A Sky Full of Fire
by Sarah Ell

Sarah Ell’s first work of historical fiction for adults, A Sky Full of Fire, is a beautiful, eerie and suspenseful account of the 1886 eruption of Mount Tarawera. It draws extensively on Ell’s passion for New Zealand history with the perfect balance of historical detail and storytelling drama.

The prologue sets the scene for the biblical destruction we know is on its way:

In the beginning there were three mountains unified as one: Wāhanga, Ruawāhia and Tarawera. Silent and still, their steep slopes glowed blue in the dawn, grey in the daylight, purple in the dusk. For thousands of years, nothing stirred on their shingly sides except lizards and hard-shelled insects, scuttling beneath the scree to avoid the baking sun. Below them lay the deep waters of the lake, reflecting the mountains’ bulk against the bright blue sky.

Into this deceptive idyll arrives Cyprian Marsh, an upper-class English lawyer, travelling incognito as William Langford and looking for his brother, Tobias. Tobias has abandoned his filial obligations to con his way around the colonies, ‘determined to wander the globe, never returning to take up his rightful position as heir.’ Marsh has ‘come halfway around the world on this quest — two months on a steamer through tropical seas and freezing ocean to the ostentatious gold-rich capital of Melbourne, then on to this outpost of empire on something even smaller and leakier.’

Marsh is unimpressed with ‘the pervasive aroma of sulphur in his tiny, shabby room’ or the ‘clouds of malodorous vapour drifting skywards’ from the lake shore – or the stench of the inhabitants of Ōhinemutu, a ‘barely habitable one-horse town’, But there he finds Alice Bright, a former prostitute turned psychic’s assistant helping ‘acclaimed psychic and spirit medium Madame Blanche’ pull off various scams and thievery. Marsh knows Alice is connected in some way to his brother, so he follows the two con artists to Te Wairoa, now famous as a buried village, but at this point a town catering mostly to the Victorian tourists wanting to visit the stunning natural phenomenon of the Pink and White Terraces.

Alice is another of the novel’s point-of-view characters, as is Mohi Pairama, a young Māori orphan who has moved to Te Wairoa to attend school. Forbidden ‘to speak te reo at all, any thoughtless utterance or tiny slip punishable by a painful rap on the knuckles,’ Mohi struggles to learn English and is distracted by the ravings of missionary Reverend Lucius Steele (‘Mohi called him Pōrangi because it seemed he wasn’t quite right in the head’). He spends a lot of time observing the ‘mysterious ways of the Pākehā’ from behind the protective skirts of his aunty, Whaea Kati.

Alice’s hard-won observations of class combine with Ell’s show-don’t-tell approach to the prevalent issues of racism and colonialism to create a very believable portrayal of 19th-century New Zealand colonial society.

Rich people were so gullible. Tell a working-class man that his dead mother is sitting on your shoulder whispering that she loves him, and he’ll laugh in your face and call you a faker. Tell some red-cheeked, corpulent old fool of a banker the same thing and he’ll weep for his mammy and tell you he loves her too. These people seemed to think that more money made the spirits more likely to talk, pressing coins into her hand at the start of sessions and tipping handsomely afterwards, faces flushed with emotion, earnest tears in their eyes. Dead babies, lost loves, expired parents … everyone seemed to have someone they wanted to hear from one last time.
And Alice had to admit Hen really had the gift when it came to spinning the stories these rich idiots wanted to hear.

Life in Te Wairoa is a big adjustment for Marsh, Alice, and the tourists alike. This ‘inclement outpost’ is nothing like the Melbourne that Alice is used to, with its ‘delicately calligraphed picture windows, carefully lettered signs hanging from wrought-iron brackets, gas lights beckoning customers inside, tinkling bells alerting proprietors to their arrival’. In the southern hemisphere Marsh finds ‘seasons turned back to front, animals like giant rabbits which hopped on their hind legs, dinner parties where the guests all had to go home at dusk because of a lack of candles.’

Ell doesn’t shy away from the unpleasant attitudes of her flawed characters and uses these moments to flesh out the setting and the prevailing assumptions of the time. All Alice sees from her window are ‘just pigs; pigs and native children — the same view as always,’ while Marsh assumes that ‘with the increasing influence of Empire, the old ways of the Māori would pass away and be replaced by the wonders of modern civilisation.’

The portents of doom – a lake that seems to advance and retreat at will, earthquakes shaking the ground, rumblings from deep in the earth, a growing smell of sulphur ‘as if Beelzebub himself had taken a room adjacent’ – add their own ripples of tension to the narrative. The ‘hot springs and hissing fumaroles’ of the Rotorua area prove to be the perfect place for the novel’s more thriller-like elements. It can be difficult to build suspense around a famous historical event, but Ell manages in spectacular fashion. Her cast of characters and their schemes are so vivid and diverse that the eruption of Tarawera almost takes a backseat to the other action.

Spirituality – with questions of justice and heavenly retribution – plays a large role in the story here. Reverend Steele (‘much too far down the fire-and-brimstone end of the spectrum for Marsh’s conservative Church of England liking, although he conceded that Steele’s tendency towards apocalypse was at least appropriate for the current setting’) riles up the residents of Te Wairoa with his ominous, baleful sermons. Mohi, who lost his parents and many other relatives to typhoid, is also questioning the role of his and other gods in the new order of Te Wairoa:

Thoughts and images swirled in his head of his people’s atua and tīpuna, the things they believed and that he had been told were true. But the Māori atua didn’t seem so powerful in Te Wairoa now; the Pākehā coin was the most powerful force. His people, Whaea Kati included, had little time for the old ways. They drank and smoked and made bets in card games, their scores scratched in the dirt. The people were made sick and weak by Pākehā diseases and drink, but they had stopped asking their atua for help.

The story is told in three parts, split into before, during, and after the eruption, with ever-increasing tension, especially when the Terraces themselves are finally revealed. Like the lives of Te Wairoa’s residents and visitors, the trip out to see them feels precarious and haphazard. Despite the experienced local guides, there are ‘many delightfully macabre ways to meet your end’ amongst the exploding geysers and pools of bubbling mud familiar to tourists to the area even today, with Marsh observing that ‘there was a constant, if distant, thudding noise, as though an angry spirit had been imprisoned in the earth and was trying to batter its way out.’

These characters, and the nature surrounding them, are completely at the mercy of the mountain above them, whether they know it or not. In a story rich with dramatic incident, Ell skilfully leads us to consider the concept of fate, and how random events like a volcanic eruption, an encounter with a bad man masquerading as a good one, or an unexpected inheritance can shape our lives forever.