We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books
When
I was a teenager, a “bang” was one of the kiddie words for sexual intercourse,
on about the same level of puerility as “root” or the later usage “bonk”. As
Stevan Eldred-Grigg is a sociologically-aware person, I’d be surprised if he
didn’t know this. So I do wonder why he’s given the family name Bang to the
main characters of his Christchurch working-class saga. Does it point to the
fact that the novel contains teenage (and kiddie) sex? Or is it intended to
reduce people to being mere random products of random sexual intercourse?
Bangs is the fourth in the series of novels about a proletarian
Christchurch family by Stevan Eldred-Grigg, social historian and novelist. The
series began with Oracles and Miracles
back in 1987. Aunties Ginnie and Fag, main characters of Oracles and Miracles, have walk-on parts in Bangs, but the focus is on young Meridee Bang and her blowsy Mum
Gwendolyn. Meridee, born in the late 1950s, is the youngest of a large family
(eight kids) living in a state house; and she is clearly her mother’s
“mistake”. The novel opens with Gwendolyn going to the doctor because her
periods have stopped and she’s wondering if menopause has come early.
Meridee grows from
little-girlhood in the early 1960s to young-womanhood in the 1980s and it is
the novel’s purpose to follow her every step of the way, showing how she is
both formed and constrained by her environment of family, social class, time
and place. She goes to primary school. Her Mum cooks and washes and smokes. She
watches TV shows of the era like The
Patty Duke Show and I Love Lucy
and fantasises about being characters in them and hops and bops to C’Mon and sings advertising jungles. The
family go on holidays to seaside baches.
There are lots of big brothers and sisters to contend with and the
author pours in much time-and-place-specific detail. When the young child
Meridee has a meal, we get:
“I’m dressed now and ready for grub. Kids are chewing toast while seated
or jumping up and down from the table in the middle of the dinette. The table
is formica, a speckled yellow. The chairs around the table are tubes of chromed
steel padded with vinyl. The vinyl, yellow and grey, is splitting. Cracks are
starting to open in the soldering of the chromed chair legs.” (Pg.25)
And a few pages later when she
uses the bathroom, we get:
“The bathroom is a little cube. The bathtub, boxed inside painted
plywood, takes up half the space. The plywood has begun to rot. A tidal mark
inside the tub is made up of soap and body fat and sloughed skin. A knot of
hair blocks the plughole. The bathroom walls, painted salmon pink, are streaked
with toothpaste, Brylcreem, talcum powder and other stuff, nameless. I do my best
not to think about the nameless stuff.” (Pg.28)
You can easily visualise the
period detail here, and it is such detail that sustains the novel and
underwrites its credibility.
There are some interesting things
about this family. To all intents and purposes, it is a matriarchy, with Mum
Gwendolyn dominating the kids and their emotional development. Although there
is a factory-worker father, Wally, he’s all but invisible, mentioned only
occasionally, staggering in from the six-o’clock swill in the 1960s, joylessly
fumbling with his wife, and otherwise ignored. Late in the novel, we are told
in one Christmas scene that:
“We group ourselves
around the tat for the opening of the presents, which is a desultory sort of
story done every year. Dad presides at the opening. One of the very few
occasions in any season of any year when we make believe he’s the head of the
family. Mum squats nearby and looks oddly submissive.” (Pg.250)
Part of Eldred-Grigg’s purpose,
it would appear, is to tell us something about the condition of working-class
women of the era. With all the kids, Mum is prematurely aged. It is a jolt, in
Meridee’s teenage years, to find that the decrepit Mum she talks about is only
in her forties, and by the time Gwendolyn speaks her last words in the novel,
she is a mere fifty and considering her life to be effectively over. But
women’s roles changed between the 1950s and 1980s and the sociologist in
Eldred-Grigg wants to show us so. Young Meridee’s ambitions and outlook are
quite different from those of her mother, although there are continuities, as
the novel’s conclusion makes painfully clear.
Meridee narrates about 90% of the
novel with Gwendolyn providing most of the rest of the first-person narrative.
So far, so credibly sociological.
We easily register the fact that, from the 1950s to the 1980s, the background
noise of working class life in New Zealand was almost full employment, with
characters readily able to move from one job to another should they wish. We
easily register that gender roles were different and that some people’s
horizons were more limited. We note that in Christchurch in the years covered,
there were beginning to be seen some Polynesian faces and nightclubs were being
set up.
But a little before midway point
in Bangs, there is the shocker.
Pre-pubescent Meridee is first fondled, and then regularly sexually-abused, by
her gormless older brother Larry. (We get all the explicit details). And once
this happens there is inevitably a change of tone. It is found in the overtly-symbolic
nightmares of the girl, as in:
“I’m trapped under red
rubber and I’m drowning. Staring fearfully at a riverbed where eels are
swimming slowly, I see a rank bed of waterweed. I can’t breathe. The eels whip
their tales. I catch sight of something in the weed. Teeth in white rows, small
and sharp. No, round and shiny things. Round and silver things. Shillings! I
grab, but they’re not shillings, they’re the shards of glass, the shards that
flew into the lounge. The glass cuts my skin. My hand begins bleeding. Eels
thrash towards my hand. They thrash towards my eyes. A claw reaches down to
help, the white claw of a woman, yet it doesn’t help. The claw smack my hand
with a frightening whack.” (pg.134)
The white claw appears to belong
to Meridee’s Mum, who all but blames Meridee for the abuse she has suffered.
(Again, perhaps, a model of an older sort of womanhood, giving her first
support to her son.)
The novel gets more depressing.
Not only is the narrating Meridee becoming more grown-up and more aware and
less childishly chirpy, but she is much more cynical even than the average
teenager. She is clearly a bright kid and likes to read more highbrow books
than her Mum would ever crack, as the account of her high-school years
indicates. But marriage, coupling, having children, are always seen negatively
by the teenage Meridee. Her big sister Annette and later her big brother John
get married, and in both cases the event is described in completely joyless
terms. Big sister Valmae gets pregnant at the age of 14 and adopts the child
out. Meridee herself goes on the pill at the age of fourteen, and is soon
“banging” promiscuously all over the place. Boyfriends, older men, a guy who
takes her to Australia and shacks up with her for a while etc. Much of the detail
occupies the last third of the novel, with Meridee visibly becoming weary, more
depressed and feeling hollow and worthless.
I’m sure that an historian like
the author would be able to access statistics on under-age teen sexual activity
and pregnancy, not to mention reported sexual abuse. Presumably Meridee’s
experience is far from unique. Even so, once this becomes the focus of Bangs, the novel becomes more a case of
individual psychopathology than a social portrait.
To add to the problem, there is a
hasty wrap-up, which is very unsatisfactory. The novel jumps suddenly and
gracelessly from the 1980s to (if the very last few words are to be trusted)
what seems to be the big Christchurch earthquake of 2011. It is as if
Eldred-Grigg suddenly reminded himself that this was not intended as a work of
determinism, with Meridee destroyed by her experience and background. He allows
us to picture two or three possible outcomes in Meridee’s later life. Even so,
it is not dramatically convincing.
This is not meant to be a
dismissal of the novel. The voices of Meridee and her Mum are convincing
(allowing for a little unlikely slang on Mum’s part), the external period
detail is interesting and the events varied enough to keep us turning pages.
But Eldred-Grigg has a big
problem, which he doesn’t always solve satisfactorily.
He uses first-person narration,
hence he has to reflect the limitations in the viewpoints of his characters.
But he also wants us to see the big sociological picture. So there are times
when you can detect the author’s index finger pushing characters to say things
that they would not be likely to say; or when the author makes little Meridee’s
tone suddenly change so that, instead of being a child with an artless child’s
perspective, she is a knowing adult looking back on her childhood. Consider
little kiddie Meridee having a chocolate fish. She says:
“A chocolate fish is a hunk of pink marshmallow. Well, to tell the
truth, years later I find out that it’s not marshmallow at all, it’s sugar and
egg white and maize syrup and gelatin, and you know what gelatin is, right?
Yep, powdered skin and bone from the freezing works. You can drive past
freezing works in some of the other suburbs. Freezing works smell of burnt
hair, which is what Nazi death camps must have stunk like. Anyway, none of
these things come from the little scented herb with pink flowers, the marsh
mallow….” (pg.34)
Is this what a five- or
six-year-old would think? The “years later” there gives the game away and lets
us see the joins.
Later there is pubescent
Meridee’s annoyance that Mum won’t hand over the family allowance as pocket
money:
“The money we’re talking about is the family benefit, which is money
given by the state every week to every mother for every kid. The money’s not a
lot, only two dollars. Once upon a time between the wars, when the first Labour
government began handing out the family benefit, you could keep a kid fed and
clothed and shod on that money. Now we’ve been throttled too long by the
National Party. The rich bastards who boss that bloody fascist gang have wasted
away the family benefit till it’s worth nothing more than pocket money.
Sharon’s mum, who wears jeans and is quite foxy for a woman her age, gives
Sharon the two dollars every week and lets her spend it as she likes, the whole
lot. Yesterday, having only just heard about this admirable system, I went and
asked for the same deal from Mum.” (pp.156-157)
It is possible that the young
teen girl has heard her parents talking about the family benefit in these
terms, but again this is more a socio-historical footnote than likely teen
perspective.
The problem of wedding
first-person narration with the author’s intended commentary comes out in other
ways. A number of times, first-person narrators other than Gwendolyn and
Meridee butt into the narrative for just one brief sequence. The prim
primary-school teacher who sizes up Meridee’s chances at school and makes
condescending comments on Meridee’s Mum. Pregnant Valmae filling us in on
details of the domestic situation that little-girl Meridee could not possibly
understand. Most jarringly, near the novel’s end, the six pages of a
middle-class girl Chloe, who is a fellow-student with Meridee and who is
apparently necessary to show us how Meridee struggles to fit in with a
university environment.
Twice (on p.9 and p.265),
Eldred-Grigg repeats the device of having a narrator (Gwendolyn in the first
instance and Meridee in the second) catching her own reflection in a shop
window, so that he can give an “objective” description of how she would look to
others. The fourth wall is broken, the artifice is too obvious and the author
descends to telling us how to see the characters, rather than letting the
characters credibly reveal themselves.
Post-Christchurch earthquake,
though, there is some nostalgic irony. Surely it’s there when, sometime in the
1960s, Mum Gwendolyn reflects:
“The spire of the
cathedral sticks up into the sky. It looks beaut, the cathedral. All old stone,
and old stained glass and old slates, and way up on the spike of the spire is
this big shiny ball and cross. You look at the cathedral and you know where you
stand. The cathedral was here when my great-grandma was the age I am now. The
cathedral will still be here when my great-grandkids are the age I am now.” (Pg.101)
No it won’t. No it isn’t. And one
hopes much of Meridee’s experience won’t be there either.
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