Ephemera

Tina Shaw

Cloud Ink Press

Otago Daily Times, July 4th 2020

“We were probably doomed from the moment the virus hit the airport”, muses Ruth, the protagonist of Tina Shaw’s Antipodean, a feminist paean to Heart of Darkness. The virus in question may have infected computers rather than people, but its toll on humanity is just as devastating, taking out the infrastructure on which modern life depends and plunging the world back to pre-industrial times.

Ruth is a librarian specialising in preserving and archiving social detritus from the late 20th and early 21st Century. Introverted and risk-averse, her life was insular and self-sufficient even before the Crash, and in its aftermath, she maintains the same routines as before, splitting her days between her childhood home and the library where she used to work. Then, her sister falls ill with TB, and Ruth ventures far beyond the bounds of her carefully ordered world to save her:  sailing into the wilderness of the Waitaki Valley in search of a pharmaceutical stockpile rumoured to be hidden on the grounds of Huka Lodge. Accompanying her are her sister’s dashing boyfriend, PC Lance Hinkley, the inscrutable riverboat captain, Adebowale Ackers, and a doctor and her daughter whom they meet en route, also bound for the Huka and its legendary pharmacopeia. The group maintains an uneasy allegiance as they navigate the dangers of the river and the various communities through which it passes. But all have secrets and agendas of their own, and a journey that begins as a demonstration of sororal devotion becomes an exercise in self-discovery, one that will transform Ruth from a damsel in distress to an agent of her own destiny.

Told through Ruth’s eyes, the story alternates between past and present, offering glimpses of the social unravelling and reconfiguration catalysed by the Crash alongside the details of the journey itself and revealing a personal history that is more complex than we are initially led to believe. Her wryly self-reflective musings are also integral to the novel’s structure, highlighting the moments of absurdist comedy that leaven the bleakness of the narrative landscape and playing with the story’s metafictional underpinnings. Lance, for example, may be Mills-and-Boon handsome, but after an early moment of heroism, he is rendered superfluous, his functions reduced to fighting with Ackers and taking the occasional slash in the bush. And when Ruth randomly selects Conrad’s classic as reading material for the journey, she actively embraces the irony, quoting passages to herself at opportune moments – thus ensuring we know that she knows she travels in Marlow’s footsteps – but completely misses the resonance of the Steven King novel she contemptuously passes on to a former colleague.

The novel takes on additional resonance by the events of the past few months, highlighting the fact that the technology that enabled us to weather the social isolation of lockdown is in many ways as fragile as the pages of the women’s magazines and fliers to which Ruth has devoted her life. As discomforting and disturbing as the work it pays homage to, Ephemera challenges the casual arrogance with which we regard the world and our place within it.