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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