Trouble at mill
Debut novel set in Kawerau in the 1980s doesn’t achieve its lofty ambitions.
Helen McNeil grew up in Kawerau. In the mid-1950s, her family immigrated from the UK to what was then New Zealand’s newest town, founded in 1953 to house workers for the vast new Tasman Pulp and Paper mill. Her first novel, A Place to Stand (2013), deals with family dynamics in that era. Here she focuses on the personalities, histories and relationships of a wide range of characters caught up in the 1986 mill strike.
Her chosen structure is a fragmented and sometimes frustrating sequence of short first-person chapters moving among the main interlinked figures: teenagers Miriama and Ray, CEO Stuart, librarian Notta, her outsider journalist sister Ima and Leo the union secretary (not the president, as the blurb and all the online publicity states). All the other characters and unfolding events are seen through their eyes, requiring a great deal of reported dialogue.
For the teenagers, McNeil’s ear seems consistently pitch-perfect. Schoolgirl Miriama and her Maori mother, Stella, are struggling to cope with their ageing, stressed-out, abusive Old Man (as everyone calls him), the union president. Ray, from a well-off but emotionally withdrawn English family, is staying with his management-team uncle to do a kind of internship at the mill, working on its state-of-the-art IBM computers.
He and Miriama meet for the lead roles in the school’s production of Grease; their burgeoning relationship, fraught with conflicting loyalties, is superbly written.
Then there’s Paul, the son of the CEO, in a wheelchair since a terrible car accident. Though he doesn’t get his own chapters, he emerges vividly, and others – including his father – are cleverly delineated through their interactions with him. These three are
such strong creations that I’d like to see McNeil tackle a young adult novel.
The chapters featuring the adults are less satisfactory, especially in scenes where no women appear. One ostensible reason for the strike is the employment of the first female millworker (Sally Wihongi in real life, though she’s not recreated here). Otherwise, the mill management and factory workers are (and were) entirely male.
Leo’s and Stuart’s inner reflections generally ring true, but the all-male interactions they report, particularly among management, don’t work nearly as well.
So the blurb’s large claim that McNeil “brings alive a time in New Zealand’s history when the very foundations of our political identity changed dramatically” is not borne out. But very few fiction writers could have achieved such a feat. l A STRIKING TRUTH, by Helen McNeil (Cloud Ink Press, $28)
Characters’ inner reflections ring true, but the all-male interactions they report don’t work nearly as well.