Ash by Louise Wallace: Risky but impressive

I’d not come across Louise Wallace before I spotted her first novel on NetGalley. She’s a poet from New Zealand whose work isn’t easily available in the UK. Ash is a brief novella which follows a country vet on maternity leave living with her young family in the shadow of a volcanic mountain.

Work is a holiday and I smile into the beautiful quiet.

Thea is called in to cover a colleague’s leave, juggling the domestic chores with more help from her partner’s mother than from Nick himself. At the weekly meeting she quietly seethes when the male team members looking to her when the biscuits run out, resisting the silent implication that she should replenish the plate, or sort out clean coffee cups. Her mother-in-law leaves pioneer women’s memoirs out in a passive aggressive nudge towards full-time motherhood. When the volcano erupts, coating everything in ash, it’s Thea who picks up the slack at work and at home while Nick cloisters himself in the spare room, working from home for a fitness influencer. Called in to deal with a distressed heifer, Thea is infuriated by its owners’ cruelty and lets them know it. A family crisis makes her support of her young female colleague impossible. Suddenly, work recedes far into the background.

Once, the wife’s skin had been covered in a tiny volcanic range, ready to splinter and fly apart if pushed.

Interspersing Thea’s narrative are ‘Figures’ – stream-of-conscious passages, brief poems, cries from the heart repeated across the page – together with a fable in footnotes, all of which draw on a variety of sources as Wallace makes clear in her notes. Risky for a debut but overall, it worked for me, evoking the chaos of domesticity and parenting while holding down a responsible job with little help. Thea’s frustration is underlined by a dark humour, leavened with flashes of love and affection. The eruption echoes her consuming fury which may seem a little heavy handed yet the novel is far from that. Ash is very brief, even more so given the font size and the white space surrounding the Figures, but it would be a shame to race through it. It won’t appeal to everyone, but I found it an impressive first novel and will be looking out for Wallace’s second.

Cornerstone: London 9781529155600 160 pages Hardback (NetGalley)