characters than can easily be pinned down. The last words are ‘To Be Continued’.

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