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.

 

 

 

Setting as Character By Ashley Tate

 Although I am a writer (and a soon to be published author!), I consider myself a reader first and foremost; starting as a child when I’d read from sunup to sundown, and whenever I can squeeze a book in now. And as an avid reader and lover of storytelling, I want to be pulled into a book from the outset; I want to become so immersed in the pages that everything else slips away. Reading is my absolute favourite thing to do—imagine! You can fall in love, be horrified, be inspired all from the comfort of your couch or bed—but it also serves as a great escape from reality. Nothing pulls me out of the stresses and anxieties of the real world (of which there are many, especially in the last handful of years) like getting lost in a good book. And I think that one of the best ways to ensure that a reader is hooked (whether that’s me reading or someone reading my book) is with setting. So, it’s probably no surprise then, that creating and crafting setting is my favourite part of the entire writing process.

I treat setting as though it’s just as important as the plot and characters and structure—this is how I ensure my sense of place and world building leaps directly off the page to pull my reader all the way in. In this way setting can become a character in its own right. A city or town or planet or dystopian hell-scape on a far-away star that can live and breathe and be its own multi-dimensional character.

Some authors prefer to write about places and locations that exist in the world, but I prefer fictionalizing them, so that my reader can picture themselves being dropped right there without any preconceived idea of what the place is really like. My debut thriller, Twenty-Seven Minutes, takes place in fictional West Wilmer, a small rural town that could be found anywhere in North America. The kind of town that everyone knows; surrounded by a patchwork of razed fields, a long dusty highway, and rusting water tower. A town where there’s one Main Street and one local bar, in the case of my debut this bar is Flo’s, and where everyone knows everyone else and has for generations; where no one really leaves, where the secrets linger within the town’s borders and gossip can take on an insidious life of its own.

When crafting my setting, I want the reader to feel it and smell it and live in it for the duration of the story. To that end, setting is one of the first parts of my writing process—where do I want this story to take place? When? How? Further: How can this small fictional town of West Wilmer help tell the story of its characters? And as a thriller writer, how can it help add tension for the reader?

Twenty-Seven Minutes is a thriller about the transformative nature of grief and what happens when long-standing secrets become impossible to keep buried. The decision to set this in a small town meant that I could draw on the aspects of one—how close-knit communities can sometimes feel claustrophobic (adding tension to the story), how everyone knows everyone’s business (making it hard to hide from your past) and how those hard-to-hide secrets can weigh so heavily on someone that they begin to unravel (adding more tension and a propulsive sense of a ticking clock) for the reader.

The irony here is that I grew up in the middle of a very large, very busy city. But I spent many childhood summers on the farm where my mother grew up, in a rural town on the East coast of Canada. During those idyllic summers, I learned to swim in the Ocean, hang laundry on a clothes’ line, eat vegetables pulled directly from the garden, borrow books from the Book-Mobile that would rumble by the old farmhouse, and hear nothing at night but crickets, and nothing in the morning but crows. I learned the art of “visiting” neighbours, and the smell of barns and old churches and the joy of pulling into the parking lot of an ice-cream bar on the side of the highway (trust me, nothing tastes as good as when it comes from a bored teenager behind a splintered wooden counter).

As writers, we must be keenly observant and attuned to noticing even the tiniest of details—this is how we add layers of reality to our stories, how our characters come alive, and in terms of setting, how readers can really feel themselves in that place—and it was that incredibly stark contrast of those quiet rural summers spent on the farm, to my loud and busy and boisterous city life, that made such an impression on me during those formative and impressionable years as a wide-eyed young girl, that I fell in love with setting, and especially small towns.

 

Twenty-Seven Minutes by Ashley Tate (Headline, £20)

THE QUESTION- For the last ten years, the small town of West Wilmer has been struggling to answer one question: on the night of the crash that killed his sister, why did it take Grant Dean twenty-seven minutes to call for help? If he'd called sooner, Phoebe might still be alive. THE SECRET - As the anniversary of Phoebe's death approaches, Grant is consumed by his memories and the secret that's been suffocating him for years. But he and Phoebe weren't the only ones in the car that night. Becca was there too - she's the only other person who knows what really happened. Or is she? THE TRUTH - Everyone remembers Phoebe, but local girl June also lost someone that night. Her brother Wyatt has been missing for ten years and, now that her mother is dead, June has no one left - no family, no friends. Until someone appears at her door. Someone who knows what really happened that night. And they are ready to tell the truth?

Ashley Tate can be found on X @tate_ab and on Instagram @ashleytateauthor