ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Charlotte Randall (Source: Penguin NZ)

Charlotte Randall is a New Zealand author not afraid to take risks.  Hokitika Town, her sixth novel, is written in a narrative voice that takes a bit of getting used to, a pidgin language  that demands reader concentration.  Here’s how the story begins:

I never seen nothing like this.  Papa say whitey do things different from us, but he dint say how.  Now I see it with my own eyes.  Whitey’s ships is so big they choking up the river.  Them ships got poles big as kauri trees and the poles got cloaks hanging off them. Mebee no one believe that back home, but I swear – whitey’s ships wear clothings.  But I keep  forgetting, I not live at home no more.  I live in whitey town now.

Rilly I live in the bush.  I not ezactly moved into the town yet.  I kind of creep around. My tuakana tell me if you do what whitey say, he give you coin.

Halfie is a homeless child growing up between two cultures.  Somehow he has been separated from his people and is living on the fringe of a bustling gold rush town in 1865.  He wishes he’d paid attention when Mama was showing him which berries were safe to eat.  He finds the muddle of languages around him a bit bewildering – but he’s been befriended by Violet, a teenage barmaid, and with her help he’s learning English and its spellings, and getting occasional work at the pub.  He’s also learning to negotiate the strange world of adults and their inexplicable preoccupations.

In the chaos of hasty development and a shanty town which exists mainly to serve the drinking needs of the miners, Halfie also enjoys the somewhat eccentric protection of Ludovic, an alcoholic bible-basher, and Kaspar, an existentialist philosopher. Sleeping under trees, in caves, in a hut with Ludo and occasionally on ‘cloud beds’ at the pub, Halfie soon earns a collection of other monikers: Harvey, Thumbsucker, Bedwetter, Cocoa and Pipsqueak – but he has another name and his coming-of-age is marked by the moment when he remembers what it is, and chooses to use it.

For despite a series of disasters both comic and tragic in this engaging novel, there is never any doubt that Halfie is going to survive, even when he runs across the criminal underbelly of the town.  He is a clever little boy with amazing initiative.  He makes many mistakes as he struggles to interpret life as he sees it – at the bottom of a grasping, amoral society – but although he’s  ‘melon cow lick’  sometimes, he’s indefatigable.  He’s funny, he’s courageous, and he has a kind heart.    

Great characterisation lies at the heart of this novel.  Brusque, busy, kind-hearted Violet has problems of her own; Ludovic has a somewhat ‘pliable’ personal history and a ‘fancy top coat that he say were made for him by tailors in California when he were rich as Croesus’ (p111); and Kaspar’s in search of love as well as that elusive gold nugget.  Caradoc, the ambitious owner of the Bathsheba pub, shares an eye for the same girl as his son does, an indiscretion which has to be concealed not only from his perpetually weeping wife, Gertie, who lives upstairs in her room on quack medicines and the fish that Halfie catches for her  – but also from Griffith’s respectable fiance, the gorgeous Lily Moncrieff.  There are petty crims, and then there is One Eye, with his frightening disregard for human life, and the sinister Otac.  There are dancing girls, shady characters and a little girl who is lucky to escape the predatory attentions of a lonely man…

Paula Green reviewed this book for the NZ Herald and Maggie Rainey-Smith guest blogged it at Beattie’s Book Blog.  You can read an extract at Penguin NZ (scroll down to the orange link at the bottom of the page).

Author: Charlotte Randall
Title: Hokitika Town
Publisher: Penguin (New Zealand) 2011
ISBN: 9780143563390
Source: Review copy courtesy Penguin NZ

Availability: at Fishpond Hokitika Town