A tantalising launch
The debut novel from Annaleese Jochems is a disorienting experience, not unlike being on board the cramped, rocking boat its characters inhabit. Sparse and tantalising in its unfolding, it never quite allows you to get your sea legs. Baby is Swallows and Amazons meets We Have Always Lived in the Castle. There’s messing about in boats ( the titular Baby is a tired little boat moored at Paihia) and madcap adventure but the waters swiftly become murky. Cynthia, the intriguing, mercurial protagonist, impulsively steals money from her father to run away to sea, or at least to harbour, with her fitness instructor Anahera.
Cynthia worships the older woman; Anahera’s motives are less clear, her inscrutable remove a mystery wrapped in a threadbare towel. When a tragic accident is followed by the appearance of a mysterious stranger, a storm begins to gather above Cynthia’s maritime idyll.
Baby feels both nostalgic and bang up to date. Cynthia is a modern young woman who lives on her phone, pouring vast hours into the artificially glossy worlds of The Bachelor and Real Housewives of Auckland, yet Paihia and its environs feels like the 1950s: a supermarket, a school, friendly fishermen, empty islands and not a soul on any of the surrounding boats in the mooring. It’s a setting both gentle and a little too quiet; it’s impossible to know whether the emptiness is benign or full of invisible menace.
The story moves rapidly and springs many sharp little surprises, keeping the reader off- balance. The dialogue is marked by both hostility and wry humour, pithy lines delivered with derision. Jochems captures the confusing suddenness of violence; the way bad things can be over and their aftermath already playing out before you can consciously process that they’ve begun.
In a particularly effective device, the comfort foods of roughing- it holidays become grotesque in the increasingly tense setting: tinned spaghetti, Tim Tams, Coco pops queasily slopping around Baby’s cabin, becoming unwholesome by association with the festering conflicts within.
Baby drips with both malice and sympathy for its characters and proves the adage: worse things happen at sea.