Why Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar recommends Ingrid Horrocks’s women-led stories in ‘All Her Lives’

Poet-memoirist Ingrid Horrocks makes her debut as an author of prose fiction with All Her Lives: Nine Stories. It is the first book by a New Zealand-based author that I read. The stories are set in various timelines, ranging from the 1700s to the present era. Beneath the title of each story is the year or the era in which that story is set, giving the goings-on in that story context. Some of the stories are interlinked with each other – or, rather, a character from one story traipses into another story; yet each story is a whole, the characters becoming intrinsic parts of the stories.

Except for four stories which are set in Europe (with one set partly in the US), the rest of the stories are set in New Zealand. The characters are mostly White. One important side character is a non-White male from East Africa, in a story whose timeline says “Now”. Horrocks outlines the characters’ backgrounds and how they came to be in New Zealand, and even if they are out of it, what connects them to New Zealand. Despite being set in New Zealand, the concerns in the stories are universal, and the stories are engaging.

Women are the lead in the stories in All Her Lives. They take up challenging tasks all by themselves. Yet their vulnerabilities show in their most private spaces and are related to people, usually men, who are close to them – brother, partner, lover, son.

The question of belonging

The opening story, “Evie on Branch”, is set in the year 1919 and its protagonist is the eponymous Evie who had worked as a nurse during the First World War and has, upon the end of the war, returned to her brother Finn, his wife Mae, and their infant daughter Kit in the “three-room weatherboard home [her] father had built” in a valley. An undercurrent of guilt can be felt as the circumstances behind why Evie, a woman, went into war while Finn, a man, did not is revealed.

“Evie on Branch” set the tone for me for the rest of the book. I found terms peculiar to New Zealand and Māori life (like whare and pūkeko) and appreciated Horrocks’s style, which is a calm, unhurried unfolding of events till an irony or realisation is reached.

Mae, Finn’s wife and Evie’s sister-in-law from “Evie on Branch”, makes a cameo in the next story, “Marvellous Instruments”, which is set in the year 1955. Mae’s role here is that of the proprietress of the “Wairarapa farm” where the protagonists of “Marvellous Instruments” settled upon their arrival to New Zealand from Scotland. “Marvellous Instruments” is built around the Plunket Society which was founded by the health reformer Sir Frederic Truby King and is “still Aotearoa New Zealand’s largest support service for parents with babies and young children”.

The next two stories are set in more recent timelines: “The Usual Spiel” in 1995 and “Concrete Box” in 2017. “The Usual Spiel” has Mae and Finn’s daughter, Kit, making a cameo – even though she is just a voice on the telephone – as the mother-in-law of the protagonist, Sophie, who is a schoolteacher. Upon hearing from her teenage daughter, Hazel, about something bad that happened to a female classmate of hers, Sophie is worried to death; but then she realises that the community’s response to a crisis might not be like hers and that her response might be misunderstood as an overenthusiastic interference.

“Concrete Box” is in the first person, narrated by a single mother of a school-going child and an infant. They have a dog whose droppings on the street offend the neighbours, leading to them borderline insulting the narrator. They live on rent in a doer-upper in a land where “[the narrator’s] father’s whole family had lived…for forever, before the hills were even cleared and that ‘first’ house built.”

The narrator does not have a regular job or steady income, is humiliated for being a renter and for having a dog who litters, it is raining outside, the child is running a fever, the infant is uncontrollable, the dog has just spilled baby food on the narrator’s bed, and the overwhelmed narrator does not have anyone to help her. I wondered if the renter plot element was Horrocks’s statement about the indigenous people, about who belongs to a land, but the two pages in which she describes the vulnerability of a penniless and harried single mother were nothing short of relatable.

The book travels back in time to trace the journey taken by Mary Wollstonecraft, the English feminist writer and philosopher, to Scandinavia to look for a horde of silver that had belonged to her lover, Gilbert Imlay, the American businessman and diplomat. “The Silver Ship”, set in 1795, recounts Wollstonecraft’s daring expedition, something she was probably not expected to undertake. Yet Wollstonecraft travels and deals with men and returns not with the silver but with a certain hope.

In “The End of the Fair”, set in Devonport in 1981, activists Diana, Madeline, and Jack go to a fair to protest the docking of American nuclear ships along the coast. Committed to the cause of disarmament, Jack drives little kids to tears as he recounts stories of destruction caused by war.

In “Women’s Choice Night”, set in 2005, Ben – whose mother is Diana from “The End of the Fair” – has moved from New Zealand to Berlin, where he is an intern at a tech firm, working in the same ecosystem his mother had been opposed to in her youth; while Eileen, Ben’s girlfriend in the US, is curious about her sexuality.

Back and forth

In “Murmurations”, set in Now, Daniel has taken after his mother, Madeline (from “The End of the Fair”), and is a climate activist, concerned with issues like “[the] collapsing Gulf Stream” and “[the] heat dome in Canada’s Pacific”, part of an underground group called Falcon, in London.

Daniel is in jail for his activism and Madeline has travelled from New Zealand to London, burning “three thousand kilograms of CO₂” as she travelled in an aeroplane, to meet him. She meets Daniel’s companions from Falcon, one of whom is Samson, a tour operator from East Africa, prompting her to wonder if activism is easier for Daniel because he is a White male and even though he is in jail, than it is for someone like Samson, who had to be whisked off to London by “The Movement” for raising awareness about dying coral reefs in East Africa.

The question that is constantly in Madeline’s mind is “why Daniel?”, leading her to compare ethics of activism in her time and in the present era. She is afraid for her son, who she had carried from the embryo stage to a baby, a boy, a man, an amateur ecologist, a tutor, and, finally, an activist. She is visibly disillusioned by all activism. And yet, she wants her son to follow his heart because she knows that what he is doing is right.

“Murmurations” takes its title from “a murmuration at dusk, thousands of starlings in swooping black patterns…doing it for warmth and protection from predators…[each] bird [responding] to a handful of its nearest neighbours, creating a wave-like motion that pulsed through the entire flock.” This passage probably is the gist of this story, or of activism too. Each one for others, all conducting themselves in harmony, no one betraying another. Horrocks points out the hollowness of concern for the environment in commercial acts that have been normalised.

For example, in seeking alternatives for dairy milk at a café: “[Madeline] watched the barista perform the familiar iterative dance, oat milk, almond milk, soy milk steaming off the machine as each customer performed a version of mild concern for a planetary crisis in which they only half believed.” Though each story in this collection is remarkable, I enjoyed “Murmurations” the most.

The book ends with “The Silver Ship II: A Conversation Fragment”, which is set in 1795 and is a short, touching piece imagining a conversation between Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus and the younger daughter of Wollstonecraft, ten days after whose birth Wollstonecraft passed away from puerperal sepsis. The two women are shown to be rowing a boat, “[the] sound of water parting for their passage, like a glass being endlessly emptied and refilled.”

The stories in All Her Lives are still lingering in my mind. Horrocks’s writing is fluid and yet sumptuous; her themes are thought-provoking; and her technique of letting a character feature in more than one story, as a minor character in one and the lead in another, drives home the fact that even though places and circumstances might change in this huge world, everyone seems to be having a bearing on everyone’s life in ways that might not be readily apparent or understood – like the butterfly effect or the routine, inherent process of murmuration among starlings.

All Her Lives: Nine Stories is a highly satisfying read.

Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar is an author and translator. Sowvendra received the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar in June 2015.

All Her Lives: Nine Stories, Ingrid Horrocks, University of Queensland Press.

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