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.

“THE LUMINARIES” by Eleanor Catton (first published 2013)

            Let me begin with the expression of a mild grievance. Early in 2013, I was asked if I would review, for Landfall magazine,  a novel I had never heard of called The Luminaries. At that time,  few other people knew about it, either. Landfall appears twice a year, and like other periodicals which appear in such circumstances, it has a very long lead-time for its contributors. I set about diligently reading this very long novel, and was very impressed with it. I wrote a review which said so. But between my submitting the review and the date the review was published, months went by. And in those months, the novel was first given dismissive reviews by two elderly New Zealand literary figures writing in London newspapers; then it gained momentum and won international praise, whereupon it also received positive reviews in New Zealand; and finally it won the Booker Prize and received hosannahs. And only then did my review appear. So I was slightly miffed that my review might have been taken as jumping on a bandwagon by praising a book that was already loaded with honours. And I feel like asserting that I got there before the bandwagon was in motion. Oh well. Heaving a sigh, I here present you with my review of The Luminaries, unaltered from its appearance in Landfall #226, Spring 2013.

            In a famous passage in his autobiography (which I quote per Walter Allen’s venerable The English Novel), Anthony Trollope discussed the working methods of the mystery writer Wilkie Collins. He wrote:

“Wilkie Collins seems so to construct his [novels] that he not only, before writing, plans everything on paper, down to the minutest detail, from the beginning to the end; but then plots it all back again, to see that there is no piece of necessary dove-tailing that does not dove-tail with absolute accuracy. The construction is most minute and most wonderful. But I can never lose the taste of the construction. The author seems always to be warning me to remember that something happened at exactly half-past two o’clock on Tuesday morning; or that a woman disappeared from the road just fifteen yards beyond the fourth milestone. One is constrained by mysteries and hemmed in by difficulties, knowing, however, that the mysteries will be made clear, and the difficulties overcome by the end of the third volume.”

With great accuracy, and especially in the phrases “the taste of the construction” and “constrained by mysteries”, Trollope catches the effect of mystery novels upon many readers. Those long Victorian detective novels, whether by Wilkie Collins or by the undervalued Sheridan Le Fanu, place a special strain upon readers. In order to make sense of them, you have to hold in your head much factual information and remember specific connections between characters in ways that are not necessary when reading other sorts of novel.

I mention this in reviewing Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries for two obvious reasons. First, it is essentially a story of mystery and its construction is indeed “most wonderful”, linking a large cast of major characters and many minor ones. Second, it is set in the Victorian era (the 1860s) and, at over 830 pages of text, is at least as long as anything the Victorians penned. I admit that in reading it, I often had to check back to remind myself who was married to whom, or who was a business partner or enemy of whom. The chart of twenty characters printed at the beginning was both necessary and a great help.

In the way it establishes itself, The Luminaries has the hallmarks of a classic mystery. Young Walter Moody arrives in Hokitika at the beginning of 1866 hoping to prospect for gold; but he first puts up in a hotel, where he finds himself in the midst of a conclave of men discussing a mystery that seems to involve them all. From most of them in turn, Moody hears a version of events. Collectively they give many different and overlapping perspectives, Rashomon-like. The mystery involves the disappearance of young Emery Staines and the death in his shack of the hermit Crosbie Wells. At stake is a fortune in gold belonging to Wells, which is one reason why so many people are interested. Crosbie Wells was somehow connected to the ship-owner and criminal Francis Carver and his wife the fortune-teller and whoremonger Lydia. Crosbie was discovered dead by the rising politician Alistair Lauderback, and the situation involves the prostitute Anna Wetherell, the pushy law officer George Shepard and the Chinese goldsmith Quee Long.

Who has a right to the fortune in gold, where exactly did it come from, how has most of it been secreted, and why are all these men interested?

So, through 360 pages, Walter Moody hears the views of the shipping agent Thomas Balfour and the pharmacist Joseph Pritchard and the greenstone hunter Te Rau Tauwhare, and the Methodist minister Cowell Devlin and the local tycoon and brothel-keeper Dick Mannering and others. All this testimony – all 360 pages of it – is given on the same day in January 1866. I offer no “spoilers”. If the chief appeal of a mystery story is the unravelling of a mystery, then it is not the business of reviewers to broadcast the solution (or – in the case of this polyphonous novel – the solutions). Be it noted, however, that significant details include the backstories of families and unsuspected blood relationships; blackmail; the use of opium; confidence tricks to increase the sale value of diggings by “salting” them with nuggets; legal chicanery; illegal violence; and the smuggling of vital items sewn into the lining of dresses.

By the time Walter Moody has heard all this testimony, and as we approach page 360, we are considerately given a recapitulation of all the evidence lest we have lost our bearings. And it is after this point that we rapidly realize the novel does not quite inhabit the territory we thought it did. For if The Luminaries were no more than a pastiche of a Victorian mystery novel – albeit with a New Zealand setting – then Mr Moody would draw all the threads together and explain neatly how everything fitted into place, the way Mr Cuff or Inspector Bucket or Sherlock Holmes do when all the witnesses have spoken and all the motives of characters have been ticked off. A rational order would have been restored. Indeed, such rationality is signalled when we are told (p.359) “Moody had no religion – and therefore did not perceive truth in mystery, in the inexplicable and the unexplained, in the mists that clouded one’s scientific perception as the material cloud now obscured the Hokitika sky”.

But neat rational deduction is not what happens in The Luminaries. Time resumes in the remaining 472 pages of the novel, new events are piled on old, and despite two long courtroom scenes, the motives of characters become more, rather than less, opaque. Some mysteries are resolved. They have to be if the novel is not to become a gigantic tease. Yet what begins as a rational explanation of diverse, but connected, events, ends as fragments of experience. It culminates in a long series of flashbacks to events from the year prior to the novel’s opening, which re-cast characters in ways quite at odds with our earlier impressions of them. This a-chronological order is foreshadowed in an early sequence (pp.105-06) where Te Rau Tauwhare translates the name Hokitika as meaning “Around. And then back again, beginning.” This is the method of the novel itself.

Some nineteenth century novelistic conventions are observed throughout The Luminaries. These include those brief synopses of the action that serve as headings to each chapter (“In which Gascoigne repeats his theories, and Moody speaks of death” etc.). But by the end of the novel these conventions are being parodied and subverted. The chapter headings become longer and longer and the chapters themselves shorter and shorter, to the point where the synopses are telling the story while the ensuing “chapters” are giving us mere impressionistic moments of time.

In this way, and without cheating those who expect answers, The Luminaries moves from being a pastiche of Victorian detective novels to being a deconstruction and critique of the whole notion of rational detection.

Would it be too much to call it an anti-mystery novel?  

If The Luminaries were no more than this, it would be a remarkable literary achievement. But it is considerably more. By Catton’s choice of leading characters, by her exposure of their suspect motives, and by the mixing of ethnicities, the novel also gives a detailed picture of a raw, volatile, exploitative colonial society; a “frontier” society still based on the myth of wide-open opportunity and the realities of extractive industries and fierce competition for capital. The time is specifically the moment when the Otago goldfields are running out, the West Coast looks the likelier prospect, and “West Canterbury” is about to become (briefly) the province of Westland. The connection between an excess of males and thriving prostitution is obvious, as is the connection between prostitution and the wide use of opiates. Along with the British, Maori and Chinese characters, there is also a German Jew (the newspaper editor Benjamin Lowenthal), a Frenchman (the law clerk Aubert Gascoigne) and one New Zealand-born Pakeha (the banker Charlie Frost) who, paradoxically, is more ill at ease in this frontier world than the assorted immigrants are. The diverse reactions of all to this new country are what make The Luminaries a convincing social mosaic.

It is historically right that much of the novel’s backstory involves dirty criminal doings in old Sydney, the cross-Tasman connection being a huge factor in all New Zealand gold rushes. It is also historically right that there is a tension between the lawlessness of the frontier society, and the propriety of language that is often used to describe it. (This was also a major theme in Charlotte Randall’s West Coast-set Hokitika Town). A real achievement is Catton’s refusal to repeat current stereotypical conceptions of Victorian-ness. For example, a number of men look longingly at the whore Anna Wetherell, seeing their own feelings as chaste and their motives as the pure ones of wishing to “save” her. This type of situation has often been the cue for satirical dramatizations of Victorian “hypocrisy”. Eleanor Catton chooses the harder course of showing the depth of the men’s feelings and the profound psychological and sexual effects of a society in which women are a small minority.

Judging by her prose style, Catton has apparently immersed herself in the writing of the era in which the novel is set. As an incorrigible pedant, I am always on the lookout for anachronisms in dialogue supposedly spoken by characters in a past age. The Luminaries has characters saying “heist” meaning robbery (p.37, p.253 and p.736); “class act” (p.64 and p.243); “taking me for a ride” in its threatening gangster-esque sense (p.103); the Americanism “john” for a prostitute’s client (p.228); the statement that “a lawyer would be able to join the dots” (p.539); a reference to “shoot-outs” (p.598); and the sneer that “you are becoming paranoiac” (p.740). I may be wrong, but I do not believe that any of these would have been common usage in the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, I believe some of them were not coined until much later. That I have been able to compile only such a short list from 830 pages, however, is an indication that Eleanor Catton is usually pitch-perfect in her “Victorian” prose. This is evident in those neat paragraphs of physical and psychological characterization with which each person in the novel is introduced. It is also evident in her precise descriptions of place. Yet there is no sense of mugging up. If she presents us with some physical processes – how newspapers were then set up; the difficulties ships had crossing the bar at Hokitika’s river mouth; how young women were inveigled into prostitution – it is because they are integral to her story and not decoration for the sake of period atmosphere.

Thus far in this review, I have deliberately refrained from mentioning one element in The Luminaries that might be of central interest to a minority of readers and is evidently important to the author. This (from the title on) is its astrological symbolism and content. The separate parts of the novel are all introduced with astrological charts showing the planetary influences upon characters at each given date of the action. Chapter titles declare “Saturn in Libra”, “First Point of Aries” and so forth. I am tempted to dismiss this as mystification that adds little to the novel’s meaning, and I am not mollified by the specific exegesis of astrology that is given at pp.531-32.

But perhaps I should trust the author more, for there is one passage in the novel in which the stars become a potent symbol of the settler condition. Walter Moody turns his eyes to the skies at p.343 and finds “Orion  - upended, his quiver beneath him, his sword hanging upward from his belt; Canis Major – hanging like a dead dog from a butcher’s hook. There was something very sad about it, Moody thought. It was as if the ancient patterns had no meaning here.” At this point, New Zealand is still what is alien to Europeans. Its otherness is read in the stars. Patterns of meaning and morality have to be re-negotiated.

This sense of a new, unfamiliar world is something The Luminaries shares with the best recent New Zealand historical novels, Randall’s Hokitika Town, Hamish Clayton’s Wulf and Paula Morris’s Rangatira. But its imaginative grasp is greater.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

OTHELLO IN PORTUGUESE

Forgive me, patient reader, but I am once again going to unload a traveller’s tale upon you. Back in January, enjoying three weeks in Portugal, we spent most of our time staying with friends in Peniche an hour or so north of Lisbon, but we de-camped to Lisbon itself for a number of nights, took many day-trips to other towns, and spent much of one week up north in the university town Coimbra and the better-known city Porto – or “Oporto” as a few English-speakers still miscall it.

In two-and-a-half days in Porto we did what all tourists do. We took in many elaborate baroque churches. We visited a spectacular ossuary in a crypt. We lingered near the misty Douro River, admired its bridges and remembered the engineering genius of Gustave Eiffel who designed some of those bridges before he built his tower in Paris.

And of course we sought out the drink that takes its name from this city. Crossing Eiffel’s famous Dom Luis I Bridge, we walked into the cellars of the Burmester Port Company and enjoyed a guided tour – for just the two of us – conducted by Pablo, a genial young Spaniard [sic], who explained the whole process of blending and maturing port, allowed us to sip a few free samples, and easily induced us to buy a couple of bottles of the best. (Calm down, now – I know all such tours are a species of advertisement; we are not naïve when we travel; but we intended to buy some fine port anyway.)

So far, so predictable, if you’re making a brief visit to Porto.

But in Porto we also found the unexpected.

We are not lounge lizards or habitues of night-clubs or bars. If we are being tourists, the entertainment we seek in the evening is opera, jazz or live theatre. And there in Porto we saw advertised, at its local branch of Portugal’s National Theatre, a production of Shakespeare’s Otelo [sic] in Portuguese, but with English surtitles. It was directed by Nuno Carinhas, who has a track-record in producing Portuguese versions of European classics (Shakespeare, Moliere, Beckett, Brian Friel etc.).

Three years ago on this blog, in a wordy critique of Orson Welles’ film Othello called Put Money in Thy Purse Before Thou Startest Filming, I explained why it was that Othello is one of the seven or eight plays by Shakespeare that I know best. I wrote a study guide on it, have seen it performed in many different productions (both live and filmed) and have read what many critics have had to say about it. And so I thought it would be intriguing to see the play performed in another language.

In we went to the gallery of a medium-sized 19^th century-style theatre.

The production was in modern dress. It had a total cast of ten and was performed on a minimalist set, occasionally with slightly fussy staging to accommodate the fact that there was much “doubling” by the actors in smaller supporting roles. The minimalist set meant that Desdemona was eventually smothered near floor level rather than on a curtained bed. Not that this worried me too much. The simplest of sets are more in keeping with what Shakespeare had in mind than anything more elaborate. The force of his plays is in language and motion, not in set-design.

Nearly every production of a Shakespeare play will cut some of the text. This was to be expected. But [following Shakespeare’s words in the surtitles], I found some of the cuts regrettable. Most of Othello’s speech when Iago first twists his mind was missing (“Farewell the tranquil mind… Farewell the plumed troops, and the big wars, / That makes ambition, virtue!” etc.). As far as the characterisation of the flawed tragic hero is concerned, this is a bit like cutting “To be or not to be” out of Hamlet. It was also a pity that Emilia’s commonsensical questions about Desdemona’s supposed adultery were cut (“What place, what time, what form, what likelihood?”) – for these are question that, if answered, would cut the ground from under Iago’s schemes. Saddest of all, though, was that Othello never got to ask, of Iago, the crucial question “why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body” – the question that Iago cannot and will not answer, as it exposes his essential nihilism.

But most challenging of all was the fact that Othello was played as (and by) a white European – not as a North African Moor nor yet as an equatorial African. I understand the modern sensitivities here. Othello can easily be (mis)interpreted as a play presenting an African (or Moorish) man as credulous and “primitive”. Have the role played by a white man in blackface (as was most often the case since the play was written) and the problem is compounded by racial stereotype. Yet the fact remains that much of the taunting of Iago and Roderigo (behind Othello’s back) is based on what we would now call racism – taunts like “the thick lips”, comparisons with animals and so on. I would go so far as to say that the play implicitly condemns racism by putting such taunts in the mouths of men who are clearly villainous (Iago) or pathetically gullible (Roderigo). So in this Portuguese production, with Othello a white man among others whites, a major part of what the play is about was missing.

All of which makes it sound as if I am condemning this production in the Porto branch of Portugal’s National theatre.

Not a bit of it.

The play was performed robustly and passionately with (probably engaging in a racial stereotype of my own) much Latin heat, especially in the scene where Othello falls down into a writhing fit. Of course we were following the surtitles, but we were also listening intently to the voices of the Portuguese actors – the oratorical sonority of Othello in the earlier scenes and his manic rage in later ones. The sinuous innuendo of Iago and his frank cynicism in his soliloquies (of which he has more than Othello does in the first half of the play). Desdemona’s bewilderment, Emilia’s no-nonsense arguments, Cassio’s hurt pride, Roderigo’s whining sense of grievance – it was all there in the sound of the voices, even if the language was alien to us. And the action was vigorous and swift, as it should be.

Most impressive of all was the rapt attention of the audience. Doubtless there were a few other Anglophone tourists like us in the crowd, but most were clearly Portuguese, following and listening intently to every moment of it, and applauding vigorously at the end of each half – a contingent of teenagers among them. I have seen very good non-English-language film versions of Shakespeare’s plays (excellent Soviet-era Russian films of Hamlet and King Lear; not to mention Akira Kurosawa’s Japanese adaptation of Macbeth as Throne of Blood). But I had never seen a non-English-language live performance of Shakespeare before this production in Porto.

I know the effect was, as it always is in drama, as much the impression made by the players as by the text of the play itself. Even so, watching Otelo [sic] in Porto was a great demonstration of Shakespeare’s international appeal.

And we applauded lustily too.

Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“THE UNRELIABLE PEOPLE”, by Rosetta Allan (Penguin – Random House, $NZ38)

The Unreliable People is an important and complex novel, with a strong cast of characters, an intriguing plot that keeps us reading, and true historical resonance. Rosetta Allan has clearly undertaken much research (partly in her time as Writer-in-Residence at the St Petersburg Art Residency) and she has delved deeply into the relevant historical facts. But she does not let this research overwhelm the fiction that is her novel.

 “The unreliable people” was apparently the name Stalin gave to the “Koryo-saram”, ethnic Koreans who settled near Vladivostok, in the extreme east of the old Russian Empire. This was in the early 20^th century, about 1910, when Korea had been annexed by Japan. The Koryo-saram were later willing to remain members of the Soviet Union and thought they could survive and prosper by being obedient citizens. But Stalin, in his paranoid power, had other ideas. As one character in this novel remarks “They were always such a peaceable people. Gullible perhaps. Stalin had promised them liberation and land, a joyful life as a Soviet, when what he really wanted was slaves. But what could they do?” (p.17)

Under Stalin’s reign, many ethnically non-Russian minorities were treated harshly, communities were broken up and settled in cold, uninhabitable places which they were expected to farm. Millions died. The axe fell on the Koryo-saram in 1937, at the height of the Stalinist purges. They were uprooted from the east, and taken in cattle trucks to southern Siberia and Kazakhstan. Korean-language schools were suppressed. In the process, tens of thousands of Koryo-saram died. But some survived and some married outside their community to continue as Soviet citizens. For a while, the only, tenuous sign of inherited Korean culture was a travelling “Korean theatre” in which the older people kept up some memory of traditional legends and folk-tales.

The Unreliable People is Rosetta Allan’s second novel. Like her first novel Purgatory, it sounds a theme of how people are affected when they are deracinated and separated from their original culture. At least part of Purgatory was about the disorientation of an Irish peasant in colonial 19^th century New Zealand.  The Unreliable People deals with the historical disaster of the Koryo-saram in two time frames.

Katerina is an old Koryo-saram woman who was part of the “Korean theatre”, lived through the mass deportations, and can remember them vividly. Chapters concerning her skip between the 1930s and the 1970s and 1990s, when most of the novel takes place. Antonina is a much younger woman, being brought up in Kazakhstan, of racially-mixed parentage. After two chapters of her childhood in Kazakhstan in the 1970s, we move to her life as an art student in St Petersburg in the early 1990s. By this stage, the Soviet Union has gone and Kazakhstan is a separate nation from the new Russian Federation.

For most of the novel, it is very unclear what the exact relationship between Katerina and Antonina is. But their ethnic and cultural identity as Koryo-saram is very important to both of them, even if  Antonina knows little of the Korean language and has grown up speaking Russian. “There aren’t many words of the old country that survived the homogenisation of Stalin’s collective farms,” reflects one character, “Only the old people harbour much knowledge of the language, but they refuse to speak it.” (p.37)

There are many ways in which Allan shows her skill in telling such a complex story.

One is the element of mystery and of the bizarre. The opening chapters, concerning the kidnapping of a child, are appropriately nightmarish. They involve the dark clanking of a long, nighttime train-journey, a motif that occurs elsewhere in the novel. Those who have lost first-hand knowledge of their ancestral origins often rely on rumours, legends and folk-stories to fill in the gaps. But such fragments can often be dark things. The young Antonina’s head is filled with tales of “gwisin” (Korean ghosts), stories of the “screaming bridge” where the souls of the dead are said to protest their exile, a little knowledge of shamanic dances, and the Korean folk-tale of the crow king, which Allan uses to echo the destinies of her main characters. These disturbing tales are akin to the narrative of ghosts awaiting burial in Allan’s earlier Purgatory. (They are also akin to the dark and horrible tales the German children hear in Catherine Chidgey’s The Wish Child). Even in a secular age, the pull of the supernatural is hard to suppress. As for mystery, there is that long puzzle, one of the things which keeps us turning the pages, of the true relationship of Katerina and Antonina.

There is also great skill in the way Allan dramatises the nature of modern Russian society. Obviously, the old USSR had little to commend it, especially in the era of Stalin. The whole premise of this novel tells us so. But there is no delusion to suggest that end of the Soviet regime immmediately brought a stable democracy. The new Russian Federation, as depicted in this novel, is a very shaky thing.

In all the chapters dealing with Antonina’s life as an art student in St Petersburg, there are tales of poverty, gangsterism and bribery. For want of better accommodation, Antonina and her art-school friends doss in a disused factory. Great-Russian racial chauvinism still persists. Antonina is upset when a fare collector on a tram tries to cheat her, obviously because she looks Koryo-saram: “Such racial contempt shocked Antonina at first, but after almost four years in St Petersburg, she is numbing to the disappointment it causes her. Kazakhstan was a more accepting mix. Russian, German, Koryo-saram, Uzbek, Ukrainian, and ethnic Kazakhs. They never seemed to mind each other, not that she could tell.” (p.61) With inflation and the rouble rapidly losing value, crowds queue up for essentials and a Russian woman yells “The Soviets will rise up again. They’ll squash this Boris Yeltsin. He’s no good, you know.” (p.91) And later Antonina herself thinks “Democracy… does not deliver the bread any more than Gorbachev did.” (p.97) One wonders what her thoughts would be if the novel were set now, 25 years later, when Russia has reverted to its default setting of nationalist authoritarianism under the “post-modernism dictator” Vladimir Putin. Later in the novel we meet black-marketeers, people-smugglers, the damaged prostitute Polina and a hospital full of radiation-poisoned or deformed children, the fruit of leaky old Soviet nuclear power-stations and bomb tests.

Most important, though, is the the complexity of Allan’s characters. They are not one-dimensional. Konstantin and Natalya, friends of Antonina, gradually change as the novel progresses, ceasing to be the sort of people we originally thought they were. Our perspective on old Katerina changes as we discover what connection she has with Antonina. In the character of Antonina herself, Rosetta Allan raises a complex problem: what is the cultural status, and what is the inner being, of one who has assimilated another culture and yet is not quite of it? Why does she still feel some adherance to the culture from which some of her forebears came, even if she herself has only limited knowledge of that culture?

It would be rather trite to say that Antonina finds salvation in her art. She is at first repelled by the extreme, exhibitionist avant-garde art she sees in St Petersburg and is conformist enough to admire the more traditional art in the academy where she is officially studying. (As a flawed character, she is, later in the novel, also confomist enough to Russian ways to attempt bribery and some emotional blackmail to negotiate a personal problem.) But bit by bit she finds herself attracted more to the dissident art of another school, and through a display of such dissident art she comes to identify who she really is: “I am not Kazakhstan, she says, I am not Russia. I am not Korea. I am not the dosplacement of my people. I am not lost. I am part of the new tribe. I am Koryo-saram and my place is here.” (p.219) This is a robust assertion of her own personal identity – an acknowledgement of where she came from, but also a realization that a new context creates a new sort of person.

I add this to my list of the best historical novels to be written in New Zealand in the last ten years.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   * 

As I’ve mentioned Rosetta Allan’s earlier novel Purgatory a number of times in the above review, I’ve decided to add here my review of it,  unaltered from its appearance in the December 2014 edition of New Zealand Books (now renamed The New Zealand Review of Books). If I were writing it now, I would of course include Vincent O’Sullivan’s All This ByChance and Catherine Chidgey’s The Wish Child in its opening roll-call of the best New Zealand historical novels.  Anyway, here is what I wrote four-and-a-half year ago.

There’s one current phenomenon in NZ Lit that I’m watching with great interest. It’s the fact that, with a few honourable exceptions (Hamish Clayton’s Wulf, Owen Marshall’s The Larnachs, and the historical reconstructions of Peter Wells) all the best New Zealand historical novels are now being written by women – Paula Morris’s Rangatira, Charlotte Randall’s Hokitika Town and The Bright Side of My Condition, Sarah Quigley’s The Conductor, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries and (with minor misgivings) Tina Makereti’s Where the Rekohu Bone Sings.

Rosetta Allan’s debut Purgatory reinforces this impression. It is smart, funny, tragic and the product of some close historical research. It delves deeply into a particular sort of mentality that came to colonial New Zealand – in this case, the mentality of an Irish Catholic peasant.  Purgatory is based on real murders that took place in Otahuhu (south of Auckland) in 1865. James Stack, Irishman, ex-fencible and petty crim, murdered the Finnegan family, a mother and four children, and buried them clumsily in the back yard of their cottage. His motive (apart from liquor) appears to have been to gain possession of the property. He was soon found out and hanged.

Rosetta Allan’s boldest imaginative stroke is to have parts of the story told by the ghost of one of the murdered children, young John Finnegan, who lingers about the property with his ghostly family until such time as they receive decent Christian burial. This meshes closely with an older Catholic concept of Purgatory – stalling between Heaven and Hell until released by appropriate prayers for the dead. It also meshes with Maori rites for lifting tapu from ground defiled with blood. In Rosetta Allan’s hands, then, it becomes a strong metaphor for old customs adapting themselves to a new land.

The ghost narrative is, however, really the framing device. Most of Purgatory is the story of James Stack, from famine and impoverishment in Ireland, through British military service to his dabbling in crime in New Zealand. Some of this narrative is necessarily sordid, including vivid and bloody scenes of the lash being applied on a British ship, convicts in Australia being exploited as prostitutes by sex-starved soldiers and a long and grisly hanging in an Auckland jail. The bush scenes down the Great South Road, where James Stack is involved in the Waikato war, are unheroic, unpleasant and painful. So are Stack’s relationships with women.

Here, though, there is something of an imaginative problem.

I think Rosetta Allan’s purpose is to suggest how James Stack has been brutalised by the times in which he was reared; and that this in itself was an incitement to the murders he eventually committed. Certainly we see him making a number of bad decisions – including involvement in one earlier killing. But his transformation from gullible peasant innocent, pushed about by circumstance, to murderer, fully responsible for what he is doing, is still rather abrupt.

Rosetta Allan writes vividly. Her dialogue is plausible. Only occasionally are there lapses into archness like the episode when a ghostly Pakeha-Maori instructs the narrating Finnegan ghost on matters of tapu. Or the moment (on p.133) where a surgeon says sententiously to Stack when they are in Australia: “New Zealand? A land of new beginnings. Much like this, I expect, with some of the old rules and some new ones too. It’s up to us what we make of it, Stack. It’s like the first page of an unwritten story. How it ends depends on us.”

Fortunately there’s not too much of this sort of thing and Purgatory, freighted by ghosts and all, gives a stark and credible re-creation of time and place.

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.  

“GOLDEN HILL” by Francis Spufford (first published by Faber and Faber, 2016)

Dear reader, I know I can be devious. As you can see from the standard heading to this part of my blog, I declare that for me “Something Old” is to be defined as something first published more than four years ago. Originally, when this blog was first set up, the definition said more than  five years ago, but I found that too restrictive because I wanted to be able to dissect books of more recent date. This week, however, I’m really pushing it. My selection was first publshed only three years ago, but I think it passed with little notice in this country, so here I am reviving its memory.

Golden Hill is a lively tongue-in-cheek historical romp, its author’s debut novel and the winner of a number of literary prizes. In the blurb of the paperback reprint in which I read the novel, one reviewer is quoted describing it as “the best 18^th century novel since the 18^th century” and the novel’s epigraph is a quotation from Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random, which should warn us that we are in for an episodic picaro tale.

In 1746, the mysterious young Englishman Richard Smith comes to the small British colonial town of New York, which used to be the small Dutch colonial town of New Amsterdam. He has a money order for over 1,000 pounds – a huge fortune in 1746. But is he a fraud or a conman? The Lovell family – bankers – will not honour his money order until they get confirmation of its authenticity from London, a process that will take some time. So Richard Smith is at large in little old New York, spied on by the curious and having many adventures. Is he a French spy? Is he a Papist? Could he be one of those Jacobites (whose most recent rebellion happened just the previous year)? Or is he a complete innocent? In his Acknowledements, Francis Spufford admits his debt to the novels David Simple, written by Sarah Fielding, and Joseph Andrews, written by Sarah’s more famous brother Henry Fielding. Both concern a naïve, innocent young man, so perhaps this is what Richard Smith is.

Golden Hill soon reveals itself to be genuinely picaresque, bombarding us with one set-piece of action after another – a chase after a pickpocket; a drunken and violent anti-Papist celebration on Guy Fawkes day; a daring escape from thugs across rooftops; a long prison scene; the staging of a production of Addison’s tragedy Cato, which turns out to have local political resonance; a duel; a courtroom scene.

I will not bother telling you how any of this is related to the mysterious protagonist’s suave acquaintance Oakeshotte and his slave Achilles. Nor will I expand upon the protagonist’s on-again, off-again relationship with the haughty Tabitha. When Richard Smith and Tabitha converse, it is pert intellectual banter – appopriately, Beatrice and Benedick are referenced a number of times – but it develops into a complex relationship before the novel is done.

What I will say is that as he dashes from episode to episode, the author delights in detailed physical descriptions which at times seem the main motive for his writing – the specific evocation of a past time and place. Thus we have the difference between the raucous, bumptious English mob and the more reserved and seemly Dutch who still live in the town. The mild Dutch family celebration of Sintaklaas contrasts with the drunken mob in the English Guy Fawkes night, which eventually turns homicidal. The production of Addison’s play is given to us in meticulous detail. So is the filthy creature with whom the protagonist shares a prison cell. And there are always reminders of how freezing cold the town is in winter. Given that the novel is written in the third-person, the author also occasionally nudges us into seeing how artificial such descriptions of past ages are, and how they are dependent on research which the author has undertaken.

I do not believe that such detailed – and closely-researched – descriptions would have appeared in a genuine 18^th century novel. Nor would the two detailed sex scenes, though I give Francis Spufford credit for his sense of humour. The longer of the two sex-scenes is so gloriously over-the-top in its detailed anatomical detail that it would qualify for the Literary Review’s “Bad Sex Award” were it not so clear that the author was pulling our leg.

One major point – the main motive moving the story along and making us want to turn pages is our desire to know who exactly Richard Smith is and where (if it is real) his money comes from. This is satisafactorily explained – indeed brilliantly explained – in the novel’s last 20 pages. In the process, our view of all the events we have experienced is dramatically altered. In fact our view of what sort of novel this has been is dramatically altered. But only an absolute cad would give away such an ending.

And, I regret to say, Wikipedia is such an absolute cad. Do not read its entry on Golden Hill if you wish to read the novel. Wikipedia gives away the novel’s denouement and thus deprives potential readers of the pleasure of discovering it for themselves.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

MEETING OUR RELATIVES

I regret to say, my friends, that I am going to serve you yet another traveller’s tale, but have patience, for as always this one has point. It is partly about the joys of visiting somewhere in the off-season, but more importantly it is about realising how close we are to some of the non-human creatures with whom we share this planet.

My wife and I were on our last day in Lisbon before we scuttled back up to Peniche, an hour-or-so north of Lisbon, where we were staying with friends. We had most of the day to kill before our bus arrived, and we had already done extensive explorations of Portugal’s capital. So, most unusually for us, we decided to spend our time in the Jardim Zoologico, the municipal zoo, which is just across a busy road from the bus station.

This was in late January, the off-season because it is in the middle of Europe’s winter, though in fact (as on most of our days in Portugal) the weather was fine. There were no visiting school parties, no howling children and no crowds blocking our views of enclosures and cages. Indeed, in the whole five-hours-or-so we spent in the zoo, there were so few people there that for much of the time we seemed quite alone with the animals. The few vendors of coffee and ice-cream looked hopelessly around for customers who weren’t there and eagerly solicited our business.

We began by looking at the zoo’s impressive collection of tigers, both Siberian and Indian. We saw their dolphin and sea-lion show, staged in a stadium designed for a couple of thousand people. I counted heads before the show started and discovered that there were exactly 23 of us there. For half-an-hour we watched three dolphins perform their complex and exhilarating tricks, followed by two clever sea-lions not quite matching their eclat. 

We entered the large avian cage where volunteers were feeding red- and rainbow-lories and showed us how to distribute the feed. We followed many varieties of macaws and screeching lorikeets and parrots with their brilliant colours. We looked for monkeys and primates; and met orangutans, spider-monkeys and their kin. We saw jaguars and cheetahs close up, behind thick protective glass. We crossed a high bridge over an enclosure with two mud-caked white rhinoceroses, and found ourselves looking at a field of bright pink flamingos. Towards the end of our journey we caught up with the brown bears and giraffes.

We also lingered near the chimpanzee enclosure, where we had ample time to observe their group behaviour. Near a wall, a large group of chimps was sheltering together for mutual warmth in the face of a whippy wind; and a younger chimpanzee was teasing and tormenting an older one by (literally) excreting and then picking up his excrement and throwing it at the oldster. Topping this, another chimp was shitting in the direction of us few human visitors, and then smearing his shit over the plate glass to show what he thought of us.

This seemed to me very close to the humiliation games that young human beings habitually exhibit. But the highlight of the day was watching – from behind very strong plate glass – the family behaviour of a group of gorillas. They were confined inside as cleaners (protected behind a locked steel door) cleaned and then scattered food in one of the gorillas’ indoor chambers, and then retired before the gorillas could enter. In came the gorillas, and we were so fascinated to watch how they behaved that we stayed watching for about 40 minutes.

There was a big, dominant silver-backed adult male, together with three smaller adult females, and one adolescent male (with a tuft of reddish-brown fur on the top of his head) who was followed and tormented by a baby gorilla. The alpha male headed for the fresh food (leaves and twigs) and began feeding himself. The three females stood guard and waited their turn. Sometimes the adolescent male would creep up behind the alpha male and try to steal some food. The alpha male would rapidly turn around and get ready to whack him. Whereupon the adolescent would hide behind a sturdy ladder fixed to the wall, where the alpha male couldn’t reach him.

At one point there was a big scuffle in which the females seemed to assist the alpha male in putting the adolescent male firmly in his place. And all the while, the baby gorilla kept following the adolescent male, taking sly pokes at him and pulling his fur, often calling out to the adults as he did so, clearly drawing attention to the adolescent male’s misbehaviour and attempts to steal food. The adolescent male tried to swing and climb and run away from the annoying fur-pulling baby, but never hit back.

I could very easily assign human roles to this family. Sulky teenager hiding in his room [behind the ladder] and being snitched on by annoying kid brother. Dad bellowing and saying “Can’t a man eat his dinner in peace?” Mother(s) saying “Behave yourself in front of your father!”. Little kid brother knowing how much he could get away with because he knew the bigger kid would be punished if he lashed out. My wife pointed out another human thing. One of the females spent much time worrying away at the lock on the door that led to the gorillas’ outdoor enclosure. Of course she couldn’t undo it, but she was trying to figure out how it worked. So this, said my wife, is the woman patiently trying to work out a practical solution when the rest of the family is squabbling.

At one point the alpha male chased the adolescent up to the higher level from which we were watching. A few inches away, the adolescent gorilla locked eyes with us before swinging back down. Later, the alpha male gorilla himself swung up to the glass and – a very daunting sight – banged angrily on it, clearly telling us to go away and stop watching his family’s affairs. We took the hint and moved on. (My wife, however, says that the large gorilla might have been angered – or indeed partially blinded – by the flashbulb used by a thoughtless tourist standing next to us.)

I know it is foolish to anthropomorphise and claim to see human traits in other species. But it was impossible to observe this gorilla family for long without noticing how much like us human beings their behaviour is. Indeed it was impossible not to realise that they are our close relatives. On later reflection I also thought how fragile are arguments that refer to all formalised human relationships as mere “social constructs”. The human-like behaviour of these gorillas showed a natural hierarchy with assigned roles. It was the product of evolution, not of some malign plot built on a "construction". The same is true of much formalised human behaviour, even if we have more advanced reason to modify what comes naturally.

Perhaps an even more profound part of this experience was the sense of kinship I felt with these animals. Much as I criticise the flawed world-view of Henry David Thoreau, I can’t help thinking of such moments as “Thoreau moments”.

I had one such moment recently when I was finishing a day of volunteer-guiding on the “open” bird sanctuary island Tiritiri Matangi. All day I had been admiring, and pointing out to visitors, the wonderful native birds – kokako, kereru, saddlebacks, tiu, hihi, bell birds and others. But as I trudged back down to the ferry wharf, I saw sitting in a tree a large magpie. These alien and aggressive birds are very much seen as pests in New Zealand, and indeed they are. So for a moment I was irritated by the magpie’s presence on the island. But then I looked more closely and recognised that, in its large size and beautiful black-and-white plumage and stateliness as it sat on the bough, this annoying creature is a marvel of evolution in its own right. And after all, it was no more of an intruder among native species than I, as a human being, was. Hello brother magpie, my kin – even if I’d shoot you if I were a farmer.

Another “Thoreau experience” came about a month after our visit to the Lisbon zoo, when I was on my own in the south-west of France. I spent some hours in the excellent natural history museum in Toulouse. Among many other fascinating things, there was the skeleton of a gorilla. But there was also the skeleton of a human being riding on the skeleton of a horse. The connection of gorilla to human being was obvious enough. But the sight of a human bag-of-bones on the back of a horse bag-of-bones immediately made me think of Gulliver’s Travels - the human ape-creature Yahoos compared with the patient horse Houyhnhnms.

Magpies, gorillas, horses. We are part of a continuum. 

Related footnote: A week after writing the above posting, we watched on Netflix a documentary about Jane Goodall, famed for her observation of, and interaction with, chimpanzees in their natural habitat in Africa. Much of this was delightful. But there was one moment when, at the risk of being accused of heresy, I was moved to sour laughter. Late in her chimp-watching years, Goodall saw the death (by natural causes) of an influential female chimp in the group she was observing. Shortly thereafter, the group split in two - and the two groups proceeded to attack and murder each other. In effect, this was war, carried out by organized bands of chimpanzees. Sorrowfully, Goodall said "This was a very dark time. I thought they were like us - only better." My sour laughter came from her naive assumption that somehow, non-human animals must be morally superior to human beings. Like hierarchies, organised violence is not something that human beings have created. It is built into nature itself, but usually in the form of predation (carnivorous animals killing other animals) or dominance contests (inidividual animals fighting over who will control the herd or pride). Nature really is "red in tooth and claw", and it is surprising that people who have long given up on religious belief somehow think that there once existed a primal harmony between species in an imagined Garden of Eden. As for violence by organized bands of one species against organized bands of the same species - in other words war - I used to tell students when I lectured on the history of warfare, that as far as we know, there are only three species who engage in warfare: ants, chimpanzees and us. Not that this fact in any way lessens my feelings of unity with other species that I expressed in the above posting.