(Published by Stinging Fly Press)
 |
After such a positive experience with Keri Holmes’ The Bone People, I recently decided that it was time that I read more books by New Zealand authors. I tried to read Katherine Mansfield but short stories aren’t my cup of tea so I turned to another of New Zealand’s celebrated authors, Maurice Shadbolt. Best known for his award-winning trilogy on the New Zealand Land Wars, he has also written many other novels and Dove on the Waters is one that came to my hand when I was browsing through his books at the library. You can imagine my disappointment when I realised that the book seemed to be a series of short stories, albeit linked by a framing narrative, but, as I had no other book to hand I stuck with it.
Dove on the Waters was worth it. Shadbolt tells the stories of Walter Dove, a gentleman lawyer who takes off on a solo circumnavigation of the globe in the early part of the twentieth century; spinster painter Rose Lightfoot fancy free in Venice; and Boer War veteran Jim Bird, and his true love Laurel, living in exile in New Zealand’s Coromandel region. But the thing that ties all these stories together so brilliantly is the character of the narrator and his beloved Great-Aunt Alice who tells the tales, with many interruptions and asides. The characters in the stories are all known to, and contemporaries of, the fascinating Alice in the early 1900s and Shadbolt could surely focus a whole novel on the life of the woman he only lets us glimpse through a refracted lens.
Dove on the Waters is an example of masterful storytelling and Maurice Shadbolt is indeed a name to be reckoned with. Well worth searching down in Ireland. 
