What. What. Was it really only 282 pages? I feel as though I’ve been reading Alice Tawhai’s first novel, Aljce in Therapy Land, forever. The covidious plague has been going on for eleventy million years and my brain has become as fragile and holey as a broken sieve. Tawhai (Tainui, Ngāpuhi), who also created the striking cover art, seems to understand this – understands, too, that nothing makes sense.

“It wasn’t as if time actually existed.” I break off and stare out the window.

Aljce in Therapy Land is a reimagining of Alice in Wonderland but for adults, with lots of weed, and set in Wellington (or at least a suspiciously Wellington-ish place). It has been published by Lawrence & Gibson who also published one of my favourite works of NZ contemporary fiction, Lonely Asian Woman by Sharon Lam. Both pukapuka (books) are surreal – original – deeply odd.

Aljce in Therapy Land is about trainee counsellor Aljce. Not Alice: Aljce. Every time I read it my brain hiccupped. I couldn’t work out how to pronounce it. Al-jiss? Al-yiss? Aljce (Al-jiss?) gets a job at the Therapy Hub run by Jillq (Jilk?). Jillq is both the over-the-top Queen of Hearts character and an unsettlingly recognisable portrayal of a bullying boss. Her gaslighting behaviour shreds Aljce’s self-esteem and ramps up her anxiety. Most of her colleagues will happily backstab Aljce in order to placate Jillq: the entire organisation has been warped to maintain the poisonous status quo.

Friends keep urging Aljce to quit her job and she keeps saying she can’t. She tries diagnosing Jillq with a variety of personality disorders but it doesn’t help. Out of her office window Aljce can see a garden full of rabbits. There are golf clubs and balls around the office but some of the clubs are trick ones. Aljce’s colleagues keep calling the Therapy Hub a one-stop therapy shop but no one seems to help any actual clients. It isn’t clear that they’re legally allowed to practise therapy: “I suppose it depends which side the sun comes up,” Mrs Kingi was saying. “Some days it might come up on this side.” What. What. What is going on?

Aljce has two kids but, unusually for a novel about a solo parent, they hardly feature. Most of the action comprises either Aljce getting stoned and philosophising about the universe or Aljce strategising how to deal with Jillq. This gives Aljce in Therapy Land a circular feeling, as Aljce repeats these two activities over and over again. I started getting a bit lost and remembered a text-based Alice in Wonderland computer game I used to play in the 90s where if you made the wrong choice, you’d be stuck in the Queen of Hearts’ garden forever, going round and round and never getting out.

Aljce in Therapy Land feels dreamlike both in its sense of unreality – or heightened reality – and in that nightmarish feeling that something bad is happening and you can’t stop it. It makes for an unbalancing and compelling reading experience, just the job if you need validation of your weird, pandemic-induced brain-holes.

I recommend reading this pukapuka but stopping before you get to the epilogue. It’s a clunkily conventional ending that, for me, spoiled the cleverly unsettling vibe of the rest of the story. Stop instead on page 276. It finishes with Aljce’s Mad Neighbour saying: “Those characters in Wonderland … The White Rabbit, the Queen of Hearts, it wasn’t Wonderland to them. It was reality. And where are we right now? Reality. This IS Wonderland.” We’re down the rabbit hole for sure.

Reviewed by Elizabeth Heritage