The Other Catherine
by Lauren Keenan

Lauren Keenan’s new novel spans 1790s Ireland, New South Wales and Ngāmotu/New Plymouth on the brink of the New Zealand wars and the decades after. Although not an official prequel, The Other Catherine is closely related to Keenan’s last book, The Space Between. In the new novel we follow the story of Keita – the aunt of Matāria, one of the protagonists of The Space Between.

Keenan has written another story of two women, though this time they are not contemporaries: a mythically perfect Irish-born mother-in-law and the Māori woman who often feels unworthy in her (however distant) shadow. Keita – made to change her name from Āwhārerenui so her white husband could pronounce it – wonders of her granddaughter, the third  generation to bear the same name: ‘Doesn’t she realise that, sometimes, perfect women do exist? You might not like them, and you may secretly hate them, but you still aspire to be like them.’

The story opens in 1893 on a beach in Marlborough Sounds. Keita is an old woman, reliant on a walking stick and not sure exactly what a photograph is. Two of her grandchildren, her only remaining whānau, are gathered on the beach to be photographed with a dead whale. Her husband, Abraham, has just died, and Keita now has to rediscover her identity. She feels that whoever she was before their marriage has ‘been gone for over sixty years and is not coming back.’

No longer a wife, and no longer a mother, daughter or sister, either — death has stolen all of those roles. So what does that leave me? A widow? Something altogether different, yet, like all those other words, still defined by an attachment to someone else. So, I ask again, who am I now? Ko wai au?

The smell of the whale carcass spurs Keita’s memories of Abraham. ‘It wasn’t the fault of the whales that my husband and sons relied on them for coin, just like Abraham’s father before him, selling their oils for soap and varnish and fuel for lamps.’ She also recalls her husband ‘telling me long stories about the other, better, Catherine, his mother, the one I would never be like, no matter how much he insisted that I go by Keita — Māori for Catherine — and learned to speak in his tongue.’ When Keita’s granddaughter, Kitty, brings her a package from New South Wales addressed to Abraham, Keita is plunged back into her memories of war, whaling and warriors, when she first met her husband.

In the next chapter we go back a century and into the point of view of the titular Catherine, Keita’s mother-in-law. In 1793 in Cork, Ireland, Catherine is eighteen, loaded onto a convict ship called The Tempest that is bound for the ‘bottom of the earth’ – New South Wales.’ She wishes she could send a message to her mother: ‘I’ll be free in seven years. I’ll come back and find you.’

Catherine has to bunk with three other women in a single berth. Eleanor appears young and weak; she sings plaintive songs that remind Catherine of ‘playing in the meadow with her older brothers and sisters, before everyone died or left for the factories’. Quiet Rosannah has a fae-like beauty; she believes that none ‘of us will see our families again’. Máire has committed some gruesome crime, the details of which are unclear, as they are for all of the convicted women. Keenan paints a clear picture of a world that is unjust to the poor. ‘The wooden berth is even smaller inside than it looks from the outside: the length of a person, but barely wide enough for the four women to lie down. It smells like tar and hay and damp wood, and the air here has sat still for too long.’ Seasick, Catherine’s world is reduced ‘to the few yards between bunk and bucket’.

The narrative moves back and forth between Keita’s past and present, and the woman she describes as ‘a shadow in the corner of my eye, a shape I cannot quite make out, ever since I met Abraham, all those years ago’. He arrives on a whaling ship:

We knew they were coming ashore; it was all anyone in the papakāinga had talked about that day, ever since the whalers’ boat was first spotted sailing past. And what a vessel it was: so much larger than our waka, with masts as tall as the tōtara tree and sails that shuddered each time the god Tāwhirimātea took a deep breath of his precious wind.

The strangers are aliens to her, dressed in clothes ‘the colour of dirt, of tussock grass and of water’. Her father decides to offer her to Abraham – this ‘strange, praying man’ with ‘hair like fire’ – in marriage despite her objections. They need allies against the encroaching Waikato, and many others have already ‘gone south with Te Rauparaha.’

Separated by decades as well as cultural backgrounds, Keita and Catherine face similar struggles. Keenan skilfully winds the threads of these stories together, connecting more than just both women. On the ship, Catherine feels abandoned: ‘She is surrounded by women in this tiny berth; they are so crammed together that she can’t even tell whose smell is whose. And yet she is totally alone.’ After Abraham dies, Keita endures the same fate in her cabin: ‘I’m all alone, and it’s getting as cold as the middle of winter, he makariri i tēnei rā, with a bitter wind blowing from the mountain range and the fire so tricky to light.’ The experience of aloneness extends to Abraham: when he first arrives, he builds a shelter of ponga logs away from the shore and his fellow whalers. He liked solitude, the translator tells Keita, but to her ‘it looked more like loneliness. But I suppose that’s the thing with loneliness and solitude: they look exactly the same from the outside.’

Keenan’s focus, however, is in the forgotten women, Māori and Pākehā, of the story’s three distinct historical time periods. Although covering a lot of ground – mutiny, marriage, war, colonisation – the novel rarely feels like an awkward history lesson, despite very occasional over-exposition. The sensory detail and thorough research create a fully engrossing realm, populated with characters who are living three-dimensional lives. As the author herself mentions in the novel’s historical note, there is a difficult balance between writing a good story and maintaining historical accuracy. Keenan strikes the perfect note of immersion. Catherine and Keita are two very different women, both at the mercy of their historical circumstances.

Readers hoping for a vast historical epic may be disappointed, for Keenan is too meticulous a storyteller to opt for familiar dramatic tropes. Instead, she gives us a carefully constructed study of memory, grief, the stories we tell ourselves, the myths we build. ‘Memories take mere seconds to recall, though they cover long stretches of time, major events and shifts in fortune, lives lost and journeys taken.’