Making Sense of our Lives

Loop Tracks by New Zealand writer Sue Orr has just been released by Upswell Publishing. Previously published by Victoria University of Wellington, this captivating novel is now more widely available, as it deserves to be. Loop tracks refer to the way our lives spiral forwards and backwards in time over our lifespan, intersecting at different points with our experiences, and allowing us to view our past from different perspectives. In this novel, Sue Orr has created a clear narrative structure within which the main character’s thoughts mimic the spirograph pattern on the book’s cover.

The novel begins with a scene in Auckland airport in 1978. Charlie has just turned sixteen and is waiting to board a flight to Sydney for the termination of her pregnancy. The Pan Am flight is delayed and after hours of waiting on board, passengers are invited to disembark and wait in the terminal. Charlie’s actions at that moment shape the rest of her life. In Loop Tracks she tells her story in first person from the distance of forty years on, looping back often to that pivotal time in her childhood, reliving the reactions of her parents, her schoolmates, and her own emotions as she makes a life for herself.

Loop Tracks is the first novel I have read with the COVID pandemic as a backdrop to its 2020 action. Along with New Zealand politics (abortion law, the lead-up to an election, and a referendum on euthanasia), adjustment to pandemic restrictions intrudes on the lives of Charlie and her circle in ways that resonate with the novel’s themes of the right to choose, the consequences of choices, and the serendipity of moments of joy.

We all enjoy most the books we find difficult to put down. Loop Tracks was one of those books for me. In large part, this was due to the quirky and authentic voice of the main character. In her forthrightness, Charlie reminded me of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Ketteridge in the novel of the same name. A primary school teacher and would-be linguist, Charlie needs to release her live-in grandson as he pulls away from her teaching and protection into adult life with ideas of his own about abortion, pandemic restrictions, and euthanasia.

I found Loop Tracks an engrossing novel about one woman’s life and thoughts in the context of political issues affecting the contemporary lives of women in New Zealand and Australia.

Listen to this post here: