Review: A Sky Full of Fire, by Sarah Ell

It is 1886 in rural New Zealand and there is an overall patina of mud, grey, and disorder. While colonial towns are establishing themselves, scrub and wasteland lies beyond the facades of main streets. This is very much Cyprian Alexander Tollford Marsh's dubious impression when he arrives in Ohinemutu, the Bay of Plenty, via along-winded route. With his name and demeanour marking him as gentile, this import from the South Downs of England finds gentility counts for little in the backs of beyond. Though he ponders writing home of a picturesque village and comfortable lodgings to his mother, 'Her Ladyship', the truth is more rustic. His room is shabby, the land itself 'indisposed', with 'clouds of malodorous vapour' permeating every corner. For this is geothermal terrain, full of sulphurous 'hissing fumaroles'.

Most significantly, this landscape is home to the famed Pink and White Terraces, a major tourist attraction amongst Europeans.

Though the Terraces pique Marsh's curiosity, this is but a side note to his mission. Undercover as a landscape painter, he is in fact on a journey to locate his half-brother so that the latter can return home to claim a fortune. Tobias Maudsley Bedggood has a reputation as a scoundrel. In the colonies it is easy for such characters to make their way. While relations between the two are unfamiliar and cool, Marsh seeks him out from a sense of duty to his beloved mother, Estella. His only clue is a woman of lowly means, Alice Bright.

As we enter the story in Ohinemutu, many secondary characters populate the convincing scene. There are shopkeepers and coach drivers, religious leaders and crooks. Besides these few Pākehā are the local Māori, attached to villages by the lakeside, centred around marae. While the two broad groups of people are introduced separately, their lives begin to integrate as the story proceeds. Some interactions burgeon with curiosity and compassion, while others are full of ill-intent. There is a theme of dead fathers and orphaned children, and of precarious lives generally.

Author Sarah Ell fills in historical details of which readers might be unfamiliar. Māori populations are being decimated by typhoid, transmitted through new arrivals. Other additions to their traditional ways of life are just as disastrous, such as gambling and liquor. 

Further historical trends include the attempted indoctrination of the local population by Christian missionaries, notably represented here by the impassioned and crazy Reverend Lucius Steele. So legendary is he among the cynical flock in his long black cloak and broad-brimmed black hat that he has been nicknamed 'Father Pōrangi', which can be translated as 'insane'.

Ell introduces us to other local characters, where the general impression is of desperately poor people trying to survive, even if this involves trickery. Yet, the trickster aspect appears to extend beyond the anthropological to the natural world, where the lake, surrounded by low, heath-covered hills, reveals and obscures according to its will. The Tarawera eruption and the destruction of the Terraces is the anticipated, central moment of the novel. Various omens and portentous events dot the narrative so that we can anticipate nature's revolt. For instance, local Māori, steeped in their mātauranga, are aware of slight shifts in the landscape, and young orphan Mohi is alone in seeing ghost people on the lake. Not to be underestimated is the imperious Madame Blanche, bursting forth as a protagonist/antagonist, with whom Ell intrigues us.

North Island author Ell has come from a journalism and publishing background and is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. As well as for adult readership, A Sky Full of Fire would be a sophisticated classroom text for older teenage readers delving into this historical disaster, with skilful portrayal of themes such as race relations, and vivid characterisation. The smooth prose and straightforward narrative would mean students could engage with the multiple points of interest embedded in this fascinating event in our history, waiting to see what the state of the world will be after Tarawera fully lights up the skies.