The Newcomer
Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s novel takes us on a journey through loss, love, lust and the darker side of human nature.
On the fictional island of Fairfolk, Judy is waiting for her daughter Paulina. It is Paulina’s thirtieth birthday, and Judy has flown over from the mainland to celebrate it with her. Paulina is unreliable and often late, but on this occasion, she doesn’t turn up at all. Paulina has been murdered.
Now it is two years earlier, and we meet Paulina making a drunken spectacle of herself at a friend’s wedding. A long-term relationship has broken up, she is devastated, drinking too much and displaying all the signs of a personality disorder. In this context she makes an impulsive decision to leave her job and go and live on Fairfolk Island.
From this point we switch between the perspectives of Judy, grieving in the present, and Paulina, clumsily trying to make a life for herself on Fairfolk in the past, while time ticks down to the fate that we know awaits her but she doesn’t.
Into the mix are thrown Jesse, who has a complicated relationship with both Paulina and Judy; Judy’s sister Caro, who is determined to stage-manage her sister’s grief; and a raft of island men with whom Paulina throws herself into relationships that are dysfunctional, to say the least. The murder is the pivot around which the interweaving stories of Paulina and Judy revolve, rather than the point of the story in itself.
This is the third outing for author Laura Elizabeth Woollett, who has been shortlisted for both the Prime Minister’s and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards for Fiction. All of Woollett’s work so far has been inspired by real life crimes, and riffs off actual events. Her collection of short stories, The Love of a Bad Man (2016), puts us inside the imaginary heads of real women who loved the perpetrators of historical crimes. Beautiful Revolutionary (2018) follows a handmaiden of People’s Temple cult leader Jim Jones, whose disciples committed mass murder-suicide in 1968. In The Newcomer, the fictional murder of Paulina is inspired by the actual murder of Janelle Patton on Norfolk Island in 2002.
Like both of Woollett’s previous works, The Newcomer is not a standard whodunnit crime story. Her fiction subverts the crime genre by focusing on the victims, both direct and collateral, instead of the murderer and how he is caught.
The novel uses familiar crime fiction tropes like the ‘dead girl’ and the ‘island paradise’, but creates a fresh take on them. The dead girl, Paulina, is by no means the perfect victim. Self-destructive, disaster-prone and desperately needy, while also funny and good company, she is a real person who does not deserve to die.
And Fairfolk is not the perfect island paradise. Woollett creates an isolated world of stunning physical beauty and stifling social insularity. The islanders speak their own language and have their own customs and social hierarchy. Embedded in the island’s culture, however, is an acceptance of entitled masculinity and predatory behaviour, and a contempt for ‘mainies’, outsiders who deserve everything they get. Into this world blunders desperate, hopeful Paulina, and no good comes of it.
Alternating between Judy and Paulina, Woollett examines grief, victimhood, and the tensions and co-dependencies of family, love and friendship. In doing so, she dives into some confronting themes, including sexual violence, victim shaming, abuse and self- hate. Her subversion of the crime genre gives us a window into individual people, human and flawed, and their reactions and relationships under the most extreme of circumstances.
While acknowledging that The Newcomer is inspired by Janelle Patton’s murder in 2002, Woollett has gone to some lengths to change the history, geography and people of Norfolk Island and to create fictional main characters. That said, the crimes that inspired Woollett’s previous works happened much longer ago. Some readers may have an issue with the real crime connection in this novel, or find it too recent for comfort. If you are in this category, The Newcomer is not the book for you.
Neither will it fit the bill if what you want is a crime novel of the whodunnit variety, with a plot based on the well-trodden formula of following the clues until the bad guy is captured.
For everyone else, The Newcomer is a well-paced read that improves as we get to know Paulina and Judy better, becoming more invested in Paulina’s fate and its aftermath. While it deals with some dark themes, the story is moved along by evocative scenes rich in dialogue. This keeps the momentum going, roots us in the midst of the action and creates moments of real humour.
It leaves us with a vivid sense of the world in which this tragedy plays itself out; a world in which the protagonists are trying to survive as best they can amidst some of the worst manifestations of human behaviour.