Rough water
The Seven Orchids by Ian MacMillan Bamboo Ridge Press, 149 pp, $15
At the beginning of Ian MacMillan’s latest novel, The Seven Orchids, Danielle Baker finds herself in a large shed on Moloka’i. She is 23, an alcoholic and ‘banished’ by her father from Honolulu, where her drug-dealer boyfriend has helped her lead a self-destructive party life.
Danielle’s story intertwines with her six fellow, screwed-up paddlers, who are all suffering through and trying to overcome their own personal problems. They are practicing to paddle in the Na Wahine O Ke Kai canoe race across the Moloka’i channel.
The story plods slowly through Danielle’s alcoholic haze as she shares her father’s dilapidated second home with her younger brother, Kimo, and paddles half-heartedly in the afternoons to break up the monotony.
But a neighbor’s tale begins to give the story shape. Danielle learns about a long-ago tragic affair with a lost koa canoe and a suicide in the shed. Danielle is struck by the girl’s hopelessness and begins to weave her own troubles into an imagined version of the young lover’s life.
But, it is also in the shed that Danielle finds the old koa canoe and–surprise–seven orchids. Inevitably, the seven wilted paddlers find a cause in the canoe and come together to form a team to race.
Along the way, each character grows and learns more about herself and how to dig deep and find strength through paddling. However, the novel does not go beyond a fairly expected set course.
The story finally comes alive when they take to the channel. MacMillan, who teaches fiction writing at the University of Hawa’i-Manoa and whose recent novels include The Braid and The Red Wind, is at his best when he takes the time to describe real action and emotion. Much of what has come before is in rushed back-story or quick dialogue, but in the channel, MacMillan finds his pace:
‘Hold the pace–She [Danielle] now felt a familiarity with it and was able to concentrate exclusively on the motion of her body, no rocking or lunging, just the sweep of the water and the sensation of sockets and bones and muscles moving something like a machine, with the same angles and forces reproduced in each stroke, something everyone else in the boat must have felt, because the canoe did not bounce.’
In a writerly turn, MacMillan has one of the paddlers write a book about the Moloka’i experience, with the seven orchids equal to yet another circumstance. Perhaps one too many.
But Danielle’s discomfort when she realizes what her life might look like on the page is an interesting way to end the novel. Danielle must find a way to untie her fate from the young girl’s tragic end, but MacMillan wisely leaves her transformation open. The question is out there: What will she do now?
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