JP POMARE Call Me Evie. Reviewed by Ashley Kalagian Blunt
Who is Evie? JP Pomare’s taut debut thriller has already been shortlisted for crime writing awards.
A man holds a young girl against her will. She bolts, reaching the front door of the house, but the man catches up and drags her back inside. He forcibly shaves her head. She remembers a time when she loved him. He calls her darling. ‘I’ve been through this before,’ he says. ‘And I’m not going to let you leave me.’
Minutes earlier, however, she was cutting off her own hair, using tiny scissors found in a first-aid kit.
The girl is 17-year-old Kate Bennett, though her captor introduces her to others as Evie. She decides to call him Jim. A bespectacled man with yellow teeth, Jim claims he is protecting her. Kate is from Melbourne, where her schoolmates are preparing for exams, but now she and Jim are in Maketu, a small town on New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty coast. Some of the locals are welcoming, while others bristle, vaguely threatening or outright hostile.
A tightly wound psychological thriller, Call Me Evie explores trauma, trust and the instability of memory. This debut novel from JP Pomare, host of the On Writing podcast, draws its dual setting from the author’s background. Now Melbourne-based, Pomare is originally from New Zealand.
The novel’s tension comes from the many unknowns established in the shearing of Kate’s hair, and their well-paced revelation. The story alternates between the ‘ before <‘ and ‘> after’ sections, each rushing toward the event encompassed in the brackets, the event Kate can’t quite remember.
Jim helps her recover her memory and overcome her panic attacks, insisting that he’s taken her away to protect her from the aftermath of what happened in Melbourne. Locked in her room at night, with no access to the internet or television, Kate has no way of knowing for sure. She remains suspicious of Jim’s motivations:
Everything he has said, everything he has suggested, could be a manipulation. It’s possible I had nothing to do with any of it. It’s possible my dreams and memories are fabrications. Maybe I wasn’t there that night at all.
Yet when they visit a doctor in nearby Te Puke, Kate has the opportunity to break free from Jim, but chooses to remain silent.
With precise narrative control, Pomare leaves a bread-crumb trail to a surprising twist. Dread builds with each chapter, echoing Maketu’s rugged landscape:
The storm could strike all of us from the country. This thumb of land could be sent sliding into the sea. Somewhere amongst it all is the endless lolling of the waves. Always folding over themselves onto the shore. One wave coming in while another recedes and the rain drills down. Between the two waves they make an ever-widening grin, some dark thing laughing.
Even Jim’s juice-making ritual, part of his effort to restore Kate’s physical health, feels ominous:
The grinding of the juicer fills the house as the first piece of beetroot churns through. … The spout coughs a foaming blood-rich concoction.
Kate’s harsh weeks in New Zealand contrast with her suburban teenage life back in Melbourne. There, her thoughts revolve around her crush, Thom Moreau. Her father, minor rugby celebrity ‘Bomber’ Bennett, formerly of the Melbourne Gators, has a chequered past, but does his best as a single parent. Still, at 15, Kate is friendless except for Willow, a girl from swimming lessons with a remorseless mean streak. Kate is on the scrawny side, not ‘strong and filled out’ like Willow, but it’s her psychological insecurity that drives her actions.
Like Willow, Thom comes into Kate’s life through swimming, where she watches him move through the water with natural athleticism. When he quits the lessons, she interacts with him through mutual Instagram likes, dreading the day he’ll post a selfie with his girlfriend. But we know Thom and Kate will come together, because Thom is intimately involved in the murky event that destroyed her life. Early on, Kate says:
Before you can understand why Thom and I did what we did, you must know one thing: I envied the girls who got attention but not the attention itself. Rather, I craved the comfort they took from it, the way some girls waded through it. I wanted to be like that.
Naïve and unsure of herself, Kate is believable both as a teen and a trauma victim. The exception to this is her occasional grand insight into the human condition, when she speaks with the wisdom of a much older person. She notes, for example:
There is a stranger inside everyone, an animal that doesn’t think but responds only to its instincts and impulses. Some people will let the stranger take over only once, possibly twice in their entire lives.
Aside from these moments, Call Me Evie is captivatingly taut. Pomare’s settings are evocatively portrayed, and his characters thrash through their lives with an almost painful authenticity. His verbs crackle with energy: engines groan, juicers thunk to a stop, bruises pulse with pain, and warmth diffuses where two people touch. Throughout is the persistent question – whose memories can you trust?
Call Me Evie has been shortlisted for the 2019 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Novel and for Best First Novel. The winner will be announced in Christchurch on 14 September 2019.
JP Pomare Call Me Evie Little, Brown 2019 PB 400pp $29.99
Ashley Kalagian Blunt is the author of My Name is Revenge, a finalist in the Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award. Her writing also appears in Griffith Review, Sydney Review of Books, the Australian, the Big Issue, and Kill Your Darlings. Find her at ashleykalagianblunt.com
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