I always enjoy Tina Makareti’s descriptive writing and here she gives us a real undercurrent of murky rising damp. A swamp pervades this story, running between things and below the surface, always slightly unnerving. Always out, and back, the collective breathing of all the waters flowing through all the channels of the earth. I had a sense of a whole system of communication and connection all around that I couldn’t see. I wasn’t sure it meant me well. This is an unsettling read.
This story is about three households, neighbours, living on the edge of a swamp on the Kāpiti Coast, a “nice suburban area” of council housing. Keri is a solo mum who had chosen to do things the hard way all her life and has recently escaped an abusive partner in Australia. Now she is struggling financially while bringing up her two children, a 4 year old boy and Wairere, her slightly spooky teenage daughter who has a sensitivity that opens her up to feel other people’s trauma. Keri’s neighbour Janet calls her ‘Kerry’, because pronouncing the name in a Māori way is tricky, in the same way that it’s tricky to know how to behave around the new immigrant family on the row. The immigrant family are from a small city in the Mediterranean and they manage to get out just before it became uninhabitable. Sera and her gracious husband Adam are grateful to be there in Kāpiti, it feels a safe place to bring up their daughter, but obviously, it is not home and everything is new for them. The dislocation of this family and their lack of belonging is a theme that runs through the book. Bouts of grief and yearning come at her like a hard slap in slow motion: her face turned away, the slow dawning of shock. Sera tries to stay in the present, but the past pulls at her.
The women all have need of community, but their coming together is a fraught process. It is driven finally by the children, who cross the cultural boundaries and the fences and become friends.
Keri, on a rare night out, has a few drinks, meets a young man and it looks like the story is going in a predictable direction but, like the swamp, the tide comes and turns on a swell and there are murky bits left in the mud below.
Janet has a man-boy son who returns home and sets up his computer equipment in his old bedroom and shuts the door. Keri is alarmed to find that he is her near-miss, living over the fence. We get glimpses into his head, a realm of instability and misconnections, nasty holes in the mud he digs into, relentlessly.
It is Keri’s sensitive daughter Wairere who gets a feeling that something wicked is building. As the community looks like it is beginning to come together, there are forces at work to smash it apart.
But beneath all the messing about on the surface, this is a story of the swamp. Wairere is a mind reader, and the swamp has a mind of her own.
Lots to enjoy in this book, which goes from domestic to political to gothic- biblical. In the end, however, I did find the set-up of the characters a bit too contrived and the magic reality ending, although a powerful fantasy, didn’t really wash any but the immediate problem away.
The Mires is shortlisted for the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
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