Friday, January 06, 2012 12:17 PM

It was her role as a court clerk after leaving school that lit the spark of what became Faye Whittaker’s debut novel, For a Fee of Two Shillings. There she met a “tubby, amiable man”, a lawyer who curated the courthouse library and encouraged the young clerk to study the law herself. That early mentor remained a fixture in her memory, and reappears in the fictional form of Thomas Gregory, a sagacious small-town attorney who deftly turns around the lives of a vulnerable young girl and those in her orbit within a tiny coastal Taranaki community.

 

Emma Hammond, whose steely sweetness is so affecting that one hopes Whittaker has more stories to tell of her, is a teenager who has endured the death of her Maori mother, Miri, and the explosive, violent unpredictability of her Pakeha father. Little is known about Joe Hammond, who bears an accent that hints at American origins. The community views him as an oddball, and with the birth of Emma his behaviour becomes extreme. Obsessively protective and clearly not all there, he segregates the family, raising Emma separately from her mother and two elder brothers.

 

To give away anything further about the plot would deny the reader a rewarding experience, and the author her due, so we shall turn to the characterization, one of the strongest elements of a well-conceived but sometimes flawed book.

 

People and the relationships they form are what Whittaker depicts most nimbly. Emma draws people in: first her father, then, as the family dissolves, her older brother Hemi (this bond is especially well-drawn), and finally Thomas Gregory, to whom she presents her sole possession, two shillings, in a humble bid for aid.

 

The insubstantial nature of Joe and Miri’s union is contrasted with her deep ties to her home marae and its people, who are rightly alarmed by the marriage but unable to prevent it. And Miri’s own angst, shared fully only with the reader, is genuinely saddening. Levity comes in the form of Gregory’s polite interactions with his longtime secretary, Miss Crisp, in scenes which possess an appealing authenticity.

 

Whittaker’s writing does let her down: there are distracting idiosyncrasies, such as conflations of nouns and verbs. One character “hollow-sighed”, another “seal-waved”, a particular sensation is a “swoon-float”. Sometimes words are misused – a hut shown to be Spartan in design and furnishings is then described as “certainly [not] the most ascetic of woodland cottages.”

 

The exposition at times verges on heavy-handed, most notably when a reverend’s expression of regret over his failure to recognize Miri’s cultural insecurity veers into verbal self-flagellation. And for some readers, suspension of disbelief may be required: a tohunga (shaman or high priest) and other elements of Maori and Christian spirituality are integral to the story.

 

But to harp on flaws is churlish, and worse, is to disregard the many triumphs of For a Fee of Two Shillings. It is difficult to write about cross-cultural relations and intermarriage, and such events as a British lawyer stepping on to a marae for the first time, with delicacy and an absence of condescension (either to reader or subject), but Whittaker does it.