I’ve just read two new NZ books back to back and enjoyed them both hugely in totally different ways. They were Louise Wareham Leonard’s Miss me a lot of, and Mary McCallum’s The Blue (Mary, pictured).

The Blue is set in 1938 on Arapawa Island in the Tory Channel. The whole island spends three months of the year immersed in whaling. As whale season looms, a look-out is posted on the highest point of the island watching for the spouts which will galvanise everyone into adrenaline-pumped action.

Most of the men spent a part of their lives in the Great War and have terrible scars on their bodies and minds, which are, of course never discussed. There’s a lot of the past that’s never discussed in Lilian’s life and it’s those excruciating family skeletons which finally demand to be hauled out of the closet – the return of a broken but beloved son is the catalyst.

This is one of those stories which builds to something hinted at all the way through, but when it’s finally outed it leaves you gasping. The scale of some human grief and loss, whether adult or child, can be breathtaking – but even more quietly brutal is the way we can live our lives with it, twisted and buckled, but alive.

Mary’s spare prose captures the tone of the times, the ‘don’t talk about it, just get on with it’ attitude they almost had to have to survive that incredibly hard life. At other times her writing can be whimsical, light and fresh. Without being maudlin, she captures with tenderness how these hulking whalers cope with the horrors of their mud and blood-soaked pasts, their loves and losses, their broken hearts in the privacy of their own cottages – and she shows how the simple act of a man burning a sack full of letters can make you cry. Blimey, it’s nearly making me tear up thinking about it.

Then there’s the whaling itself – the years of research that must have gone into this is humbling. It’s gory and utterly fascinating:

‘Have you seen a whale heart?’ He’d lifted his eyebrows up and down and patted the left side of his chest. ‘It’s almost as big as this one.’
Lilian had laughed and shaken her head.
So he’d tied a rope to his belt, saluted her and taken a knife from his belt. He went to the large slack mouth of the whale and without any preliminaries dived into the water, into the mouth, and disappeared. Swallowed by the whale.
Ed explained later how the Friar had gone in through its gullet, cut the ribcage, and after coming back up for air he’d gone down again into the lung cavity. That’s when he hooked a chain to the heart and crawled out. […]
Out of nowhere, there came a line of men wet to the bone, for it was drizzling and the hills were grey gauze, and these men pulled that heart from the body of the whale, pulled it out hand over hand. She was the sole audience as it emerged at last, six fee wide and the weight of three men; and they’d cheered to see it; and Ed and the Friar had looked at her at the same time to make sure she was watching […]

I did find the book a little hard to get into, wasn’t sure about the voice of it, but once I’d settled in – and especially now it’s done – it’s clear that The Blue is an awesome piece of work. So one would hope after four years of work – see Mary’s blog on NZ Book Month.)

Louise’s book is awesome in a different way – again there’s plenty that’s unsaid, but you pick up a lot for yourself from her dry, polished words. Holly, the main character, is brought up in extreme privilege, her father working day and night with his mobile constantly on his ear, urging his family to excel, holding the mundane in contempt, blinding all with his charisma and charm. Especially women who are not Holly’s mother.

It’s set in the States, where Louise has spent a lot of time. The lifestyle said F Scott Fitgerald to me – in fact Holly herself refers to The Great Gatsby half way through, in what must surely be a small inclination of the head on Louise’s part. There’s lots of buff, slick, smug new money – the lake house, the tennis court, the marble bathroom, the city apartment – but are they happy? Holly knows the answer to this; craves the simple life but knows she’ll have to escape once and for all to be allowed it.

There’s a whole lot going on even in the first two pages – here’s the first page describing when the house she grew up was built:

We moved there because my mother could not stand the city, because its fumes made her sick, because she never gave to beggars and did not want to start. Days of construction, we took trips from the city, the house new and wood, each beam orange with freshness, rain soaked in the grain. We stood outside my parents’ gold Lexus – cigarette butts and masking tape blue, red and ivory in the dirt.

Right away you know – and you’ve found this out for yourself – the mother is neurotic, they are rich and they smoke carelessly.

And how about this, a kind of summary statement right up front on the second page. It seems ominous, as if to set the tone for disaster to come, in a rather creepy, Martin Amis kind of way:

Sometimes you choose the way you look at things and you see your choice plainly. Sometimes truth comes like a flock of black birds. You see the birds land on the tree. You see the radiant black sheen of feathers like ink slicked with oil covered in sunlight. You want to think these birds are not beautiful.

So quite lyrical, poetic – gorgeous actually. And challenging. There is indeed an undercurrent of submerged violence, but it’s bathed in lake swims, sunlight, Frank Sinatra, tennis whites and gin. Her players can be oblique in conversation, and it’s fun to fill in the gaps:

‘My Dad said you’re importing. Olive oil?’
‘Olive oil, a few other things.’
‘Sharona’s father – Sharona Peat from Garrison – his father made money in hedge funds.’
‘In Europe it’s artists people look up to – writers, thinkers.’
‘Are you here for the summer?’ I asked him.

This conversation is with G, the suave, sexy and very very cool neighbour. It’s clear from early on that there’s chemistry between these two, but he’s only a little less than her father’s age (or that’s how I read it), has troubled daughters her own age, and it remains unspoken for the longest time. Holly meanwhile has a series of unsuitable romantic entanglements. She’s beautiful and she’s keenly aware of it, and of how she can move into just the right bit of space to let a man know she wants it without saying a word. How to arrange her legs, how to pull herself up out of the water… but there’s a terrible blankness and waiting about her. How will she allow herself to kick her omnipotent father out of her life and really love someone?

You’ll have to read it to find out. But I can tell you this – it does indeed involve a tragedy, which is all tied up in how we see teenage girls, and how they see themselves. It’s something Holly has to deal with from the ‘good’ side, as in, she’s so beautiful it’s all people see; and something one of G’s daughters has to deal with from the ‘bad’ side. Or fails to deal with. As the mother of two daughters, both approaching adolesence, I found some of these themes in Miss me a lot of disquieting. At a recent ‘Raising Daughters’ parenting evening, the speaker showed this video from the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. I made damn sure my daughters saw it. They were satisfyingly gobsmacked, bless ‘em (even though it still has to peddle the 'beauty' idea at the end. Why not say 'every girl deserves to feel smart'?).

I can see this as a movie, with – hmm… Gabriel Byrne? No, too old – Johnny Depp as G, the ubiquitous Scarlett Johanssen as Holly. Maybe Gabriel could do Nick, the father. Care to go to Hollywood, Louise? I reckon if you could get a good director to take this on as a script, you could maybe make people take a good look at how we perceive young females. But you could put a pretty safe bet on the fact that Hollywood just wouldn’t get it.

Such bliss to read two such excellent pieces of NZ writing, especially in a year at the Montanas where fiction was totally dominated by the blokes. Congratulations girls. These two will be on the shortlist next year or I’ll be a monkey’s er, aunt.