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.
