I really hope this book smashes the awards next year. It’s a damn good story about family dynamics and dealing with life’s ups and downs in a Wellington seaside suburb in the early 1900s. Oh, and for some reason, Tracy Farr decided to stretch belief a bit to invent a scenario where scientist Marie Curie comes to lodge with this very kiwi family. She is hiding out of the public eye as she recovers from scandal and illness. Each of these very different story-lines offers a good premise, the weird thing is to put them together. What was Farr thinking? Whatever madness caused it, we need more of it in our novels.
We start with triplet girls narrating. They have a single consciousness which I think is a brave move as the natural impulse is to individualise characters, but these three are very much a collective unit. Six eyes, six ears, one interpretation of events. When we get to know them a bit better, we begin to recognise their differences but that lovely compatibility remains. And the three of us tuck ourselves in, Ada curved around Onna’s back, Onna’s arm drawing Hanna close, Hanna stretching her arm across to link us all together, and we drift off to sleep, to the gentle rock and tug and rhythm of the wind on the timber and tin of our house. Things come together in threes.
Their house is on the beach at Seatoun, a suburb in Wellington that sits on the edge of the world, through a tunnel from Miramar. Our next narrator is mother-doctor-wife, Matti, who cycles through two tunnels in all weather for night shift at the hospital where she works as a midwife. She grabs sleep when she can during the day, (I recognise that sleep deprivation phase with the description: A mothering flutter in her brain wakes her), when the girls are at school, playing on the beach, or with their father, the larger than life ring-master character, Charlie Loverock. The Loverock name says it all. Charlie owns, champions and manages (not well) the amusement park, Wonderland. Through the eyes of the girls, Wonderland is the best. It closes for the winter, but every year there is a winter spectacular gala where the triplets do a turn on stage and the crowd goes wild. It’s brilliant. The girls spend their time imagining and practicing for their performance. The shine of Wonderland is bright for these unsophisticated girls, but their parents open the account books at the kitchen table and see more red than black.
Mother-doctor-wife has good women friends and blessed are the women who have friends like these. They smoke (it’s 1912) and drink and dance around the kitchen. The girls adore them.
Then, into this mix, comes another narrator with an outsiders’ perception of the family. A foreign woman is introduced. She is sent from Europe to Matti by her friend and correspondent, Ernest Rutherford, who believes Matti’s wholesome household and medical care will provide restoration. The Lady, she is called, and she goes by her Polish name, but it is Marie Curie, her husband dead, a scandal with a married lover dragging her name into the courts and her health collapsed. She needs a sanctuary.
Matti has enough on her plate, you’d think. But she stretches. I think this is a story about women stretching because that’s what they do. She loses sleep, but there are gains, too. Her care saves Madame Curie, and the kindness is mutual. When the time comes, support is shared by all the women. They cook and care, smoke and drink, do what they can.
There is plenty of uplifting humour in the book. The Lady hears verandah as Miranda, and so they sit on the Miranda in the evenings. Charlie horses around with the girls, calling them ratbags and loving them to bits, insisting on morning calisthenics on the beach and a swim before breakfast.
All of this is well written without any sense of the clever self-awareness that sometimes can spoil a crafted book. The story unfolds. The language is lovely, simple but well chosen. A woman comforts a grieving friend going to her, soughing. There are great descriptions of noise, the kettle hissing and tea caddy’s clat, and of smells and sights. The smokey hum of the seated audience, their beards and cigarettes and powder and spectacles, their handkerchiefs and toffee apple sticks and fuming pipes and waxed moustaches and fingers up noses and thumbs in mouths, their upturned faces glowing like hundreds of moons, all lit by the light from the stage. Welcome to Wonderland, Wellington 1912.
Wonderland might be the name of the amusement park, but there is more wonder in the lives in and around the Loverock household. I thought the whole book was wonderful and I am recommending it to everyone.
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