Tragic bells in early N.Z.

Press, 14 March 1987, Page 23

Tragic bells in early N.Z.

Bells for Caroline. By Iris Nolan. Black Robin, 1986. 148 pp. $21.99. (Reviewed by Sharon Hunter) Iris Nolan's novel won first prize in the Bank of New Zealand’s historical novel competition on the occasion of the fiftieth jubilee of the New Zealand Women’s Writers’ Society. Nolan’s novel is a woman’s story tracing the birth of Caroline in Norway, in 1853, and hfer subsequent journey to and life in colonial New Zealand. The bells of the title are interspersed throughout the novel, ringing the changes, usually unhappily, during Caroline’s life: “The school bell rang furiously clanging, clattering. Bells — ships’ bells on the Hovding — funeral bells — alarm bells. The church bells, the night of Mafeking — the slow eighty-two peals for Queen Victoria, dead. And for the dead husband too, but only a few slow tolls for him ...” Upon arriving in New Zealand Caroline escapes from the cloistered and rigid confines of the Norwegian settlements of Norsewood and Dannevirke to the more anglicised Napier. Here she marries an Englishman who is more of a dilettante than the required colonial man, makes a home, and has seven children.

Caroline’s life — harsh, selfless, with few pleasures, much pain, and many losses — could easily be the life of any woman without means in this era. For a woman of the 1980 s witira small family, an automated life, and j a liberated husband, “Bells for Caroline” makes for hard yet necessary reading. Women in the 1980 s find child-rearing and household management difficult enough; one must admire the sheer strength and courage of earlier women without running hot water, plumbing, and microwaves. The sheer determination of women to somehow find a way and cope in the midst of such adverse conditions during this period of New Zealand’s history is told by Nolan simply and matter-of-factly; “Bells for Caroline” focuses not only on Caroline, but in some detail on the lives of. her adult children as thSy make their way in New Zealand. : Nolan’s novel is a hard tale about the struggle of both men and women as pioneer New Zealanders, but it-is also a book crammed full of early New Zealand history and Maori myth and legend. When the reader is just starting to feel that he or she cannot take any more of the hardships endured, Nolan slips in an historical fact or a fascinating legend' which gives the reader breathing space.