Review: A Beautiful Family, by Jennifer Trevelyan

‘Wanna help me find the body?’

Tweens Alix and Kahu are sitting in the sand dunes, above a beach ‘that stretched uninterrupted for miles, to the north and to the south’ when Kahu makes this offer. They’ve just avoided the caustic tongue of Alix’s sunburnt older sister, Vanessa. It’s a question wrapped in curiosity and innocence, rather than any ghoulishness that may have weighted it were it to come from anyone older.

Both children are searching for something to occupy themselves over a long, hot summer holiday, away from school, home, and their usual lives. Embarking on the shared quest will stave off any looming boredom, or loneliness and give them the connection they seek

Earlier, the budding pals had stood, dripping from the sea, in front of a wooden cross gilded with fading wildflowers. Alix, who ‘would be eleven in a matter of months’, swims like a dolphin, and is wary of the unsmiling neighbour at their disappointing holiday home that ‘was as plain on the outside as a public toilet and not much bigger’. She's just met Kahu, a chubby 12-year-old Māori boy who tried to impress her with his spearing of slime at the nearby lagoon, yet is unfazed, making no jokes or excuses (unlike other boys) when she easily outruns him on the beach.

‘Her name was Charlotte… She was nine.’

Like Stephen King’s novella, The Body (adapted into the brilliant 1980s film Stand By Me), Jennifer Trevelyan’s debut novel A Beautiful Family uses the fate of a missing child as a MacGuffin to kickstart a layered coming-of-age story of adolescent friendships, fears, and dysfunctional families, that shimmers with tension and nostalgia.

Trevelyan turns back the clock to the 1980s, soaking readers in the times through her narrator’s recollections (though it’s never entirely clear how far ahead ‘Ally-Pally’, as her mother calls her at times, is reminiscing from). There are Dolly magazines. A fire-engine red Sony Walkman with a single, treasured cassette – the True Colours album by Split Enz. Navigation is by road map, tucked into the seat pocket in the car. The summer holiday begins with a surprise. Vanessa and Ally-Pally’s mother, who always loves remote places with few to no people, this time specifically picked a popular, built-up area of coastal holiday homes. Why? And what else may be blown in, or away, on these winds of change?

Meanwhile their father oscillates between fun-loving adventurer trying to make the most of their annual family trip, and being consumed by cricket watching on TV. While their mother plays Queen’s Greatest Hits on the two-hour drive, perhaps Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours would have better suited. The singing of cicadas. Clicking from their neighbour’s balcony. Unspoken hurts and simmering tensions. Damn your love, damn your lies. [ES1] [CS2]

Trevelyan does a marvellous job with the spaces in between. A Beautiful Family is rich with subtext, and things often aren’t spelled out or neatly tied up. Like lazy, hazy memories of our own childhood summers – where things may be amplified or overlooked at the time, or with time – how much can we trust what the narrator recalls? It’s a child’s-eye view of adult actions, or inactions, throughout. Authors such as John Hart, with his Edgar Award-winning The Last Child, Aotearoa’s own Paul Cleave, with his terrific A Killer Harvest, and Ojibwe storyteller Louise Erdich, with her National Book Award-winning The Round House, have successfully meshed a child investigator with multi-layered adult tales of crime, literary quality, and genre-blending. Jennifer Trevelyan has joined that club with this novel. It’s a rare feat.

A Beautiful Family doesn’t move at breakneck pace but inexorably pulls you through the pages, like an unseen riptide as opposed to raging whitewater, compelling one to read on.

Years ago I reviewed one of Maurice Gee’s final books, Access Road, a brooding tale of family relationships and dark secrets – with a geriatric rather than adolescent protagonist - and noted his superb touch for compromised characters, scratching beneath the surface, the menace beneath the mundane. I was reminded of that touch in this novel. And as our books community, and beyond, mourns the passing of a mighty totara of Kiwi storytelling, we can be glad that authors like Jennifer Trevelyan are continuing Gee’s legacy.

I’m looking forward to what she brings us next.

Craig is a lawyer turned writer, editor, and podcast host. Among many hats, he’s the founder of the Ngaio Marsh Awards and editor of the Dark Deeds Down Under crime and thriller anthologies. Craig grew up in Te Tau Ihu o Te Waka a Māui/The Top of the South, and currently lives in London.