Sunday, February 14, 2021

Review: THE TALLY STICK

THE TALLY STICK by Carl Nixon (Vintage, 2020)

Reviewed by Alyson Baker

Up on the highway, the only evidence that the Chamberlains had ever been there was two smeared tyre tracks in the mud leading into the almost undamaged screen of bushes and trees. No other cars passed that way until after dawn. By that time the tracks had been washed away by the heavy rain . . . It was a magic trick. After being in the country for only five days, the Chamberlain family had vanished into the air. The date was 4 April 1978.

In 2010 the remains of the eldest Chamberlain child have been discovered in a remote part of the West Coast, showing he lived for four years after the family disappeared. Found alongside him are his father’s watch and what turns out to be a tally stick, a piece of wood scored across, marking items of debt.

How had he survived and then died? Where was the rest of his family? And what is the meaning of the tally stick?

It is the late 1970s New Zealand, a car goes off the road into the dense forest, slipping “between the trunks like a blade”, and plummeting into the river below. Rain takes all traces away. In the car is a newly arrived family from England, taking a West Coast drive before the father takes up his new job in Wellington in two weeks’ time. Twenty-three years later the body of the eldest child, Maurice, is found, but his skeleton shows he lived for four years after the family’s disappearance. His father’s watch, a leather dog collar, a large amount of money, and a wooden tally stick have been found with his remains. Where was Maurice for those four years? And what happened to his parents and the other three children, baby Emma, younger brother Tommy, and twelve-year-old Katherine?

It is almost impossible to write a detailed review of THE TALLY STICK without ruining the plot. It is a compelling mystery, the effectiveness of which depends on the reader not knowing anything of what is going to happen. The story is told from multiple timelines and points of view, yet it is well structured and the different narratives weave around each other. We see through the eyes of some of the surviving children, as well as through those of their Aunt Suzanne, both when she makes four trips to New Zealand early on, trying to find her sister and her sister’s family, and then years later when she manages the repatriation of her nephew’s remains.

THE TALLY STICK is about so many things, and many of them link to the meaning of the stick – a record of unpaid debts. It raises the question of what, if anything, people owe each other, what must be earned and what should be freely given. It is about what you owe your family, at what point you may give up on them, follow your own path and disassociate from them. And if connections last through the years, what are you connected to? How do people change in different environments?

Maurice resists change, he is judgemental, seeing people who are different as stupid and “not civilised”, he says long words to himself to prove his superiority, he makes shrines to vengeance. Katherine is a more attractive character, always seeing the goodness in people, paying due respect to the dead and the damaged. Her eyesight is weak, and she sees spirits in the forest, reads meaning into the sightings of birds, and she makes shrines to the benevolent deities. She tries to pray but her words “seemed more likely to be heard by God when you said them in London”. We see Katherine change the most, as her name diminishes: Katherine, Kate, Kat.

There are other characters the car crash survivors encounter, and they are ambiguous. We suspect them and fear them, but eventually we understand them, to a degree. The colonial experience is somewhat echoed, by the survivors encountering people who have been shaped by a completely different world. And in there being those that adjust and those that can’t, but who are therefore changed in a darker way. Those from the UK often must ask for clarification, what is a Crunchie, what are the wop-wops?     

The writing in THE TALLY STICK is evocative, you can smell the native bush, see the birds, feel the soggy forest floor. There is much that the reader must fill in for themselves. It is a read full of conflict, violence, and dread, but there is also beauty and kindness, and the switching back and forth gives it an inevitability that puts the characters in the frame of a morality play. I am not going to say anything else about the story – you will have to, and should, read it yourself.

Alyson Baker is a crime-loving librarian in Nelson. A longer version of this review first appeared on her blog, which you can check out here

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