Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.     

                                        FOUR NOVELS BY LLOYD JONES

I have just reviewed  Lloyd Jones’ latest novel The Fish, which inevitably, in terms of ideas and preoccupations, has much in common with Jones’ earlier works. The only one of Jones’ New Zealand-set novels I have neither read nor reviewed is his first The Book of Fame (published in 2000). Since then I have read and reviewed all his work, but in most cases for newspapers and magazines which, of course, impose strict limitations in word counts. 500 or 600 words are regarded as the average length for a magazine or newspaper book review, which means that inevitably most book reviews tend to be terse and perhaps lacking nuance.

So here are terse reviews of three novels by Lloyd Jones, with reference to a more elaborated fourth which has already been carefully assessed on this blog. Though I might now find some of my judgements a little harsh, I have not changed any of these reviews from the way they first appeared in their respective publications. 

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The following review of MISTER PIP appeared in the NZ Listener on 7 October 2006.

How do you convey in story the power and formative influence of literature?

There are right ways and there are wrong ways. From this novel’s set-up and its blurb, I feared that Lloyd Jones might have chosen one of the wrong ways.

Mister Pip’s blurb says that the novel is “a love song to the power of imagination and storytelling. It shows how books can change lives.”

Here’s the set-up.

In Bougainville in the civil war in the early 1990s, regular schooling for villager children is disrupted. Elderly eccentric Mr Watts, the last white man in the area, agrees to become a teacher. His classes consist of reading Dickens’ Great Expectations to the kids. Government troops (known contemptuously as “redskins”) and the local boys who have become armed rebels (“known as “rambos”) pass through the village sometimes with scary or horrible results. And despite everything, the children are touched and begin to see new imaginative possibility in their lives. They relate to the orphaned status of Dickens’ Pip and to the theme of being uprooted from home. They begin to see characters such as Joe Gargery, Miss Havisham and Mister Jaggers in terms of their own culture.

Presented thus, this must sound as glib and simplistic a fable as the blurb threatens. Something like those bits of Steven Spielberg’s movie version of The Color Purple where a black kid gets intellectual nourishment from Oliver Twist .

By this stage, shouldn’t we be at least a little wary of benign white men bringing enlightenment to young indigenes? Doesn’t it smack of intellectual imperialism?

The answer to both questions is that Lloyd Jones is many steps ahead of us.

Far from being simplistic, his tale canvasses a whole range of problems under its general endorsement of the imaginative power of literature.

At different times, the possibilities are raised that even great literature can be mere escapism, or can encourage a deformed view of reality, or even be downright dangerous when it is taken literally. (Soldiers get angry and vengeful when they can’t find this Mister Pip the children are talking about.)

As for that troublesome cultural imperialism, the novel confronts it head on. Postcolonialism and the culture of migrant workers lured off to Australia lurk in the general background.

The atheist white man Mr Watts spars verbally with one local God-fearing mother. He usually gets the better of their exchanges, which come across as a kind of secular missionary-ism to the unenlightened Whereupon the plot reaches an awful climax (the sort reviewers are shot for revealing) and we are forced to reassess the judgments we made about these two characters. Indigenous values are more robust and meaningful than the sparring at first suggests, and indigenous people are not passive receptors of imposed cultures, no matter how beguiling literature may be.

Jones’ trickiest gamble is his simplest. Like Great Expectations, the novel is narrated in the first person by an adult looking back across a lifetime – or, at any rate, somebody in her mid-twenties looking back to events that began when she was 14.

Matilda is the daughter of Mr Watts’ sparring partner. So how dare a white male novelist adopt the mask of a black female narrator? This could be the cue for the type of PC brouhaha that long ago accompanied William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner.

Once again, though, Jones knows exactly what he’s about.

The mask sometimes slips. But with its deadpan reporting of civil war atrocities, its quizzing of the outside world and its rueful admission that all cultural influences have their limits, Matilda’s voice is the perfect vehicle for Jones’ key themes. This is a brilliant narrative performance, and not half as simple as it at first appears.

As for the civilised fiction of Charles Dickens, it is not the only formative fiction that reaches poor, non-European nations. Remember the rebel soldiers are called “rambos”. If imaginations are to be formed by Pip or by Rambo, Pip is obviously the preferable alternative.

 

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The following review of HAND ME DOWN WORLD appeared in the Sunday Star-Times on 31 October 2010

 

An unnamed African woman, working in a tourist hotel in Tunisia, is wooed by a European man, who persuades her to bear his child. When the baby is born, the man cons her into signing adoption papers. He then disappears with the little boy back to his wife in Berlin. The African woman desperately wants to see and, if possible, reclaim her son. She migrates illegally to Sicily, then makes her way across Europe to Berlin. Single-mindedly, with help or hindrance from various people, she looks for the man who seduced her and took away the child she bore.

A straightforward enough story, surely? In other hands it could have had a straight linear plot, leading to a final confrontation. But not as Lloyd Jones tells it in his first novel since Mister Pip. In a recent interview, Jones said the the “central starting point” of all his novels was “an attempt to answer the question – how can I find a new way to tell this story?” The answer he comes up with in Hand Me Down World is essentially the same one Joseph Conrad came up with a century ago in masterpieces like Lord Jim. It’s the “cloud of witnesses” technique, where the story is told by a series of first-person narrators, each of whom has a radically different perspective on events.

As she travels across Europe, the nameless African woman (who at a certain point acquires the name Ines) encounters an exploitative Italian truck-driver, an anarchist, a film-maker looking for Roma (that is, gypsies) to film, an African pastor working in Berlin, a German couple whose parents have a guilty Nazi past, and various other people. Each takes up the narrative, interprets the woman’s story and, at certain points, passes judgement on her.

Like the classic movie Rashomon, the noverl puts us in the position of seeing the inconsistencies and inadequacies of their evidence. We suspect most of them of being unreliable narrators. This is the “hand-me-down world” of the title, where we know other people only at one remove, and can never be sure  if we know any essentials truths about them anyway.

There’s a great danger in this technique, though, unless it’s in the hands of a literart genius like Conrad. Depth can be sacrificed for breadth. We get a panorama of various characters, and we hear their different voices, but there’s not much room for them to develop psychologically. They remain pretty one-dimensional. Hand Me Down World is also weighted with a little symbolism. One character is literally blind (more problems with perception). One of the narrators is a New Zealander who has a thing about lung-fish and their adaptability – a little bit like the desperate adaptability of illegal African immigrants in Europe, I guess.

I have to admit that I felt a rush of relief late in the piece when the African woman  takes up the narrative herself and events move in a rather more straightforward way. Even here, though, Jones has a few tricks of the sort that reviewers shouldn’t reveal. There’s an interesting context of Europeans exploiting Africans and illegal immigrants together with the whole dangerous business of people-smuggling. These are not Jones’ focus, however, so much as his meditation on the partiality of perception.

 

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Lloyd Jones’ A History of Silence, an autobiographical work about trauma suffered by his parents and its impact upon their children, was reviewed at length on this blog in 2013. It is interesting that, although it is a memoir of Jones’ parents and upbringing, it suggests much of the novelist’s interest in family dynamics as expressed in his most recent  - and obviously fictious - novel The Fish. 

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The following review of THE CAGE was published in the Sunday Star-Times on 28 January 2018

            Most of Lloyd Jones’ novels are written in the first person, and you always have to ask yourself what sort of person the narrator is. There was the young indigenous woman who narrated Jones’ best novel Mister Pip. There were the multiple, and rather confusing, narrators in the less successful Hand Me Down World. Of course A History of Silence was written in the first person because it was a memoir. But even there, we had to ask what sort of image of himself Lloyd Jones intended to convey.

            Jones’ latest, The Cage, presents us with a bit of a conundrum. The narrator is an adolescent male, but neither he nor his country is clearly defined. Somehow the kid’s family has disintegrated and, thanks to relatives, he is living in a country hotel. But what country is this? At one stage children are heard singing Pokarekare Ana, there’s a reference to Young Nick’s Head, and when the kid sees local landscape from a plane, it looks like New Zealand.

            Yet despite these touches, we are really in the non-specific world of fable, maybe with a soupcon of the post-apocalyptic.

            Two strange, tramp-like figures come to town. Usually referred to as “the strangers”, they seem to have survived some huge disaster, which they are simply unable to explain. They are at first treated as curiosities, then as figures of suspicion. Are they a danger to the town? Why won’t they say clearly what has happened to them? Soon they are locked in a cage out the back of the hotel. A group of ”Trustees” is set up to monitor them, and the young male narrator has to observe them and make regular reports on them. Tourists come along to gawk at them.

            If you thought you were in for a realist novel, you will by now realise that The Cage is more like a parable by Franz Kafka. In Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a man was turned into an insect. In The Cage, two men are brutalised (in the real sense of the word) by other human beings. Though they protest sometimes, though they sometimes ask for things, they are gradually turned into brutes.

            The “strangers” are nicknamed “the Doctor” and “Mole” by the people who have incarcerated them. Their cage is placed over a septic tank, or “sewage pit” as it is usually called in the novel. They have to live in their own excremental filth, so there are many allusions to the stench that surrounds them. They are fed food through the wire mesh of fences.

            And the narrator remains oddly inert. He observes. He reports. He sometimes plays his clarinet. Occasionally he feels twinges of pity, but he doesn’t intervene in any meaningful way.

            No worthwhile novel can be reduced to a series of neat “messages”. But it is clear that in The Cage, Lloyd Jones aims to say something about the human capacity to inflict pain upon others; to get used to seeing others as inferior; to categorise others as “alien” because they do not come from the same background as we ourselves do; and especially to move into seeing others as things to be manipulated rather than as fellow human beings. And from the prisoners’ perspective, there is a hint of the Stockholm Syndrome, where captives get used to their captivity and see their captors as potentially benevolent.

            Whether the novel conveys these things dramatically and convincingly is another problem.