False River

Paula Morris

Penguin

Otago Daily Times, 2017

One of the things I love about Paula Morris is her versatility, which is clearly evident in False River, an anthology of stories and essays reflecting the breadth her interests and her skills as a writer.  Among its pages European fables rub shoulders with slices-of-life from Mt Roskill. Discourses on historical figures sit alongside deeply personal portraits of her late parents, each exploring the complex relationship between fact and fiction, and the truth that lies in the heart of any story. This same ambiguity is reflected in the collection itself; while some pieces fall clearly on one side of the fence or the other, several essays have previously been published as fiction, and three of the non-fiction pieces explore the difficulty of untangling historical reality from popular myth.

It is hard to pick favourites from such a strong selection, but three pieces particularly stood out to me, one from each fac/ictional category. In the deliciously wicked ‘Premises’, a writer is commissioned to produce a movie synopsis for a major studio and proceeds to pitch the plots of Jane Austen’s novels from Northanger Abbey to Persuasion, each without success (the producers prefer Brontë, although they can’t decide which one). Simultaneously highlighting Austen ability to transform the most convoluted of scenarios into brilliantly timeless social satire, and skewering a myopic, formula-driven industry bereft of light and magic, this story left me laughing in smug delight.

In ‘Women, Still Talking’, a ‘fictional’ version of which appeared in Takahē, Morris describes the way in which her mother – an inveterate gossip who drowned her listeners in anecdotes about friends, neighbours, strangers whose conversations she had overheard – presented other people’s stories because she was unable (or unwilling) to share her own. It is bitter irony therefore that her final illness should rob her of language, a silence every bit as painful as her physical decline. In this essay and its companion, ‘Inheritance’, Morris pieces together what she can from her own understanding and memory, giving her mother the voice she could not find in life.

Another mater-familial relationship, that of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose, is the focus of ‘Rocky Ridge’, a synecdoche for the collection as a whole. Like so many of us, Laura’s Little House series was a touchstone of Morris’s childhood, and whilst in the US she embarked on an expedition, both physical and intellectual, into Laura’s American Frontier, only to discover that “[t]he ‘true story’ was only true some of the time. And a lot of what wasn’t true about the books was the work of Rose Wilder Lane.” Although fascinating in its own right, her thoughtful examination into the ‘real’ history of the family also explores the distinction between the truth and the whole truth, and the question of who controls how and what is told. Although now aware of the elisions, omissions, and deliberate framing behind the Wilder books, they remain as magical to me as when I first read them, and here, to my mind, is Morris’s most important message.

Lessons can be learned from any story, true or not, and perhaps what matters most is that it be a tale well told. In False River, this is certainly the case.