Review: The Other Catherine

I want historical fiction to make me forget it's historical. I want it to be a novel first, and period colour second. I want its characters to think, talk, act like 21^st century humans to a degree where I feel empathy for them, while being 18^th 19^th etc century enough to intrigue me. I want any research to be assimilated seamlessly into the narrative, not info-dumped on me. Don't ask for much, do I?

Anyway, I can report that Taranaki-born (yay!), now Wellington-based, Lauren Keenan's new novel fully meets my carping criteria.

It's ambitious in scope. A hundred-plus years separate its two protagonists. An 18-year-old young woman, sentenced to seven years' imprisonment for theft of a coat, endures the squalor and suffering of a convict ship enroute to Australia, and aches for some sort of new life. Decades later, a Maori matriarch also faces loss and hardship, while mourning the loss of her people's old life. 

One narrative covers weeks; the other spans decades. One is told in a first-person voice; the other via third person. Nifty techniques for distinguishing the two plots and their personnel.

In 1893, widowed Keita is living near a whaling station in the Marlborough Sounds. (Whales are a recurring motif through both stories, emblems of grandeur, identity, hope. For Keita and her whanau, they may have meant some material prosperity, but they've also brought confrontation and exploitation, even portents of extinction.)

The old kuia may be physically frail, but her memories are strong. She recalls her youth at Ngamotu / New Plymouth, as the first Pakeha arrive with their strange clothing and speech, their instantly unattractive habits of spitting and peeing in the flowing stream. Sixty years on, she remembers red-haired Abraham, totally decent and totally unable to smile, and the children they have, only a few of whom survive. As years spool past, she tells stories of how Taranaki Maunga changed his name and home; of the legendary whale Tutunui. She describes trade for muskets, war parties and battle, the uneasy co-existence of two cultures.

Alternating with the older woman's tale, we see Irish-born Catherine on board the Tempest, as it wallows southwards towards Australia, a century before. She's shackled, jammed into a bunk with three other women convicts, and has to share one lavatory bucket with an entire hold-full of prisoners. She sees arbitrary cruelty, self-pity and defiance, even a revolution that leads to brutal retribution. Near the very end of her journey, she requests something from another woman that will link her life to Keita's and build to the book's satisfying final moments.

Plaudits to Keenan for the finale. ''The best ending is one which leaves you looking forward,'' wrote excellent US author Alice McDermott, and it happens with both threads of The Other Catherine.  'It is not over yet,' vows one of the protagonists; '….she is ready for the next stage,' we hear of the other.

It's a novel with good variety of pace; Keenan knows how to focus on a significant moment, build a vivid scene around it, then swoop forward – or backward – to another dramatic event. She controls a couple of substantial casts adroitly, even if a few military males don't rise much above caricature. There are some effective flicks of comedy: you'll enjoy the stroppy Irishness in some of Catherine's fellow convicts, and the young Keita's perspective on praying.

'Aren't family stories an interesting thing?' the author asks in her Historical Notes. She's made them so here. Just occasionally, the dialogue can feel a shade formal or fact-heavy, but more plaudits to her for the meticulous, respectful, rich use of Te Reo throughout the book. It’d be really great if David Seymour and his party's MPs read The Other Catherine and learned from it. Once again, I'm not asking for much, am I?