Paddy Richardson reviews one of the best novels of 2021
Wellington writer Sue Orr's novel Loop Tracks is the story of the girls who went away. Down south, up north, across the island. A few of them came back. They were different; somehow awkward, less comfortable in their skin. They didn’t talk about it until years later…
Charlie is 16 and pregnant. It's 1978 and New Zealand is tentatively moving towards the recognition that abortion just may be a woman’s right to choose. The Auckland Medical Aids Centre, the only clinic in New Zealand offering abortion, opened in 1974, but following the 1977 Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion Act, it's been forced to close. But the Sisters Overseas Service helps girls to travel to Australia for abortions. Charlie’s parents use their savings as well as borrowing a large sum of money to pay for a return flight to Sydney, and an abortion at a Sydney clinic. But the plane is delayed for hours. Charlie sits waiting with other girls also booked at the same clinic. She gets off the plane.
Orr’s portrayal of the motivation for Charlie’s impulsive choice is both heart-breaking and totally convincing. Charlie is still a child and, as a child, has created a fantasy scenario. The unknown father of her child (Heathcliff, she is Cathy) and the one-time alcohol-induced sexual encounter she has had with him, has, in her mind, transformed into a full-blown relationship: "Well, my boyfriend’s called Dylan, and we’re too young to have a baby but we’re together. We’re in love and we’re getting married."
Charlie’s attention is drawn to an article about a celebrity wedding in the magazine and that idealised story, and her own fantasy, cause her to stand and leave. "Sixteen, pregnant with her head full of romance and a brain yet to develop the parts that tether her to reality."
Charlie is not thinking ahead because she can't; the situation she has somehow fallen into is simply beyond her understanding. Her parents are ashamed of her. Everything must be kept secret. Her mother left her outside the air terminal. She has never been on a plane before. She cannot even believe she can be pregnant: "Everyone knows you can’t get pregnant the first time."
But Charlie has lost the one option which may have saved her. She has to have the baby. She is sent off to live with a distant cousin. She has the baby. "Here are the two things that she does know at 11:05am. on 26 November. The baby’s gasping cry as it took its first breath. And that it seems to have disappeared leaving no trace of itself other than her torn body."
But of course, this isn't the end of the story. Orr uses patterns as an underlying motif within the novel such as Charlie’s memories of the spirograph, her favourite childhood toy, to illustrate how a shape, however small, will spiral once begun. Orr deftly moves us to the older adult Charlie, now living with her 18-year-old grandson Tommy, abandoned by the son she gave birth to. That long-ago beginning, that child-woman who left that plane, has spiralled into a present life made static by the scars of shame and secrecy she has carried with her.
She's fiercely protective of Tommy, protective, also of herself. Behind her are relationships, all of them failures; she's so afraid of being abandoned that she's destroyed them.
Much of the novel is partially set during the Covid lockdown. Isolation encourages reflection, and the narrative moves between Charlie’s recollections of what happened to her in 1978 and her present world. There's a strong focus on the power of communication and the danger of withholding truth. Charlie’s parents can't speak to her about her pregnancy, and her choice of career has been limited by a speaking disorder: "Mid-conversation the disfluency would crackle like a power surge on a cloudless day; instant, invisible and deadly." It's not until she speaks out her truth, first to her friend Adele and then Tommy, that the spirals of her life begin to flow with more ease.
It's a novel rich in reflection and debate over issues such as addiction, ageing, autism, abortion and euthanasia; should men have a say over abortion; should the government control how we should end our lives? Should we trust logic or emotions? Orr examines how, in our differences and complexities we respond to our world.
Loop Tracks is a remarkable novel, beautifully and sensitively written, which demonstrates how the secrecy of the past may so unfairly encroach on the present. I am left with an image. That child on the plane. Alone, afraid, shamed and powerless.
Loop Tracks by Sue Orr (Victoria University Press, $30) is available in bookstores nationwide.
