Powerful web of blood bonds

Tag : lacework

GIRLIE: A NOVEL
by Gillian Ranstead
(Penguin $28)
The prime mover of populations from their home to the far-flungcorners of the earth has always been competition for scarceresources, especially land. And that's why, paradoxically, theelement that most peoples and nations have in common is theexperience of division, of displacement, dispossession anddislocation.
Thus it was that when Maori encountered the various tribes ofEurope Scots, Irish, Dalmatians, Protestant French they wereable immediately to empathise with much of what constituted foreach a distinct identity.
Grief, nostalgia for a remembered home, the cupping of protectivehands around your language, reverence for your ancestors and forthe stories passed down from generation to generation and bindingall together: these were the common ground upon which each groupstood, even when you were discussing your differences.
It is this shared experience that is at the heart of GillianRanstead's second novel, Girlie. It's about the cradle of bloodties into which the main character, Mara Duine, is born and towhich, as she grows up and becomes more self-aware, she returns.The Duine family are of Highland Scottish stock, displaced fromtheir lands after the battle of Culloden.
The line is brought to New Zealand by Dhomhnuill, a seaman whojumps ship in Wellington harbour in 1839 after hearing a Scottishtune being played on a pipe by a Maori. Dhomhnuill is accepted bythe pipe-player's whanau and raises a family of his own amongstthem on gifted land.
By the time Mara is born her name is bestowed by hergreat-grandfather, Dhomhnuill's son, and means "the sea" in Gaelic in the late 1850s, the gifted land has been converted to freeholdto attract development funds from banks who will not lend on Maoriland. The moves to convert the lease to freehold mean a rift hasdeveloped both within Mara's natural family and between them andtheir Maori benefactors.
It happens that this sad fact is just one of a whole constellationof unlucky stars that attend her birth, for Mara also has themisfortune to be born fatherless to a mother who is more interestedin pursuing a career in journalism than in being a parent. Maragrows up in the care of her extended family, at a time when thatfamily is poised to be forced from the land by a combination oftragedy and natural calamity.
As the author's note following the narrative indicates, Girlie ismore of an artist's impression of her own family history than awork of pure imagination (and the title is followed by the words "ANovel", lest there be any confusion). For this reason, many of thestorylines and some of the characters are shadowy and half-formed,as the focus is firmly fixed on the greater picture, namely theresilience of blood bonds in the face of the sheer destructivepower of circumstance.
Appropriately, perhaps, the best-drawn character is the land, thesecluded valley in which Mara grows up, with its river windingthrough a gorge with precipitous walls that her mother has sourlychristened The Immensities, after the immensities of birth anddeath between which we are all trapped.
By far the most striking feature of Girlie is the power of itsprose, which weaves imagery back and back upon itself to form thekind of lacework of intersecting loops and convolutions that recurthroughout Celtic art.
In places, the long, mesmerising sentences sound ceremonial, likeincantations, like the stories learned on an elder's knee andhaunting you, half-remembered, half-forgotten, as you grow up,biding their time and waiting for their moment to reclaim you asone of their own.