Kehua! by Fay WeldonEuropa Editions, 2013

“Like a river that overflows its banks, it spreads sideways rather than carves its way forward, plot-wise” (32). So says the narrator of Kehua!, an author-character who is writing a “tale of murder, adultery, incest, ghosts, redemption and remorse” that sprawls instead of rushing along (15). The book is split between the author-character’s own experience of writing—sitting in her own possibly-haunted house on a hill—and the story of the characters she’s creating: Scarlet, who’s about to leave her husband for a famous actor; Cynara, Scarlet’s sister, who has belatedly realized she’s a lesbian; Lola, Scarlet’s niece, a “wayward nymphet” (16); Alice, Scarlet and Cynara’s mostly-absent mother; and Beverley, Alice’s mother, who was born in New Zealand, ended up in London, and has outlived three husbands. There are questions of family character and genetics and destiny, whether family secrets, misdeeds long past, can still somehow resonate. “Things come out of your family history to accost you. The present is always haunted by a past which needs to be acknowledged, purified” (113). And then there are the titular kehua, taken from Māori culture: wandering spirits whose task it is to bring the family (within the tribe) towards the soul of the bloodline: they act as motivating forces, inspiring Beverley and her clan to action in ways that aren’t always straightforward. I liked this book well enough, but it also felt a little stand-offish: the shifts between the story of Beverley and her family and the writer-character, combined with the way the narrative emphasizes its own fictional nature, had a slightly distancing effect for me.