Mysteries abound in tale by nom-de-plume writer
The identity of the much-esteemed New Zealand author writing as Lily Woodhouse is now so well known that . . . well, you can find it in here. Her energetic follow-up to 2017’s Jarulan by the River is set in the early 1950s, as Flis returns to Australia after 18 years across the Tasman. With her comes maimed war-hero husband Kip and coltish young Te Aroha chippie Roy with his Dodge car, all set for a great, if unspecified, adventure.
Flis has lost her sister — and her family home, her youth, her chance of children. Against vivid landscapes both rural and urban, physical and imaginative, she starts a quest for the vanished, beautiful yet precarious Gladdie.
Pasts, presents and possible futures thread the plot. So do secrets and questions. And narrators: the story sprints along, presented
through multiple viewpoints, biped and quadruped.
The once-grand homestead is a ruin, with a wattle tree growing through the roof. Unexplained fires have scorched the land. A dingo-watcher skulks nearby, while the animals themselves glide in and out, puzzled and predatory. We have an evasive lawyer with a resemblance to a water rat, and a disputed will.
There’s a growing Aboriginal significance, and a gathering, ambivalent spirit presence, much of it linked to Flis’ missing yet omnipresent sister, witch and wanderer. An unsettling, “horrible” picture features, along with a small grave. Even Dad and Dave are mentioned, along with children’s book characters Snuggle Pot and Cutie Pie.
The packed plot surges towards separations and tentative reconciliations, necromancy, a strew of human bones, confidences kept and outback death faced. It all happens. It happens within a conventional form quickened and deepened by an author who knows her art and her craft. Emotions run high and true. A boldlylimned cast of characters are neatly distinguished; the nuances of their shifting, skidding relationships deftly rendered.
Just about everyone is darkened by guilt and/ or regrets, which always deepen a plot and its people.
The good end stoically and the bad end partly justified, which also widens the emotional range. A few emotions and utterances get florid, but you can blame that on the genre.
Family sagas by definition tend to go on and, after The Sisters’ Lover, I’ll be happy if the pseudonymous Woodhouse keeps hers going for a few more instalments yet.