Unravelling of an okay joker
Owen Marshall’s new novel makes the mayor of a Mainland small-town ponder the road not taken.
The A&P Show is not what it was. The pickles and fruit preserves have gone, as have the garden blooms and sponge cakes, knocked from their tented perch by craft beers, freerange eggs and amateur paintings. From the back of an articulated Mack truck, Mayor Pat “Pearly” Gates addresses the crowd over the sound of wood chopping and shrieks from the octopus. “I may as well have been speaking Japanese,” he grumbles, as he heaves himself down from his impromptu stage.
Big sky, dry grass, searing nor-westers, simmering small-town preoccupations – this is Pearly’s stomping ground. Approaching what he hopes will be his third term as mayor, he drifts through local deputations, dredging reports and his cherished port-development plan with distracted ease. As the owner of Rawleigh and Gates real estate agency, he negotiates open homes and potential joint listings with assured complacency. He looks forward to calls from his daughter in Wales, he manages his son’s financial crises, he mumbles his support for his wife’s plans to go back to work. He has a comfortable home, a well-regarded position in the town – most of the townspeople consider Pearly an “okay joker” – and a close relationship with his brother, now running the family farm.
Overall, he thinks, his life had been one of success and achievement: “Often he
was puzzled, even bewildered, by the ease with which some people failed when success was possible.”
Pearly wears his self-satisfaction like an old cardigan, but flaws in the fabric are beginning to show. He blurs the boundary between his commercial interests and local-government responsibilities. He ensures the costings for the planned port development are buried deep in financial reports. He oversteps boundaries with a young real-estate client. Even his old friend Gumbo pays the price for his admired friend’s need to assert his dominance. When his bookshop-owning “greenie” deputy announces his candidacy for the mayoral race, Pearly quickly recognises a shameful opportunity to sabotage his chances.
Such inadequacies are brought home by the mystifying tirades of an anonymous caller and, for the reader, by the italicised sections in which the author fills in the blanks of Pearly’s life. Slower off the mark, Pearly begins feeling self-doubt through his involvement in the local high-school reunion. Invited old boy Andrew Nisse, school nerd turned knighted expert on the global financial scene, prompts Pearly to reconsider the slim foundations of his self-esteem. How different things would have been, he wonders, “if he had chosen to break with the past and go somewhere else”.
As with the big Canterbury sky, the shifts in Owen Marshall’s world are slow and subtle. Free-range eggs, Central Otago riesling and Scandinavian non-fiction may mark a new millennium, but the chequebooks, the homemade shortbread, memories of ballgowns, even the corduroy jacket, illustrate a presumably enduring provincial lifestyle.
Within this exhaustively detailed townscape, Pearly Gates is a slow burn, utterly proficient in its characterisation, undramatic in its demonstration of the chinks in Pearly’s homespun armour. Whether our protagonist will pass muster at the final destination of his name is uncertain – although he may take responsibility for his failings, his limited world view is not going to change any time soon. But Pearly’s self-regard is undone as Marshall’s seventh novel takes the threads of his character’s selfassumption … and gently pulls.
As with the big Canterbury sky, the shifts in Owen Marshall’s world are slow and subtle.