Kataraina by Becky Manawatu review – a generous and masterful novel

The Guardian

29-05-2025

The Māori and Pākehā writer Becky Manawatu's first novel, Auē (meaning 'to cry, wail or howl' in te reo Māori), came across my desk in a pile of books to judge for the 2020 Ockhams, New Zealand's most prestigious literary award. I'd never heard of Manawatu so the book arrived as blank as a newborn – and yet Auē read as if reincarnated for countless lives. It was an assured and flawless family drama exploring violence and redemption. It scooped the prize. In my notes I said the writing was 'like acid on the skin'. Manawatu has just released her second novel, Kataraina. Where Auē burnt, Kataraina heals; a soothing, rinsing, complex novel.
Kataraina follows the eponymous character who is whāngai (aunty) to orphan Ārama, known as Ari and one of the narrators in Auē. This book acts as both sequel and prequel; one needn't read Auē to enjoy Kataraina, though their stories orbit each other in a tight dance.
Kataraina, like Auē, is about family and violence, secrets and terrible inheritances. There is an incident involving 'the girl who shot the man' at the centre of the story to decipher, though crimes and their perpetrators in Kataraina are many and run deep. The plot is withheld for much of the novel; instead, this is a heart-touching portrait of Kataraina, from child to adult; the whenua (land) where she lives – the swamp, the river; and the ancestors that haunt them.
Kataraina is told from a first-person plural point of view of the whānau (family), a collective perspective that spans centuries: 'It's an old story, and we can see it all as if we are there.' The story is nonlinear, and revealed in beautiful vignettes that weave together like the braided rivers of Kaikōura. The novel is as much about place – the braided rivers and the endangered kanakana (lamprey) – as it is about relationships between characters.
Propelling the story forward is a secret – the identity of a murderer– that lingers as if 'once a dog barking somewhere distant, was now a shrill bird busting its head bloody against the glass pane of her heart'.
Violence shimmers on the edge of the frame in Kataraina. It's the uneasy feeling of observation, of tiptoeing on eggshells before another character stomps over them. Words are powerful matter and Manawatu wields language like an axe against a stump, splintering across the page:
We are dragons and demons and sluts and maggots and we cook a mean mutton chop and we roll a mean joint and write a mean essay and make a mean cuppa and can lend a mean ear and will let our patience be tested for love. It's all for love. We are mean Māori, mean. We're too much.
As in Auē, Manawatu's descriptions are beautiful – the water's surface moves 'like a hand rubbing a dog's coat the wrong way'. There is so much mouthfeel in the writing – the 'soft fat water' of the ocean, the 'hot chips wrapped in creamy paper', in sumptuous, powerful passages like: 'The shamer is a beast, and it doesn't eat apples and eggs and creamed corn or pain. It slurps up hope and the people you might have been. Gorges on her brilliance.'
Manawatu's writing style is reminiscent of Melissa Lucashenko, Toni Morrison and Keri Hulme – insofar as the author seems to be communing with these powerful characters on the altar of the page, and we, the readers, are opportune witnesses.
Like Hulme, Manawatu is of Kāi Tahu (Ngāi Tahu) whakapapa (ancestry). Kāi Tahu has its own storytelling tradition, and it sits here within the New Zealand gothic like a glove, the past informing the present and all time.
Her words are a balm; woven into the text is the guttural language of te reo Māori, using Kāi Tahu dialect. I felt my tongue change while reading Kataraina, and the experience felt tapu (sacred) as the language tumbled down the back of my throat to the guts.
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There is a secondary narrative set in the present, in the form of a scientific field study of the river that 'flowed silver beside her, parallel timelines merging near the rising sun'. What I found genius about this thread was how it expanded my understanding of the observer and the observed through agricultural and botanical colonialism of the mahinga kai (food gathering places) of the Waiau-toa (Clarence River) and surrounds, while also adding depth and nuance to Kataraina's relationships, by examining them through historical changes and metaphors drawn from the landscape, past and present always conversing.
The novel acts as a sort of river water; the swamp is the tipuna (ancestors), and we, the readers, are the kanakana swimming among them. Perhaps Manawatu, the storyteller, the whakahekenga (descendant), is scooping us up from the story of her ancestors, and walking us up the braided rivers, up, up, to Te Au nui (Mataura Falls) to learn, to be moved, to be changed. Whatever her intention, it is a wonder to read: Kataraina is a generous, expansive, masterful novel that drenches up and fills in at once.
Kataraina is out through Scribe in Australia (A$35) and Mākaro Press in New Zealand (NZ$37)