Tom Baragwanath on small-town claustrophobia

Some years ago, I moved from a place where it felt like everyone knew me – and I, in turn, felt I knew everyone – to a place where nobody knows me. From small-town New Zealand to Paris, I exchanged bumping into mates on the walk to the supermarket for bread for a thousand incredible boulangeries where not a single soul knew my name. This sudden anonymity was bracing, and a little thrilling. But soon, I found myself craving a little small-town claustrophobia. When nobody in the street knew a thing about me, I wondered what it would be like if everybody knew everything about me.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but this germ of homesickness was ready to sprout into a book: my debut novel Paper Cage. Naturally, I gave my heroine Lorraine Henry an encyclopaedic knowledge of my rural hometown of Masterton. As a file clerk in the police station, Lorraine would know better than anyone the way stories, facts, and gossip all intertwine and coalesce to form a sense of a person: what they’re like, what they do, how far they can be trusted. As far as it’s possible to know a person, Lorraine would know them – or she would think she did. 

Lorraine would have an unerring compass when it came to navigating threats both within the community and outside of it. As the embodiment of small-town collective surveillance, Lorraine would have a sense of the unspoken things lurking between the police reports she’d been writing. Because she’d been watching; because she’d been listening. So when children from marginalised families started going missing, she’d know exactly where to look. 

But because this is small-town New Zealand, Lorraine would quickly run into the emotional miasma that builds up inside so many insular communities. Getting useful information would mean contending with decades-old grievances, obsessions, and spats. It would mean navigating the invisible web of judgement and suspicion, and pulling apart some of the secrets binding people so tight they can barely breathe. 

Working on this novel was more than just a chance to treat my own homesickness – cheaper than a plane trip home, and with a lot less paperwork given the New Zealand government’s near penitential COVID lockdown policy at the time. It was a chance to explore small-town claustrophobia from all sides, and to understand what it is about marginal or forgotten places that writers – especially writers of crime or thriller stories – just can’t seem to escape. 

From Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen to Shelley Burr’s Wake, from True Detective to Fargo, there’s something about tiny communities that lends itself to great stories. For me, it’s the sense of people being so deep in each other’s business: of living, as Lorraine puts it, “cheek-to-jowl”. In a city of millions, it’s easy to disappear into the crowd. In a town of thousands, hundreds, or even dozens, one feels constantly exposed, and constantly judged. And while it’s true that small communities can pull together in miraculous ways to face external threats, it’s just as common for these threats to pit neighbour against neighbour. 

In the vein of the Coen Brothers, I also wanted to showcase the straight-up weirdness of small-town New Zealand. Or rather, I wanted to showcase how our local flavour of weirdness can better illuminate a more universal strangeness. Is it really that odd that the Gull service station in Masterton sells its fried chicken at half-price after midnight, for example? Should it surprise anyone that fights often break out at Featherston’s Underhill Road swimming hole on the hottest days of summer? And isn’t it only natural that gangs of bored kids might spear eels in the gutters with garden forks during a once-in-a-century flood?

I never imagined that by indulging my homesickness and sharing these kinds of hyper-local details I would end up connecting with a global audience of readers. But now that Paper Cage has made its way onto bookshelves around the world, I’ve come to understand that we make sense of ourselves not through sweeping universal stories, but through small ones. 

As I walk the streets of Paris, I find myself still enjoying my mask of relative anonymity. And yet, there’s something about small-town claustrophobia that keeps drawing me back to Masterton, and back into Lorraine’s story. Or maybe it’s only by going back to those streets where my characters feel like they can’t breathe that I’m able to breathe easy.

Paper Cage by Tom Baragwanath (John Murray Press)

Masterton, New Zealand may be a small town, but its residents are certainly not united. Old resentments and the simmering tensions of race and culture divide the Maori and white inhabitants, with everyone keeping to their own patch of turf. But when local children start to go missing, vanishing between the cracks, accusations are hurled, and community relations reach boiling point. Caught in the middle is Lorraine Henry. She works as a lowly records clerk at the police station amongst towering piles of paperwork, quietly making connections and remembering things that the cops would rather not. Solving cases is not part of her job, but when her great-nephew is the next to disappear, she must put her skills to the test as she is called in to help, all before time runs out for the children.