Once Upon A Time In New Zealand...

Having started my week of indigenous writing here in Australia, I'm finishing it on the other side of the ditch in New Zealand.  Our trans-Tasman neighbours are well known for having a fairly robust multi-racial society, with the indigenous Maori population far more integrated than is the case with the Australian Aborigines.  However, things obviously aren't quite as rosy as many would like to make out - today's book shows that many things are (or were) rotten in the state of Aotearoa...

*****
Once Were Warriors is an extremely popular New Zealand film, but the fact that it was originally a book is probably less known.  Alan Duff's novel is a searing exposé of the myth of racial harmony in New Zealand, portraying the life of the Maori underclass in a small regional town.  From first page to last, it grips the reader, pushing them into places they would rather not go, making them wonder what exactly has hapepned to a proud race of people.

The story centres on the Heke family, typical inhabitants of the town of Two Lakes.  Jake is the father, a feared fighter, a constant drinker and a threat to friends, foes and family members alike.  His wife Beth sleepwalks through her days, living only for her kids and wishing she could summon up the courage to take the first steps towards improving her life.  Together the Hekes have six children of various ages, exposed to the misery of growing up in an area rife with drugs, violence and chronic unemployment - and not all of them will make it through the book unscathed...

The story is told through the eyes of several of the family members, primarily Jake, Beth and elder daughter Grace, and each of the voices is unique and shattering, rough and wild.  At times, the language verges on steam-of-consciousness, deteriorating as the level of drunkenness increases, almost Joycean in its beauty and impenetrability.  In fact, one particular chapter, a thirty-page chunk which largely takes place in a bar, is as breath-taking in its own way as anything you'll find in Ulysses - but a lot more violent...

What comes across in the book's 200 pages is a picture of a society in ruins, a people with no hope, cast into a permanent cycle of unemployment and debt.  The streets of Two Lakes are home to casual, sickening violence, making it a very bad place to be if you're not a fighter.  It's not that there is any personal malice or bad blood - it's simply that the suppressed rage of living a life without prospects needs to be released somehow.  Jake and his friends just need to lash out at someone, anyone...

With no work, and little prospect of any, people spend their days wasting what little money they have on cigarettes and alcohol, unwilling and unable to put a little aside in the vain hope of improving circumstances.  In the first chapter, Beth makes the staggering discovery that her house is bookless, with not a single real book to be found from top to bottom - a symbol of the hopelessness of her situation.  The only other place the locals can look to restore their pride is their heritage, but the reality is that this new suburban underclass has lost its ties to its tradition.  When they left their villages, they abandoned their culture and their language, and now they are caught in a no-man's land, stranded between the Maori society they have voluntarily left and the white culture they will never be a part of.

Last year I read Witi Ihimaera's The Rope of Man, two collected novels which also dealt with the issue of Maori tradition and the importance of keeping a hold of it in modern society, but where Ihimaera's work was largely positive, Once Were Warriors is savage in its negativity.  It's over twenty years old now, so perhaps things have improved in New Zealand, but if this is (or was) a reflection of reality, it's a sobering one.

A book Once Were Warriors frequently reminded me of was Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked into Doors, another look at a post-colonial society struggling to achieve equality.  While the oppressors have gone home in Ireland (at least in most of it...), they have left behind a similar legacy to the one portrayed by Duff, that of an ethnic group which is struggling to keep up its own language and culture.  Paula Spencer's troubles stem less from ethnic than social issues, but the end result is the same - frequent, unmerited beatings...

One path to take out of the mess is to embrace the violence and join one of the local gangs, a choice one of Jake's sons decides to make.  The gangs are a law unto themselves and represent a substitute for the traditional extended Maori family.  However, there is always another - a better - path to take, and that is to return to traditional values and embrace the past.  By working as a community, the individuals can take strength from shared numbers, and by the end of the novel, this seems to be the path Duff is suggesting his people take.

Another point which comes across in the book is that Duff lays the blame for his people's decline squarely on the shoulders of the Maoris themselves.  Despite the disadvantages that the indigenous population faces in a white-dominated society, the writer refuses to take the easy way out and blame the Pakeha (Europeans) for Maori problems.  In fact, in the glimpse we get of Jake's family history, and the issues he and his ancestors faced, it's clear that the Maoris, in their own way, are just as guilty of discrimination as the Pakeha ...

Once Were Warriors is a book I would recommend to anyone, a biting critique of a people at a turning point, a proud race at rock bottom, trying to find their way back to old glories.  Duff insists that this is to be found in a greater sense of community and a return to traditional cultural values - and it's hard to disagree.  One of the enduring images of the book is the passion and energy shown when those Maoris who have retained the ties to their culture sing, dance and mourn.  The city-bred Maoris can only stand and wonder as their distant relatives show them the way out of their miserable lives:

"On and on and on, a reincarnation of what was, a resurgence of fierce pride, a come-again of a people who once were warriors."  p.127, UQP (1991)

As Jake finds out the hard way, being a warrior is about more than just fighting...

Kiwi Lit - Part Two

...and here's Part Two!  Who will be Number One?  The answer may surprise you...

Kiwi Lit - Part One

Part One of my wrap of the New Zealand Reading Month Mini-Challenge - enjoy :)

Links: Maree's Just Add Books Blog

Stories from Across the Ditch

A while back, on the Thursday night Twitter chat-fest we call South Pacific Book Chat (#spbkchat), the topic was New Zealand literature, and I was cast in the unusual position of a mute bystander, having only read works by Katherine Mansfield (exquisite short stories, poignant and thought provoking) and Lynley Dodd (Hairy Maclarey from Donaldson's Dairy).

The one name that came up again and again was Janet Frame, so I decided to check her out and was lucky enough to receive a copy of The Daylight and the Dust, a collection of Frame's short stories, from the lovely Golda at Random House Australia.  Of course, then I had a nasty bout of RSI and a flare-up of my old back issues too, which made both reading and writing (typing) rather difficult - not to mention painful.  Consider this a belated repayment of my literary and blogging debts :)

*****
The Daylight and The Dust is a selection of Frame's short stories, gleaned from her various collections, ranging from the early 1950s to the end of her life.  There is a staggering variety in the selection, with serious, thought-provoking psychological tales brushing shoulders with whimsical childhood memories and ultra-short stories which are over almost before you've realised you're reading them.  Several of the stories are set in London, and this colonial view of life in the mother country reminded me a little of V.S. Naipaul's short fiction, written around the same time.  Of course, as a Kiwi writer, it's rather obvious to say that Frame's writing is influenced by Mansfield (I'm not sure anyone from New Zealand could write short stories without sensing her shadow looming heavy in the background), but there is a definite similarity in some of the themes covered.

One example of this is The Tea Cup, a story about a woman sharing lodgings and tentatively trying to create a connection with a male fellow lodger.  The subtle desperation exuding from the poor, lonely woman reminded me of several of Mansfield's eternal spinster characters, wonderful women destined to live and die alone, unloved.  The idea is also helped by Frame's light, airy style, with both the language and the events of the story appearing at first to be quite trivial while masking great sadness and inner torment.

Another story touching on a sense of unfulfilment (if that's a word!) is The Triumph of Poetry - one of the longer stories in the book -, which follows a man from his very successful school days through his moderately successful life, always reminding the reader of the hero's failure to become a real poet, life having got in the way.  Despite the character's apparent professional and personal happiness, Frame skilfully weaves an air of unhappiness between the lines, leaving the reader with the sense of what might have been.

One of the interesting features of this book was the number of very short stories, ludicrously brief in some cases.  One, the title story, barely reached two hundred words (and I have to say that it wasn't one of my favourites...), and there were several others which were a little over a page long.  However, even in some of these shorter efforts, there was some wonderful writing.  In Dossy, a story taking up just under two pages of very uncluttered text, the little girl featured goes from being a Queen bee to an envious poor girl to a doomed orphan in the space of a few hundred words (and three differing viewpoints) - a wonderful achievement.

In fact, several of the more memorable stories centre on childhood, Frame evoking nostalgic memories of long, lazy holidays long forgotten.  However, for the adult reader, there are often darker undertones lurking beneath the surface, saving the tales from becoming mere descriptive passages and turning them into something a little more interesting.  Good examples of this include The Reservoir, a story about children daring to break an unspoken taboo, and Swans, where a family (sans father) go on a curiously bleak day trip to the beach.  These stories are both familiar and yet slightly unnerving, leaving the reader with a sense of more happening than meets the eye, which (of course) is how good writing should be...

The Daylight and The Dust is a nice introduction to an obviously talented writer, but it is a little like an appetiser before the main meal.  I'm more of a Victorian pot-boiler man than a short-story afficionado, and these stories have merely whetted my appetite for something a little lengthier.  So, to finish up today, I'll turn the spotlight back on my audience and ask: have you read any of Frame's novels?  What would you recommend?

I'd be very interested to hear your opinions :)

*****
P.S. As I began to write this review, I flicked over to Twitter (as you do) and, after following a few interesting tweets and links, I found something which brings a certain symmetry and serendipity to my post.  Apparently, Tim Jones (an NZ Science-Fiction Writer and a regular at the aforementioned #spbkchat event) was awarded a prize this week (and well done to him for that!).  Which one, you ask?  Well, would you believe it was the Janet Frame Memorial Award for Literature?  Life, sometimes, truly is stranger than fiction.  And nicer :)

Review Post 18 - Bits and Bobs

I'm rather busy at the moment (things to do, people to see, you know how it is), so after finishing Cloud Atlas, I decided to take it easy and not plunge straight into another long book which might take me a long time to finish.

Instead, naturally, I went through three short ones in five days. I really should learn not to kid myself that I'm not going to read... Anyway, the books in this post, unlike those in some of my recent reviews, have very little in common, other than the fact that they live in my study, and I've been vaguely meaning to read them for a while. Enjoy ;)

*****

As you may have noticed, my preference is for long, involved novels, so short stories are not really my thing (I find them a little frustrating at times, to tell the truth). However, there is something more frustrating than a short story, and that's an unfinished short story - and that's where we'll start today. You may have read my first and second reviews of Katherine Mansfield's Collected Stories, and this week I finally managed to polish off the last parts of the monster, consisting of her last (posthumously) published collection, The Doves Nest and Other Stories, plus a bunch of fragments which remained incomplete at the time of her death.

Again, there were some lovely pieces; I particularly liked The Doll's House, a moving story involving Kezia and her family (the stars of a couple of earlier stories), and A Cup of Tea, an interesting tale of a random act of kindness between social classes. However, once through the few complete stories and into the fragments, I just lost it. I simply couldn't engage with four pages of build up towards a denouement which had never been written and never will. I'm sure academics specialising in Mansfield find these morsels fascinating; I was just glad to get them out of the way.

I know. It's my own fault. Short stories aren't meant to be devoured by the plateful, and I have behaved like a little boy at a wedding, stealing a plateful of fairy cakes and stuffing them all into my mouth as quickly as possible (before regurgitating them outside the toilets). There were some amazing stories in the collection, but there were also several weaker efforts, and the problem with reading them in such a large bundle is that they blur into one big mess after a while. I promise that the collection will be revisited at some point: one. book. at. a. time.

*****

When I was a teenager, Neverwhere, a short series written by Neil Gaiman, was shown on the BBC, but it was one of those things I never got around to watching. Even though I read Good Omens, Gaiman's collaboration with Terry Pratchett, I had somehow neglected to read any of his books until now (which is strange because: a) I've read plenty of Pratchett books in my time and b) I loved the concept behind Neverwhere). Finally, this week, I got around to reading the book behind the show, and pretty damn entertaining it was too.

The story follows Richard Mayhew, a young Scottish office worker living in London who, after a random act of kindness towards a woman he finds bleeding in the street, finds his world turned upside down. Ignored by the people around him, he finds his way into a world beneath the city he knows, a parallel, twisted version of the metropolis above. Welcome to London Below...

Richard finds himself involved in a quest to help Door (the woman whose aid he came to) find out who killed her family and is initially all at sea in a dark world of fantastic and sinister characters. Accompanied by the enigmatic Marquis de Carabas and the sultry bodyguard Hunter, Richard and Door traipse the byways of London Below, seeking help from some of its denizens and avoiding others. Mind the Gap indeed...

It's a marvellous read, reminiscent (naturally) of Pratchett but slightly more measured and less frantic (I often feel that a Discworld novel rushes you through it as if it has somewhere else to be, and you're holding it up). It does have the feel of an adaptation - a lot of 'scenes' and not as much characterisation or description as one might have hoped -, but it does have some interesting twists and turns which most readers will be fairly surprised by.

Of course, like many people, I was most amused by the twists on the city above. Richard encounters such people as the Black Friars, Old Bailey, the Angel Islington and Lady Serpentine (one of the Seven Sisters) and visits both the Earl's Court and (K)Night's Bridge. Believe me, after reading this book, you'll never look at a tube map the same way again.

The special edition I have is padded out with some book club questions (something I'm not really fond of) which allude to serious themes of reflecting the lost souls of the real London, but I doubt that the average reader is thinking much about social issues when Richard is trying to avoid having his liver cut out by a variety of underground ne'er-do-wells. This is an entertaining book, and that's how I read it. American Gods next? Don't mind if I do...

*****

Short stories, a novel and now a play; it certainly has been a varied week so far. Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt is an old favourite of mine, and even though I'm not really one for drama, I'm happy to make an exception for him. Der Besuch der alten Dame (usually translated into English as The Visit) is a short play describing a visit by the titular lady, Claire Zachanassian, to her hometown of Güllen. Claire, through a series of well-judged marriages, has become fabulously wealthy while Güllen has gone the other way, so poor that the whole town has been mortgaged. When she decides to come back and visit, the town is counting on Alfred Ill, Claire's childhood sweetheart, to persuade her to restore its fortunes. It turns out that she is prepared to do so, but only at a price. She will give the town of Güllen one billion dollars on one condition: namely, on receipt of Alfred Ill's dead body...

You see, Claire's past is anything but happy, and Alfred's is anything but as flawless as people think. Woman, scorned, revenge, dish, cold, laugh, last longest... Cliches are wonderful, but this is no joke; when the richest woman in the world wants something, she is used to getting it. The Gülleners close ranks initially, the mayor declining her offer amid loud cheers from the citizens of Güllen, but Claire's ominous reply "Ich warte" ("I'll wait"), hints that this may not be the final answer, as much as the townspeople believe that they stand behind Ill.

The crux of the story is temptation, personified in the figure of the old, seemingly unkillable, Zachanassian. The artificial limbs fitted after numerous crashes and air disasters (of which she was always the only survivor) serve to make her seem more sinister and inhuman, a hideous goddess straight out of a Greek play. The townspeople, despite professing to support Ill, mysteriously begin to appear richer, buying new clothes, drinking more expensive beer, smoking more refined cigars - all on credit. It becomes clear that they are all speculating that someone may just take up Claire's offer, and Ill quickly begins to fear for his life. While denial is rife, the more responsible members of the community do let their facade crack at times: the priest begs Ill to flee; the teacher threatens to make the truth known to the outside world in a drunken rant; the mayor and the policeman visit Claire to beg her to change her mind. All to no avail.

It sounds very dark, but it's actually just as much of a farce as a tragedy. The stage directions are absurd, as is Dürrenmatt's wont, with actors pretending to be trees, and four chairs serving as a car. Claire is a monster and brings a bizarre court with her, including a couple of muscly ex-con stretcher bearers and two blind eunuchs who speak in unison (not to mention the three husbands she goes through whilst in Güllen, all to be played by the same actor).

When it comes to the crunch though, the writer knows how to pare away the comedic elements and leave a stark truth facing the protagonists: either Ill's body is placed in the coffin the old lady has brought with her, and taken away to buried in Capri, or he lives, Claire leaves, and Güllen rots in poverty. We all suspect we know the outcome, but it is still painful to watch. In another work, the writer talks of his Swiss countrymen as being "spared and not tempted", a response to Swiss moral superiority over the actions of Germans in World War II. Here, we see what it is to be tempted and hope fervently that it never happens to us.

Review Post 10 - News from the Colonies

It's been a long time since I last went to the library (and, if you read this post, you'll know why!), but I steeled myself a couple of weeks ago and finally got a few books out. The first was The Woman who Walked into Doors; the third is waiting to be read. The second is Nobel prize winner V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas. And a lovely book it is too.

I'd never read a Caribbean book before (in fact, the closest connection I have to that part of the world is a Trinidad & Tobago football shirt I bought cheaply after the last World Cup and a love for cricket which confuses and infuriates my wife in equal measures), and it definitely wasn't what I'd expected. Naipaul is of Indian heritage, and the book, set in Trinidad, focuses on the lives of an extended clan, and wider society, of expatriate Indians, the principal of whom being (of course) the titular Mr. Biswas. His full name is Mohun Biswas; however, right from the start, the writer gives him this rather unusual address whenever he is mentioned outside direct speech. Curious?

Not really. This emphasis on his name is part of the point of the book. Living sporadically, from a fairly young age, with relatives and then in-laws, Mr. Biswas's name is part of his identity and the way the writer lifts him up above the hordes (and there are hordes) of other family members living in the same house. It is this desire to be different, not to be more successful or richer, just to live his own life, which leads him to ruffle feathers and make plenty of mistakes in his quest for the ultimate in achievements: a house of his own.

I live in a country where home ownership is seen as a right - and where increasing house prices and interest rates are viewed as unfair and (the most negative of adjectives) 'unaustralian'. However, in WW2-era Trinidad, just having a roof over your head (even if it is shared with a few other families) is seen as a luxury. Mr. Biswas, however, cannot be content with residing in a cacophony of chanting, impromptu school lessons and squawking in-laws; at every opportunity, he attempts, in the face of derision and incredulity from both his relatives and his own wife, to build or buy himself a house: a house of his own.

From the first page we know that Mr. Biswas is, paradoxically, a success story and a tragedy. He will die young, but in a house of his own. The house is shoddy and rickety, but it is his. He has put his ambitions ahead of his family interests, but he is master of his own abode. At the end of the book, there is a tinge of sadness, regret, in contrast with the feelings of pride and success Mr. Biswas radiates in the prelude to his life story. The reader, at the end of 600+ pages of wonderfully-told family drama, is left to answer the question posed by the writer: was Mr. Biswas' life worth it? I won't answer that, but I can say that the book certainly was...

*****

One event I recall from Mr. Biswas' slow social ascent was an invitation to a writers' group where he was asked to read something he'd written. After toiling for a while, he had something, but he couldn't find an ending. Having read plenty of post-modernist literature, however, he didn't see that being a problem...

...which brings me neatly to the second part of my trawl through Katherine Mansfield's Collected Stories. Following on from reading her earliest works, I worked my way through Bliss and Other Stories and The Garden Party and Other Stories last week; to be perfectly honest, 300 pages of short stories, even in sporadic doses was a bit much for my constitution.

These two collections were, as Mansfield herself thought, much more developed than the earlier stories. Aside from the two title stories, I greatly enjoyed Prelude and At the Bay, two longer tales featuring the same Wellington family, and Je ne Parle pas Francais, a wonderfully moody story featuring an enigmatic Englishman, his long-suffering partner and a Parisian narrator who is everything a literary Parisian should be. Some of the twists in the writing in these collections were breathtaking: one particular example was Bliss where the palpable joie de vivre of the main character is frozen in a heartbeat by one simple act. Class tension, domestic drudgery, social roleplaying, repressed homosexuality... all in a handful of wonderful pages.

I suppose it's my own fault for reading the two collections one after the other, but it did become a bit of a chore towards the end. I found myself wanting to get it over and done with, and the pile of gleaming, unread books on my bookshelf caught my eye more than ever before. Still, Mansfield is not completely innocent in all this. I really do not want to read about anyone with 'weak nerves' for the rest of the year, and while stories about spinsters may be all well and good in moderation, they are as bad for you as any drug if you overdose on them.

I suppose the main problem with reading a collection of short stories is that yes, they are great to read - while you are reading them -, but when you are between stories, and you're not currently reading one, there is nothing to draw you back, nothing to tear you away from your i-Pod, your computer, your television. In short, there is little motivation to return to the book as you are, in effect, starting from the beginning.

Please don't think that I am criticising these collections (far from it; as short stories go, they are excellent). It's just that when people describe Katherine Mansfield as the inventor of the modern short story, I'm not sure whether it's meant as praise or blame. At any rate, the final part of the collection will have to wait for a good while; I'm off to immerse myself in a voluminous Victorian novel, and I won't be out for a week or so...

Review Post 5 - Short and Sweet

I'm sorry, but I really don't get short stories. I'm the sort of person who wants to engage in a story and with the characters, and I find that ten pages really doesn't do it for me. Even with my favourite authors, it feels all wrong. Spread over 400 pages, Haruki Murakami's juxtaposition of the bizarre and the utterly ordinary works wonders. In a short story, however, it just seems weird. Full stop.

So what am I to do with someone who is regarded as the forerunner of modern short-story tellers, the writer from just across the Tasman sea, Katherine Mansfield? Mansfield only wrote short stories (nary a novel, or even novella, in sight) and yet is still known and loved today. Well, I'll give it a go...

As you can see to the left, I have acquired a big brick containing all Mansfield's stories (and unfinished fragments), which I am planning to read a bit at a time in chronological order of writing. So I started on page 586 (I felt very strange for a while there).

In a German Pension was Mansfield's first publication, one she later wished she could disown owing to its alleged immaturity. The sketches of life in a typically German spa town are cutting and accurate: the linguistic structures she uses to indicate German thought patterns and cultural behaviour work very well, and the strange, almost scientific curiosity with which the locals regard the foreign intruder is wittily sketched out. Mansfield refused to allow a republication just before the first World War as she was ashamed by both the immaturity and stereotyping of the stories.

Something Childish and Other Stories is a posthumous collection of stories written between Mansfield's first and second published collections. In this (longer) collection, the writer continues with her wry observations of foreign manners and sympathetic portrayals of lonely women in dreary boarding rooms. There are also, however, some shorter (and stranger) morsels to be found.

I liked most of the stories, but my preference was for the first-person tales, where Mansfield's cool, wry Down Under persona is contrasted with self-confident European behaviour. These tales are witty and cutting, and I could well empathise with the writer's desire to be left alone by the tour guides and tourists of European travel spots.

Verdict? The jury's still out on this one. As promised, short and sweet; more on this in the coming months...