Re-racing Duder’s classic reveals it still sails well
Night Race to Kawau by Tessa Duder (Puffin, $19.99)
Even the name is iconic: a book about an adventure at sea which became a Kiwi classic and launched the fiction-writing career of one of New Zealand’s best-loved YA authors. Four decades on from the book’s first publication, Penguin Random House (under its Puffin imprint) has released a new edition of Night Race to Kawau with a striking stylised cover by Cat Taylor.
The first time I read this book, I was the same age as the protagonist, Sam (it was first published in 1982, the year I turned 12). An avid bookworm brought up in an outdoorsy family, I remember being caught up in an exciting adventure story, fraught with danger and challenges, in which the slogan we were bombarded with in the 1980s – ‘‘girls can do anything’’ – was brought to life. Now I’m a 50-something mother of a kid that age and a regular racing sailor who’s done the titular night race myself a few times, though fortunately never in such dramatic circumstances.
As both a sailor and writer about sailing, I’m in awe of Duder’s mastery in the yachting passages of the book: in the passages on the water, especially at night, her prose fully comes alive. The description of the start of the race off Devonport is beautifully detailed, depicting the intricate dance that takes place before ‘‘the silent explosions of beautiful colour’’ as spinnakers are hoisted and the race begins.
Once things start to go wrong (and I don’t think that’s a spoiler), Duder captures the sense of physical exertion required, the discomfort of being wet and seasick, the motion of the boat and complexity of the decisions to be weighed up. She raises the stakes higher and higher; the decision to continue rather than turn back creates further problems rather than solving them and the tension continues to ramp up even once the apparent haven of the island is reached.
But it takes a while to get to the exciting part. I recently read an interview with Duder in which she said she and editor Wendy Harrax, at Oxford University Press, had cut 30,000 words from the original manuscript; I’m pretty sure a children’s editor today would press for even more cuts, to get things moving more quickly. It’s not till 50 pages in – almost quarter of the way through the book – that the race starts.
But as a child of the 70s and 80s I enjoyed the time-capsule of a world I once knew which has long since disappeared: one where breakfast eggs were boiled and the table was set to eat them, and kids did the dishes by hand (without answering back). Today’s tweens will also be agog at how these people survived without cell phones, let alone other useful technological advances aboard such as weather forecasting apps, VHF radios and GPS navigation.
Duder has a journalist’s eye for detail, using precise language which is not too technical but also doesn’t talk down to her readers. It would help to know a thing or two about sailing but the sense of risk and drama is easy to grasp. Family dynamics are drawn just as clearly as the boat stuff, though younger readers will probably roll their eyes at Sam’s mum rather than empathise with her predicament as I do now as an adult.
Some of the language will sound dated to modern readers and it doesn’t reflect well on the social attitudes of the early 1980s, either; the book illustrates a time when sexism was still entrenched and internalised by the female characters. They succeed despite being female, rather than because they feel they are strong and capable.
Night Race to Kawau has rightly become a classic, part of our nautical and literary heritage.