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Fiction and history melt into each other as inner lives are laid bare on very different scales in two novels from across the ditch, writes Liam Davison
Ocean Roads
By James George
Huia, 383pp, $34.95
The Denniston Rose
By Jenny Pattrick
Scribe, 351pp, $29.95
FICTION and history may serve different agendas but ultimately both answer to the principles of the well-told tale. James George's contemporary story of family secrets and the legacy of war is informed by extensive research and an awareness that the grand public narratives we call history carry a raft of smaller, private tales with them. Jenny Pattrick writes meticulously researched period fiction set on the plateau above the west coast of New Zealand's South Island. Melding history and fiction, she apologises to the descendants of the coalminers of Denniston for her characters usurping the real-life positions of their ancestors.
It would be interesting to see the sort of history each would have written had they favoured historical truth over the imaginative insights that fiction provides. I suspect George would favour the broad survey that finds connections between momentous political events across the globe; Pattrick would prefer a more focused local history with the emphasis on domestic minutiae and how place shapes people.
George's Ocean Roads is essentially a family story carrying the weight of world history on its back. Etta, the traveller, returns to Auckland after half a lifetime roaming the globe. Her extended family awaits her arrival with varying uncertainty. Etta is a matriarch of sorts: a wilful, politically engaged photographer whose children bear the scars of the various theatres of war she has photographed. Three generations have been shaped by conflict and the family is a fragmented model of war-torn dislocation.
Etta's first son, Troy, fathered by an American serviceman during World War II, is haunted by...
