Twists and tribulations

A MADNESS OF SUNSHINE by Nalini Singh (Hachette, $35) It’s parochially thrilling to find a book set in a familiar place — I didn’t realise Madness was set in New Zealand until the heroine’s flight from London touched down in Christchurch.

Author Nalini Singh grew up in New Zealand and is better known for romance novels (the Psychangeling and Guild Hunter series), putting out an impressive list of titles during the past two decades or so. Now she’s turned to crime, setting her story on the South Island’s West Coast, in a fictional place called Golden Cove.

The name grated with me: nothing about our dramatic West Coast speaks of “golden”: it’s grey and it’s green and brown and it’s magnificent in its primeval darkness — all of which Singh successfully conveys in the background. But golden it is not.

Apart from that niggle, Singh has created a small town most New Zealanders would recognise and fills it with recognisable characters. There’s a cafe, a pub, a church, a sole-charge police station, a medical clinic and random oddballs who live in the bush, tourists, nosy neighbours. Everyone knows each other’s secrets. And it’s a sad reflection of the reality in New Zealand that the violence that is part of the landscape in Singh’s Golden Cove also feels familiar.

Anahera is broken after the sudden death of her husband and discovering her London life was a lie when his pregnant mistress showed up at his funeral. She had grown up witnessing her mother being beaten to a pulp by her father. Meanwhile, Will is a cop, banished to Golden Cove after beating up a suspect.

Then, the beautiful and talented young Miriama fails to return from a run one afternoon. As the search drags on and everyone becomes a suspect, we learn everyone’s secrets, most of which seem to involve violence.

And, of course, Will and Anahera are thrown together by the intense circumstances of the search and of their own complicated and twisted circumstances.

That romance is a minor chord in A Madness of Sunshine shouldn’t surprise given Singh is best known for her work in the genre. But it’s a disappointing cliche in an already somewhat predictable story.

Even the twist at the end — a faint echo of recent events in this country — isn’t totally a surprise.

own well.” The three young girls — “children who were too curious for their own good” — are drawn to the 1670s story of the accused Eshwell Bridge witch and they become fascinated with the well in which she is said to have been drowned. The girls have another friend, a boy in the village, Israel Hart, who will be sent to New Zealand on a child migrant scheme. Israel knows the dark secret at the heart of his and the girls’ childhood in Eshwell Bridge.

The Ash, the Well and the Bluebell is filled with plaintive passages that portray childhood in ways that bring to mind Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist .We feel we are right there in the mind of a perceptive, naïve, confused but insightful young girl as we read,

“She drew her knees up to her chin. The sky darkened and drifted downwards. Lily thought of the bucket of ash in the cellar at school. She didn’t think there was enough of Joseph to fill a bucket. She didn’t think even Elihu would fill a bucket, though Miss Thrace might. She thought of Mrs Burlington’s cat and the blood, and the burst plum, and the men in the allotments with shell shock, and Miss Thrace drawing a circle on the blackboard, and the back row where the dunces sat, and Israel’s brothers and sisters going to New Zealand and Australia, and the pale pink starfish that would die out of its environment.

The sky was so close now she could almost touch it. She wrapped her arms around her shoulders.

She thought of Israel skating on the ice slide. Up. Down. Up. Down. Up. Down. When she saw him at school tomorrow she would ask him how he did it without falling. She would ask him to teach her. She would practise and practise until she learned how not to fall.”

Arnold’s novel beautifully shows us the way these children, now adults, come to understand what they meant to each other and how their time together as children contained more mysteries than they could comprehend. The Ash, the Well and the Bluebell is a lovely, moving book that explores the pain and the poignancy of childhood and the ways that the connections we forge during these years can take hold of us.