Paula Green's launch speech follows:
"Sue’s debut
novel is pitch perfect. It reminded me of why I loved reviewing fiction for the
NZ Herald so much. I was delighted to be invited to launch The Party Line,
this utterly perfect book, of a dear friend and a fellow Penguin Random House
author. Then to open my pristine copy and discover it was dedicated to me was
so very moving. Thank you!
I got to see
a near final draft of the ms and was captivated at every level by the power of
Sue’s narrative. Even when you enter a world of flickering and uncertain light
and dark such as this, you enter the joy of narrative -- what story gifts us as
readers. To read the published book, was to read afresh, and as I read over the
weekend, everything else faded to dim (hanging out the washing, feeding the
cats, answering emails). I just wanted to read in one slow gulp –and that is
what I did.
This is the
kind of novel that a reviewer could so easily diminish the effect of by giving
away plot and character twists. Instead I want to share four reading pleasures
this book gave me.
Firstly, the
narrative is so surely anchored in a particular place and time, nostalgically
so, for someone of my age. The judicious degree of detail renders both time and
place vitally present: seersucker shorts, Happen In, the click of the
eavesdropper on the party line, 4711 perfume, a candlewick bedspread,
handkerchiefs, sharemilkers on the move, the paddock, getting in the hay, big
brown bottles of beer.
Secondly,
and most importantly, the characters resist the narrow confines of ink and
paper and become seemingly real – and in that provisional realness expand to
the point they affect you on a deep level. Husbands, wives, mothers, fathers,
daughters. It is as though all roads lead to character in The Party Line:
dialogue, plot, setting, turning points, epiphanies. Take any character,
teenage Gabrielle coming to terms with the loss of her mother, or Joy facing
brittle lines of communication with her daughter, Sue’s characters, all of
them, ache with flaws, vulnerabilities, strengths. How one lives and loves and
loses. So much of what we experience,
have experienced and will experience defies words – yet this novel nails the
kaleidoscopic, gut-wrenching, grey routine, survival instincts, good
intentions, misguided ignorance, symphonic highs, comatosing lows, elusive
dreams, startling courage, misread difference, kindness, meanness,
rebelliousness, conformity, silence as a form of collusion or consent, the make
do and the make believe of what it means to be human. These characters got to
me. I felt them puncture and punctuate my heart rhythm. They startled me and
they cajoled me. And what made the human complexity matter so very much, was
the way they grew out of Sue’s lovingly tended sense of time and place.
Thirdly,
while the narrative embeds you in the lure of its inhabited world – as you
absorb character, place and event - this too is a novel of ideas. The way ideas
ferment in the cracks and overlaps. There is the pervading notion of
eavesdropping/seeing what one oughtn’t. The architecture of tight-knit
communities. Gender roles. Human behaviour in the light of human error. Our
ability to misread and misjudge human difference. Hierarchies with misplaced power.
Fourthly,
this is a novel beautifully crafted in the light of structure but also at the
level of the sentence. Each sentence, a honeyed fluency. Economical. For
example:
‘Gabrielle
Baxter was all butter voice, and butter hair and butterflies.’
‘She
couldn’t call it menace, the tone in her husband’s voice, but she sensed the
warning, clear and final.’
‘The pile of
white linen spilled over the top of the basket at Audrey’s feet.’
If you scan
the last few decades of NZ fiction, I am not sure how many novels have buried
roots in the rural, in the back blocks, the peat paddocks, the farm kitchen,
the country lanes and the local hall.
That The Party Line is a novel of a farming community, of small
town NZ, is to be celebrated.
That the novel returns you to the world
rejuvenated, a little transformed, is because this one small part of the world
rendered in fictional form illuminates that which is real both past and
present. It makes you think and it makes you feel. Not all novels do this. You
feel like you have been the eavesdropper, seen what ought not to be seen, head
and heart shaken apart, so that everybody near you and everybody at a distance
seems acutely alive and precious.
This is an astonishing novel, not in a big
brash show off way, but in an intimate and empathetic way. I am delighted to
declare it launched! "
Below - Paula Green and author Sue Orr at the bool launch last evening held at the Women's Bookshop in Ponsonby.
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