A House Built on Sand
by Tina Shaw

Tina Shaw’s new novel starts innocuously enough, but only for a moment. While getting to the carpark and having to think about where you left your car is a common experience, by the end of the first page of A House Built on Sand, it’s clear that Maxine Christensen’s experience is something else. Her daughter, Rose, is waiting for her at the doctor’s, and Rose’s anxious impatience reveals some of the novel’s central business: the distress of a middle-aged woman suffering from ‘cognitive impairment’, the daughter who must support her mother as she declines, and the power and intensity of mother-daughter relationships.

There can be no happy endings with early-onset dementia, but by concentrating on a specific turning point, Shaw makes the condition only part of the story. In her befuddled state, Maxine is ‘looking for something…or was it a dream? A dream where I was turning back a corner of carpet to find what was hidden beneath’. That could also describe the way this novel works, its pace brisk as it moves between Maxine’s first-person and Rose’s third-person chapters. As well as dealing with Maxine, Rose is trying, with the help of hypnosis, to uncover memories that may be the cause of her claustrophobia.

In Auckland, Maxine turns up at Rose’s in the middle of the night, insisting that she has something to tell her daughter ‘before it’s too late.’ But first, she needs to remember it, so the next day she does a runner to her family’s old home Kutarere, now a bach in a quintessential Aotearoa seaside community. After Maxine has a car accident – ‘Bloody great truck shoved me off the road,’ she insists – Rose is summoned to drive down to in Whakatāne and collect her from a police station. Paul, Rose’s husband, argues that ‘you shouldn’t drop everything every time she gets into trouble … Your mother thinks she can do anything she likes because she knows you’ll be there to pick up the pieces’, but Rose feels the obligation. ‘I’m her daughter,’ she says. ‘I can’t let someone else rescue her. She needs me.’

Maxine is not ready to return to Auckland, certain the answer to whatever she needs to remember is at Kutarere. An exasperated Rose agrees to a night in the country with her mum, in part because ‘it feels like this will be the last chance to be here—just her and Maxine—because she suspects that when they get back to the city, things will change, perhaps irrevocably, and the longer Rose can put that off, the better’. Maxine is also aware that she’s ‘got to get a move on before things go from bad to worse’. The set-piece weekend, with its urgency and nostalgia, is complicated by Rose bumping into her high school boyfriend, and Maxine’s brother Renfrew arriving with unspecified troubles of his own. Both will turn out to be important to the story.

More than anything else, accumulation propels the narrative. A swirling aggregation of fragmented recollections, pieces of a puzzle being assembled or taken away, build towards the articulation of a secret that, in hindsight, is visible all along:

My life snap-locked into separate boxes: the farm, Tony and Wellington, early Auckland, later Auckland…and in between, those summers at Kutarere. Always drawn back, like being tugged by a magnet. It wasn’t just the beach and the harbour, salt on the air, there was more to it than that. If I’m being honest—and sometimes I like to try—it was like being drawn back to a crime scene.

Shaw works the tension between Maxine’s attempts to deny what’s happening and her acknowledgement that it is a constant in her life. Her thoughts are often expressed in muddled language; she’s seeing ghosts, notably a ‘shadow man’ who fills her with fear, and she dreams that things are heaving, ‘like on a ship but not shipshape’. The carpet-turning venture is working though, helping take her back to the past and the people in it.

In the lounge, dust motes are floating in shafts of sunlight. I breathe in the familiar smell and the room opens up to me as if they are…yes, as if peopled. Here’s Douglas on the old sofa, holding a bread bag filled with ice to his knee, always such a klutz. Renfrew is sitting in the armchair with a newspaper, turning a page with a flick of his wrist. Needlessly precise, some might say prissy, even as a boy, and what boy reads newspapers for Chrissake?

Not all Maxine’s memories are this benign. Her career as a social worker haunts her: there are cases she can’t forget. Also contentious is Rose’s father, and why Maxine doesn’t want to talk about him. Shaw conveys the way a young woman can fall in love and miss the signs that her family don’t – though Maxine admits that even when she was pregnant, she ‘was already learning with Tony that there was always one more “big job”, that the cash, the good fortune was always around the corner, out of reach.’ She glimpses darkness in him but it is not a ‘crystal-ball moment for me, just a simmering sense of something not-right that was easy to shunt into the background.’

Shaw’s domestic metaphors reinforce the importance for Maxine in coming home. Carpets, snap-locked boxes, dust motes, the attic ‘like getting into somebody’s brain with all its clutter and useless things lying around’. Through all of this, memories, even bad memories, are linked to family and love. In the author’s note at the end of the book, Shaw describes it as ‘very personal to me as it was inspired by the dementia my mother went through, and, by extension, our family’; Shaw says this was ‘something I wanted to portray in a fictional sense’. In some ways the novel reads as a love letter wrapped into a mystery, crafted and polished with the skill of someone who’s been doing this for decades.

Shaw has been publishing novels, as well as anthologies and nonfiction, since 1996. A House Built on Sand won the 2023 Michael Gifkins Prize for an unpublished novel, a prize that includes publication by Text in Australia. In one sense, it’s disappointing that a book this good needs a competition to secure publication, but Shaw’s novel holds its own next to the novels of previous winners Ruby Porter, Tom Remiger, Gigi Fenster, Tom Baragwanath and Emma Ling Sidnam. A House Built on Sand explores the intricacies of minds, memories and relationships, warmly and acutely observed, with a persuasive plot. Although the title’s house is built on sand, the book is certainly not.