Bluntly, a debut that grips
A young protagonist’s silent watchfulness infuses this harrowing story of family and connection.
Ihad a strange feeling, like when you’re in a deep bath and you pull the plug but don’t get out, just sit there getting heavier and heavier until the last bit of water twists loud down
the drain.” And so we come to know
Ārama, or Ari as his older brother, Taukiri, calls him. Ārama, who is eight and a half, notices and feels everything. He doesn’t say much, but his quiet articulacy and sharp powers of observation leap from the page.
Auē, the riveting debut novel from Westport writer Becky Manawatu, opens with Taukiri leaving his brother in an abusive Kaikōura home and driving away seemingly without a second thought. Ārama watches his brother peel off in his truck, leaving him to navigate the minefield that is his new home.
Taukiri, with thoughts of recent tragedy on his mind, takes the guitar his father gave him and flees north where he will busk in Wellington and begin to disentangle all that has happened to his family.
As Taukiri departs the South Island, he imagines he’s shedding the weight of
violence and tragedy he’s lived with in order to begin anew on the North Island. As he describes this leave-taking, he tells us: “The ferry had a map of the world on the wall in one of the passenger lounges. On the map, the water between the North Island and South Island of New Zealand looked like such a thin line, like you might be able to throw a stone from one to the other. Skimmed, it would reach on its third, maybe fourth, bounce.” But cutting and running to the North Island and leaving his brother behind does not create the clean break Taukiri was hoping for. His family’s past is more present than he had understood.
Auē is a braided narrative that includes chapters narrated by young and sensitive
Ārama, chapters narrated by a lost Taukiri, and chapters told in the third person about Jade and Toko, young lovers caught up in a network of gang violence and retribution.
Manawatu’s prose is blunt and gripping, revealing the awful and the beautiful in equal measure. Violence inhabits the characters in this book: “The sound of the sea nearby promised green. She was used to angrier colours, dirtier ones. Blood-red and bruise-black stains. Sounds that promised stains upon the stains.” And: “They laughed until they cried. They laughed until the tears became real tears. They cried over their own powerlessness, as they slowly, and seemingly by choice, propelled themselves towards the House.” This is a story about family and connection, a story about the ways that our pasts can trap us, yet keep us afloat.