A novel of two halves
The story of a West Coast girlhood detours to the Western Front.
Through the Lonesome Dark is a broken-backed novel, beginning as one story and then, a little over halfway through, becoming quite another. There are links between the two storylines, but they are not developed enough to paper over the big fissure at the novel’s heart.
It opens as the tale of 10-year-old Pansy Williams, who lives in the West Coast mining town of Blackball not long before World War I. There are some good things in Pansy’s life, notably two boys of her own age, level-headed Clem and the German kid Otto, with whom she larks
about happily in bush and creek.
All three are the children of miners, who have to be hard men, but Pansy’s father is a drunken brute. Sent into domestic service, Pansy notices that the attitudes of Clem and Otto towards her begin to change. They plan adventurous lives, but she, being a girl, doesn’t have their options. The world is unfair. And increasingly Pansy sees the submission of her mother to her miserable domestic position as part of the problem.
There are times when the book teeters on the edge of being a feminist tract, illustrating the inequality of the married state 100 years ago: the domestic violence and the limits set to young women’s sexual and economic independence. But it is clearly and intelligently told in a robust and engaging narrative.
But when war breaks out, we suddenly abandon Pansy and it becomes the story of Clem going off to war in the tunnelling corps that lay mines under German trenches.
Author Paddy Richardson’s war scenes are as credible and well researched as her Blackball scenes. It is possible that she means to make a comparison between Pansy and Clem. The girl goes through one sort of hell, the boy through another. It’s even possible that Richardson is implicitly criticising the sexual “double standard”. Pansy’s loss of virginity is a crisis. Clem casually uses the services of prostitutes in both Auckland and France.
But whatever the intention, the two halves don’t fit easily together. Of course, there’s a link between Clem and Pansy and there is some thread-tying at the end. But it doesn’t compensate for the sense that the novel abandons Pansy just at the moment when she is about to take up the burden of being a grown woman and develop as a more interesting adult character.
There are times when the book teeters on the edge of being a feminist tract, but it is a robust and engaging narrative.