McNeil subverts double standard
Small town character gives the working class a voice, writes Morgan Godfery.
Imagine the ideal working-class hero. Who comes to mind, other than a crooning John Lennon? Maybe a dock worker, an old bloke scraping out an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work, or perhaps his son – an honest-to-god battler like Lennon imagines.
In A Striking Truth, Helen McNeil’s latest novel, the book’s working-class hero isn’t a bloke – or even in work – but a young woman with a dazzling voice, Miriama McLay.
‘‘What matters is my old man, my mum coming home again, the strikers winning and the town getting back to work,’’ Miriama tells herself as chaos creeps closer and closer.
The story, set in 1986 during the two-month lockout at Tasman Mill in Kawerau, follows five characters – a union leader, a boss, a journalist, and two people caught in-between, Miriama and Ray. In some ways this makes A Striking
Truth a book about private experience, yet it seems to me a book of ideas. From Stuart Duncan, the mill’s boss, the bloke with orders to break the union and return the company to profit, to Miriama, the daughter of the union president, politics and ideology shape their lives whether they like it or not.
This is always dangerous territory for a novelist. Stray too close to the didactic and people accuse you of writing a polemic, but obsess over the inner lives of your characters and you risk tumbling down into that rustcovered trap men set for women writers. Where men’s fiction is usually seen as speaking to the universally relevant and resonant, women’s fiction is often written off as simply speaking to domestic themes. What Nobel Prizewinner VS Naipaul once condemned as ‘‘all this feminine tosh.’’
But McNeil neatly subverts this sexist double standard: every secret, stress, trauma, compromise and uncertain triumph has its political cause, even if the characters are unaware or refuse to acknowledge it.
Miriama’s straight-up-the-guts honesty would make her a better politician than Duncan or her father. But what makes Miriama compelling is not so much what happens on the page but what she means off it.
The strange thing about New Zealand literature is the working class lacks a literary voice. Where old English industrial towns have people like Phillip Heshner, the author of The
Northern Clemency, the closest towns like Kawerau come to a native bard is Barry Crump.
Crump, who lived with his third wife 10 minutes north of Kawerau, was notorious for racing through the forestry blocks bordering the town. He also ran outdoor camps 15 minutes south-east of Tasman Mill, yet his yarns would strike most working people at Tasman as slightly foreign. Instead Miriama, the young Maori woman with no job and a fractured family, is the voice they would recognise.