Ruby Porter's debut novel Attraction is about three women on a North Island road trip; "navigating the motorways of the North Island, their relationships with one another and New Zealand’s colonial history."
Ruby Porter is the winner of the inaugural Michael Gifkins Prize for an unpublished novel Photo: Supplied
The book is written in fragments, something Porter has done since she started writing, something she has never questioned.
“The fragments were about this move between the past and present. I think because when I originally thought of the book, probably about a year before I actually started writing it, I thought possibly that it was a book that covered this narrator's whole life. And then I realised that was ridiculous, and I was only interested in about three weeks of her life but there was a lot of back story that I had thought of and that informed her as a character and informed the story I wanted to tell.”
Originally Porter thought Attraction would revolve around two characters – she’s glad she added a third, she says, it would have been insufferable to write and insufferable to read had she not.
She's already being compared to Irish author Sally Rooney - she’s a huge fan, and the comparisons are not lost on her, she says.
“What I found so amazing is the way that there can just be a disconnect between people, no matter how much they feel for each other, and those themes in which someone would say something, and it would just be a little misunderstood and the whole scene would kind of tilt a bit and go somewhere else.”
It was painful, real and subtle but totally engrossing, she says.
The novel has an awareness of a complicated history of systems of oppression.
Porter says she didn’t go into it wanting to make political commentary but as a Pākehā person, she says it’s impossible to ignore the fact that you’re living on land that is not yours.
“I felt for the narrator it probably makes sense for her to be much more aware of the mana whenua of the land in a place like Whāngārā, but actually I wanted that to echo throughout all of the places that she went to and travelled through.”
In a sense it’s about belonging, and not belonging and home and not having a home, she says.
Te reo Māori is woven throughout Attraction. When Porter got an Australian editor there was a lot of discussion about pulling back on things that made it a deeply New Zealand book.
Photo: Text Publishing
“Obviously te reo Māori is a large part of that and I argued in almost every instance that if I thought it was something that the average New Zealander would or should understand that that should be able to stay untranslated.
“There were a couple of moments where because it was going to an international audience, an Australian audience too, I would give a partial translation in line. So instead of saying the same thing twice because you’ll never write that, you’ll never repeat yourself twice within a sentence I would give a translation that was slightly different but gave access to the te reo Māori.”
She wasn’t questioned too much, she says.
“I think it was reflecting particularly where I was at in my life at the time, I was learning te reo and I was trying to feed that in, I also felt that te reo was useful as a way of describing the landscape around us, it definitely sits within Aotearoa.”
The characters travel between towns by car, giving the narrator a chance to speak about landscape- the destruction of the landscape and a sense of false pride in clean green New Zealand.
“It’s not her experience while driving through it, she’s seeing irrigators, she’s seeing concrete, she’s seeing whole hills with trees felled.
“She’s part of her generation, which is part of my generation, so I think it’s one of those things that wasn’t a deliberate move, but it came out anyway.”
Her inner world is much deeper than her outer world, says Porter.
“She often leaves a lot unsaid.”
Prose writer, poet, artist and teacher Ruby Porter was the inaugural winner of the Michael Gifkins Prize for her debut novel Attraction which she launched at the Auckland Writers Festival last week.
She has been published in Geometry Journal, Aotearotica, Spinoff and Wireless, and a selection of her poetry is available on NZEPC. In 2018, she also won the Wallace Foundation Short Fiction Contest.
