We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books
Was the West Coast of the South
Island, in the nineteenth century, New Zealand’s Wild West? Does it have the
right credentials to become a site of Pakeha mythology? It would seem that some
of our historians and writers of fiction think so. At least, that is the
impression I get from books that I was glad to have sent to me for review over
the last few years. There was Stevan Eldred-Grigg’s loose but comprehensive
history of the New Zealand gold rushes, with ample chapters on the West Coast, Diggers, Hatters and Whores, in 2008.
There was Charlotte Randall’s courageous, and badly under-rated, Hokitika Town in 2011. And at the moment
I am diligently reading an advance copy of Eleanor Catton’s capacious
forthcoming novel The Luminaries. The
19th century South Island West Coast setting of each introduces us
to shady criminals, fortune-hunters, whores, dodgy financiers and charlatans,
Pakeha, Maori and Chinese characters, a certain lawlessness and the rawness of
a frontier society. No, there are no gunfights in the streets, but there is the
capacity for violence and at least the possibility of the mythologization of
adventurers.
A modest but welcome addition to
this theme is Amy Head’s Tough. This
collection of twelve short-stories is Head’s first publication, but she
approaches her West Coast theme in a satisfyingly novel way.
Her opening story “West Coast
Road” has a very strange structure. It begins as a conversation, in the 1860s,
between Julius von Haast, Canterbury’s Provincial Engineer, and the family of
one of his subordinates, as they discuss plans for a road through from the
plains to the West Coast. But after presenting the domestic scene convincingly,
it turns into a series of documentary statements about how road and rail were
eventually pushed west and through the alps. The point of the brief (8 pages)
story seems to be to contrast idealistic dream with structured historical
reality – and perhaps to warn us how much we take for granted the things that
people once laboured hard to achieve.
At any rate, this opening story
at once sets up a dialogue between past and present, and that is how the rest
of the volume plays out. Throughout, stories set in the present alternate with
stories set in the nineteenth century.
The contemporary story “Pluck
Duck” contrasts modern notions of social misbehaviour (games in a pub; a
subdued American woman visitor who might possibly be involved in the porn
industry) with nineteenth century notions of social misbehaviour in the story
“The Sinner” which follows.
“The Adman” presents a
sexually-frustrated modern young man. The nineteenth century story which
follows it, “Flood”, is the stolid tale of a respectably married policeman
escorting a young actress back from a camp to a township, with expressions of
his feelings implied only.
“The Kitchen Pig Smokes the
Mouseketeers” illustrates a disjunction in perception. It is the monologue of
an addle-headed waitress, with all manner of made-up slang, who is jocular to
the point of silliness about everything – but underlying her chatter we
perceive a genuinely sad tale going on as one of her colleagues goes through a
break-up. “Tough”, the nineteenth century tale that follows, is also about a
disjunction of perception. Without inserting “spoilers” into my review, I can
say it is about the difference between admiring hardy adventurous criminals
from a distance, and actually having to suffer their actions – fiction hitting
the rock face of reality. It is interesting that it has been chosen as the
eponymous piece.
It is possible that I am
over-emphasizing these thematic pairings. It is possible that the author did
not intend such neat comparisons as I am making – but the alternating
arrangement does constantly force us to compare past and present. First person
account of present-day woman on West Coast camping holiday (“Camping”) followed
by first-person nineteenth century woman’s account of her travails in the West
Coast land she has just reached (“A Strange Tale”). Pot-smoking modern-day
outsider (“Home Grown”) followed by nineteenth-century Irish woman outsider
(“Maggie Quinn”). And to bring the collection full-circle, the final story
“Visitors” has an injured man whisked from the West Coast to a Christchurch
hospital by helicopter, a far cry from the dreams of building a road west in
the opening story.
As a general judgement, I found
the stories with present-day settings more allusive, more likely to take their
social setting for granted, more prone to inconclusive endings that allow
readers to join the dots – in a word, more postmodern. Certainly their emphasis
is on presentation of character rather than on neat conclusions. Things are
left hanging in the air, so that one goes checking back through the text to
ensure that one hasn’t missed something, not quite sure that the moments
narrated amount to an epiphany.
It is often considered bad form
to pick out favourites when reviewing collections of short stories, but there
are two stories here that really stand out for me, and they are both nineteenth
century ones. The first is “A Strange Story”, which has not one, but two
first-person narrators, and which does convey the strangeness of the West Coast
to a newly-arrived immigrant. Her observations on the new country include this
viewing of early Pakeha pretensions:
“From Westport we kept on north to the new
diggings, where I first encountered stands selling spirits or spades or
Hunter’s Tonic while floorboards were being nailed down behind them. This
combination of otherworldly scenery and a kind of stage-prop architecture was
especially disorientating. We stopped outside a makeshift inn on one such
stretch where travelling diggers were spread out, resting, some of them in
their cups. Foam flew up from the beach. Drunkenness was a good sign, Reuben
told me – good for business….” (“A Strange Story” p.99)
“Stage-prop architecture” really does
conjure up the right mental image of all those wooden store-fronts we see in
decaying black-and-white photographs, with their impressive facades masking
disappointing back-quarters. Drunkenness is a reality inseparable from the old
coast. “A Strange Story” works the woman’s disorientation into her account of
sinking into trouble, will-less-ly. If it isn’t quite on a par with the
volume’s best story, it is simply because the ending seems bitten off too
hastily.
For me, the very best story in
this collection is “The Sinner”. It is a very careful and precise
reconstruction of how a boy, at the time of the West Coast gold-rushes, runs
away in the hope of making himself a frontier legend – and the rather
dispiriting reality of the diggers’ life that he encounters. The quality of the
story is in the detail – the elusiveness of the much-sought gold; the boy’s
naivete and initiation into manly ways that quite clearly have a sexual
undercurrent; the sense of loss. The incidents of “The Sinner” suggest a story
that could have been reworked as a novel. But in this case the abrupt ending is
part of its meaning. That we don’t know what became of the boy makes him a more
universal and representative figure. It is like the wail of a sad old
folk-song.
The sinner has the framing device
of a slightly crazy street orator, who observes the boy’s town-life and later
notes his disappearance. In presenting him, Amy Head gives us a good historical
social panorama of the place:
“Diggers threw him coins out of superstition,
to ward off his soothsaying. He sat in a funk of bad air and bad humour, amid
rumours of crime, desertion and love. Badly healed blisters mottled the skin
across the ridge of his cheeks. Past him, back and forth, speculators would
walk and talk mining stock. They disappeared into the Empire Hotel to seal
their sales with whisky. They passed in and out of the broker’s office and the
warden’s court. Before they had the machinery to crush the gold from quartz,
before a church had been built of even a bank, they were trading.” (“The
Sinner” p.35)
The solid
representation of place is one of the best things about the collection. And of
course there are many references to rain, to dripping bush and to flooding. It
wouldn’t really be a book about the West Coast if this were not the case.
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