Sue Wootton (poet, short story writer and past Burns Fellow) launched the book and her speech follows:
Paddy Richardson is a wonderful storyteller. I’ve known that ever since years ago I read her short story collection “If we were Lebanese” and it captivated me with its gentle, elegant, often humorous, sometimes tender – but always piercing – prose. What struck me then is how Paddy can make the page dissolve, so that as you read you slip inside the book itself, into its completely realised world, so that coming out at the end is not a simple matter of snapping the covers shut and putting the book aside and carrying on as before.... because now you carry the story – and especially you carry the people in the story – and you miss them, and you are haunted by them, and perhaps one of them you love dearly, another infuriates you, one makes you smile to yourself while you’re doing the dishes, and one has you puzzling at 3 am – why did you do that? – .. .
... because Paddy has an extraordinary gift for writing people. She’s an excellent writer of intricate plots too, as her last 3 novels in particular have demonstrated, but she knows, has always known, that stories happen because of people, and that a good story holds us captive because it is always, at some level, about our own lives. She once wrote that she likes to write about “Ordinary people in ordinary situations.” And then she added, “Except that nobody is ordinary.” Paddy knows that what drives the melodramas and mini-series of our lives is character, ordinary character, and especially its ordinary but often concealed darker aspects: jealousy, rage, betrayal, deceit. Our secrets.
Paddy’s latest novel, Traces of Red, is to my mind her best novel yet. You won’t want to put it down. It is no surprise to me that it’s already been noticed by the critics – it was listed in last week’s Sunday Star Times as one of the ‘Best of’ books of 2011. I would describe this novel as a “psychological intrigue” although I think the marketing department at Penguin will be more pleased if I call it a psychological thriller, which I am also happy to do. They should be even happier when I tell you to think Sebastian Faulk’s Engleby, or Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie stories or Lionel Shriver’s We need to talk about Kevin.
Traces of Red is narrated by Rebecca Thorne, a young current affairs TV journalist. She has had a charmed life: middle-class upbringing, loving parents, good education, great career. She’s ‘nice and normal’. Connor Bligh is in Rimutaka prison for the murder of three of his family members. He’s not had a charmed life, he’s ‘a nerd, a freak and a loner’. He’s clearly, then, not nice and not normal. He must be guilty.
But you will know by now that ‘nice and normal’ in a Paddy Richardson novel are never quite what they seem. This novel will have you questioning nice and normal; but the story’s veracity - and complexity – comes from forcing you to also reconsider “not-nice” and ”abnormal”. Just because Connor’s a loner (and I say this with some feeling, as a bit of a loner myself – not to mention that most of my best friends are loners, not that we get together to discuss it much), just because he’s a loner, does this make him a killer? He’s vulnerable, an easy scapegoat. While Rebecca, with all her apparent freedom and her probing journalistic quest for “truth”, is in her own way as imprisoned as Connor. Neither is she living as honestly as we think at first glance. So who is she trying to free? Who’s innocent here, who’s lying?
I said at the beginning that a good story holds us captive because it is always, at some level, about our own lives. Connor Bligh’s plight carries echoes of Arthur Allen Thomas, Peter Ellis, David Dougherty, and David Bain, real-life stories in which we, as citizens of this society, were involved. We hear ourselves reflected in remarks people in this book make about Connor Bligh: “His eyes look funny; he definitely did it”, and the equally certain “there’s no way that guy would have killed his sister.” (p41) It’s a story about our collective tendency to rush to judgement, and the tension between that impulse and the ponderous process of our ‘evidence-based’ legal system. But I guarantee you’ll be thinking about the words ‘evidence’ and ‘opinion’, and about the line between investigative journalism and trial by media, and about various other moral boundaries long after you finish this book.
Traces of Red constantly calls into question the validity of judgements made from first impressions. One of the recurring leit-motifs in this novel is that of ‘image’, and the idea that much of what we see is false, or at best a limited truth; it’s what we are being allowed to see – or perhaps more particularly, what we will allow ourselves to see. I’m going to finish by reading a passage from near the beginning of the novel. This is Rebecca musing on getting started in her television career. Notice how real her voice, her burnt-out cynicism, and how by the end of this we know so much more about Rebecca than her minders would want us to.
“Giving me the right image was important...to I said I never worred lipstick. I wear red lipstick now. I wear it all the time.” 38
So... traces of red for Rebecca Thorne, self-described “Crusader in the Name of Justice”. Traces of red for Connor Bligh, locked up in prison and remembering the scarlet sunsets of Foxton beach, blissful times spent with his beloved sister. I invite you to slip into the fully realised world of this book, and by the grace of Paddy Richardson’s excellent writing be introduced to Rebecca Thorne and Connor Bligh, real, ordinary, nice, normal people, and each, to a greater or lesser degree, wronged. So many stories begin with a wound.
Congratulations Paddy on the publication of Traces of Red. Writing is such a slog sometimes, and as Don de Lillo said, novelists die inside, and alone. It therefore gives me great pleasure, and I am very honoured, to help launch Traces of Red here in the presence of friends, family and fans. We’re here to cheer it on and to tell you we love it, bravo, and encore!
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