In the 1980s, the town of Dunedin, on New Zealand’s South Island, unexpectedly became the nexus of a scene that embodied the Platonic ideal of indie rock. This movement, championed by the maverick Flying Nun Records, garnered a small but devoted worldwide following. It was a rare case of an artistic community whose isolation was its strength: a delicate sensibility developed at its own pace, unencumbered by the boorish outside pressures of conventional commercialism. 

Why am I telling you this in the Montreal Review of Books? Fair question. Because now, a few decades later, the spirit of Flying Nun appears to be alighting in another branch of the arts, this time in a North Island publishing house devoted to Kiwi graphic literature. Earth’s End Publishing is clearly content to proceed at its own pace, allowing it to nurture a work as unique and compelling as Ned Wenlock’s Tsunami, the company’s first book in nine years, brought to Canada by Pow Pow Press. In Tsunami – as in a good song by, say, the Chills – youthful innocence is in imminent peril. Melancholic nostalgia battles for tonal prominence with an undertow of something much more unsettling. At the centre of it all is a protagonist destined for the alienated adolescent hall of fame.

Peter, the novel’s twelve-year-old loner hero, is in the home stretch of his primary school career. For him and his classmates, as for preteens from time immemorial, it’s an awkward life stage – trapped between their impulses and their inability to act upon or even articulate them. Peter, for example, has strong thoughts on the unjust power dynamics that rule all human interchange, but he still needs his mother’s permission to get a haircut. He also has to be hyper-aware of Gus, the neighbourhood bully, who terrorizes him for seemingly no better reason than because he can.

Set in a suburbia expressly laid out for adults and their cars, it’s telling that the kids in Tsunami are almost always on foot. What’s more, they seem to be constantly running – chasing or, in Peter’s case, being chased by the bully and his minions. Affection is expressed through physical aggression – “play-fighting” that isn’t really play, and isn’t really fighting. Until it is.

Though there is a smartphone or two in evidence, the book lends an oddly pre-digital feel to these kids’ interactions and their negotiation of the world. Their dramas, masterfully orchestrated by Wenlock, play out not online but in broad daylight, where you can run but can’t always hide, and where actions have consequences.

Wenlock’s stylistic arsenal – social realism and emotional veracity conveyed via sharp, plainspoken dialogue and simple yet highly stylized visuals, with little to no use of perspective – makes for a potent blend. What’s remarkable is how quickly you accept the world on Wenlock’s visual terms: within pages you’re too caught up in the unfolding drama to worry about how these people get around on feet that resemble rounded stumps. 

So deft is the handling of Peter’s journey that you barely notice as Wenlock gradually shifts gears, ratcheting up the element of menace and finally pulling off a plot reversal that will have you gasping. A conscientious reviewer cannot possibly reveal more than that. Nor should the nuanced significance of the title be given away. Suffice to say that water plays a part, though not in any way you’re likely to guess. Tsunami is a book whose modest fame deserves to spread far beyond New Zealand. For an ideal listening accompaniment, I suggest Daddy’s Highway by the Bats, from Flying Nun Records. mRb