Paper Cage is the impressive debut novel from New Zealand writer Tom Baragwanath. The protagonist, Lorraine, is a proto-detective like you’ve not seen before and the themes couldn’t be more relevant. This literary thriller is both a satisfying mystery and biting social critique; racism, victim blaming, misogyny, policing and generational differences all in focus. This is a dark, troubling and yet enriching read.
Masterton is a small town in New Zealand, simmering tensions come to the fore when young Moari children begin to go missing. Lorraine Henry works in the records room of the local police station, largely ignored ‘the-paperclip-lady’ is in a unique position to help with the case. It becomes personal when her great-nephew vanishes.
Paul Burke: Welcome to Crime Time, Tom. I’m curious how a writer from New Zealand winds up living in Paris? Is the novel a way of keeping in touch with home?
Tom Baragwanath: Thanks, Paul. Indeed, we’re quite a long way from home, aren’t we? My wife and I moved here a handful of years ago with remarkably little preparation. I have quite a lot of family in the UK and France, and we’d always talked about how great it would be to try to set up here for a while. Now, a dog, a baby, and a book later, it turns out we were right – it is pretty great. The novel was absolutely a way to keep in touch with home. I was working on the story as part of a master’s programme at Kent University’s Paris satellite campus, and the Masterton setting came to me quite naturally, because it was so pleasurable to spend time there in my mind. I actually finished the first draft during the first weeks of the COVID-19 lockdown, which made me extra homesick for the open space back home.
PB Paper Cage is just coming out in the UK but it was a prize winner before publication and has since been shortlisted for the Ngaio Marsh & Ned Kelly awards in New Zealand and Australia. You must be delighted, you struck a chord with readers and critics?
TB: Delighted is putting it mildly! It’s still hard to believe, even a couple of years later. I thought about writing the novel purely as an exercise in following a story I myself enjoyed, and where I could articulate some ideas I’d been chewing on for a while. It’s funny, because I didn’t initially conceive of the story as slotting within the crime genre – I just wanted to listen to what my protagonist, Lorraine, had to tell me. Looking back, I must have been delusional on the whole genre thing – she’s stuck in the basement of a small-town cop station looking into a series of child abductions, so we’re in pretty classic crime territory.
PB I was looking at your website and you cut your teeth on short stories, was that a proving ground for you?
TB: For sure. During my twenties, I got a little more serious about some of the short stories I’d been scratching around with, and I managed to convince my boss in my consulting job to let me skive off on Monday afternoons to take a short fiction workshop at Wellington’s International Institute of Modern Letters – a really cracking little programme. Short stories were also the only format that matched having a full-time day job. I think I’ve had about a dozen stories published here and there, some of which make me cringe only slightly now.
PB The title of the novel, The Paper Cage, could be seen as a metaphor for so much in the novel. Some things that come to mind; freedom to act, boxing people in, the safety of staying within a box. What does it mean to you?
TB: You’re spot-on. There are a few meanings here, from Lorraine’s literal sense of confinement in the station filing room, to some more troubling interpretations of Aotearoa’s founding document, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, that are expressed by a handful of my characters. I might be giving too much of a peek behind the curtain here, but Paper Cage wasn’t the original title of my manuscript – it was suggested by my fantastic editor at Text, Mandy Brett. It was a phrase I’d used in one of the book’s early police station chapters but forgotten about. We went back and cut it from the chapter itself to diminish the cheese factor. I won’t share the original title I had, because you’ll wonder how on earth the book got picked up.
PB The novel opens on a stormy night, the climate is a backdrop to the story, it gives it that biblical feel, but It’s impossible to ignore climate change, was that on your mind too, a reality we live with now?
TB: It’s something that’s always on my mind, absolutely. I worked in climate policy back home for a while, so it’s something quite close to me. The storm putting eels in the gutter is 100% ripped from the headlines, actually – or, more accurately, ripped from Masterton YouTube. I’ve also grown up in farming communities, and climate change is a constant preoccupation for me.
PB Your grew up in this small town environment. Idyllic landscapes often belie serious community problems. Did you always want to write about Masterton? What is it about the small town – it’s claustrophobic and a microcosm of wider society? Drugs and gangs are one of the issues the Novel addresses.
TB: Masterton is small enough on its own, but I actually grew up in a remote rural area called Wainuioru, where the primary school had about thirty-five kids in total from ages five through twelve (it’s grown since). I find small-town claustrophobia and mutual surveillance to be a rich source of drama – you have people peering over fences at their neighbours, or even slowing down on the drive home to rubberneck and see who’s switched to feeding out sileage, or who finally put in a new set of cattle yards (and where they could have got the money to do so). That’s the more mundane side of things, but small towns also have this incredible storytelling machine humming away in the background at all times – who got fired off the roading crew, whose kid has been acting out at school, who moved back in with their mum and dad after uni. On one hand it’s a sign people care about each other enough to report these facts; on the other hand, it’s a constant kind of jockeying to sort one’s neighbours into a hierarchy, to define what a community means, and what it means to be a part of that community.
PB You raise some uncomfortable questions about racism in society and how things haven’t changed as much as we would like. The crime novel is a good vehicle for social commentary, did you think that when writing this novel?
TB: A political thesis masquerading as a story would make a bad novel, but yes, that aspect was on my mind when working on the story. I think the best kind of novels (including crime novels) work their way gently but thoroughly to ask the right kinds of questions, without trying too hard to answer them. To put it another way, it was my goal to write a story that was morally alive, but not moralising.
PB Through the tale of the missing children we see ingrained & institutional racism and even victim blaming. The authorities are slow to act, the missing children are Māori, (you convey the deep hurt there too). Did you want to say something about the taking of the children from the Māori families, is the novel is a comment on policies and attitudes – uplifting babies?
TB: Definitely. You can probably feel me grappling with that question in the subtext – what does it mean to me as a Pākehā when the state forcibly uplifts children from vulnerable situations – primarily Māori children – and when you can draw a direct line between that vulnerability and our history as a colony? How do we contribute to this situation both explicitly and implicitly, and what do we owe to those affected? Like I said, you don’t want a novel to answer these questions too forcefully, but I tried to at least set the foundation for the reader to consider them.
PB The main protagonist is Lorraine, was that the driver, telling her story? There are so many aspects to it, an ordinary woman with a desire to be anonymous and in the background, but she’s also side-lined by colleagues. What comes out is her strength and determination.
TB: As I get older, I find myself thinking more and more about the indescribable volume of unseen and unappreciated labour that goes into keeping the world ticking over – most of it performed by women, and especially older women. There are also many analogues for a person like Lorraine within my family, so having the novel in the first-person present tense was like having a year-long conversation with the people I miss the most.
PB Talking of ordinary people, she’s an unusual detective, what were you portraying in her role as the paperclip lady?
TB: I didn’t feel like I knew enough about law enforcement in New Zealand to make my protagonist a detective or an officer herself – but as a previous public servant, someone up to their elbows in dusty papers came easily. There’s also a power in Lorraine’s invisibility – it’s how she manages to absorb so much valuable information about the community.
- You demonstrate how much we carry the weight of the past with us. The history and the relationships between the communities are the real landscape of the novel. We need to confront the inequalities and mindsets more I think.
TB: You’re right – whether we’re aware of it or not, the past is always with us, whether we’re talking about events within our own lives, or the uncountable things that have happened in history that tacitly affect the opportunities we’re given, and the experiences we get to have. In New Zealand, like many countries, there’s this temptation to believe in the simplest story ever told: the myth of the level playing field. I wanted in this book to try to explode that notion a bit, and to show how much our actions are confined by what has come before.
PB Did you enjoy the thriller elements, the ticking clock, mystery and suspense? Will you stick with crime fiction, what’s next, can you tell us?
TB: I enjoyed these elements more than I expected! At the moment I’m working on another story featuring Lorraine, and I’m trying to strike a balance between those classic elements of crime fiction – the stakes, the forward momentum, the mystery – while still spending enough time in the tea-room and the roast shop for it to feel like the Masterton I know.
The Paper Cage is published in hardback by Baskerville on 15th February
