NOTICE TO READERS: For six years, Reid's Reader has been presenting an entirely free service to readers with commentary on books new and old. Reid's Reader
receives no grants or subsidies and is produced each week in many hours
of unpaid work. If you wish to contribute, on an entirely voluntary
basis, to the upkeep of this blog, we would be very grateful if you made
a donation via the PayPal "DONATE" button that now appears at the top
of the index at right. Thank you.]
We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“THE SEVERED LAND” by Maurice Gee (Penguin
/ Random House, $19:99); “HOW TO HAVE A BEER” by Alice Galletly (Awa Press,
“Ginger Series”, $26)
I
must admit that I have not kept track of all the YA fantasy and adventure books
that Maurice Gee has written. I’ve certainly done my best over the years to
keep up with his adult novels, but I am so far behind on his YA works (never my
preferred genre for reading) that, when I looked at the back pages of The Severed Land, I was surprised to see
how many there are. Way back I remember reading Gee’s Under the Mountain (1979) and The
Fire-Raiser (1986) to my older children when they were kids, and I remember
once reviewing Orchard Street (1998). The publicity pages at the end of The Severed Land show me that Gee has written
at least thirteen previous books for teens. So he is obviously highly
experienced at the genre and (given the number of reprints) very popular.
The Severed Land is, says
publicity, his first YA novel in seven years.
A land is
divided in two by an invisible wall. The wall is maintained by the psychic
power of the strange, benign, original inhabitants of the land, called simply
The People. But only one of The People survives. Known as the Old One, this
survivor keeps the land divided by his thought-waves. Alas, the Old One is
enfeebled and may soon die. This would be a catastrophe, as north of the wall
are the peaceable, dark- or black-skinned people who live in small villages and
in harmony with nature. Some of them were originally runaway slaves from the
south, and The People first erected the wall to protect them. South of the wall
there are rapacious, largely white-skinned, colonisers, led by warring rival aristocratic
clans known as The Families, who enslave the populace, pollute the land with
their factories and towns, and promote war. Repeatedly, the southern tyrants
attempt to blast their way through the invisible, psychic wall, but their
cannon balls merely bounce off it. Shoo, a maternal figure for the leading
character Fliss, remarks at one stage: “There’s
no over or under the wall. Guns won’t work either, no matter how big.”
(p.20)
One day young
Fliss is sitting up a tree, watching a southern Family’s army trying futilely
to bash its way through the wall, when she sees a young drummer-boy being mistreated,
beaten and almost killed by a southern officer. Somehow, because she has a psychic
affinity with the wall, Fliss is able to pull the mistreated boy through the
invisible barrier.
In a way, she is
sorry that she did.
The boy, Kirt
Despiner, turns out to be a member of a different aristocratic clan from the
one that was persecuting him, but he has all the habits and ways of thought of
a haughty, pampered noble. He loves nothing more than fighting. He seethes with
thoughts of revenge. He despises slaves and talks down to people. He is a
selfish pest.
This is the
set-up of The Severed Land and of
course it heads, as many YA fantasies do, towards the initiation of a quest. It
turns out that the Old One has psychic contact with a blind woman in the south,
Lorna, the only other person who would be able to maintain the invisible wall
when the Old One is gone. More surprisingly Lorna happens to be the sister of
obnoxious Kirt. Lorna is imprisoned by an enemy Family. So Fliss and Kirt are
sent into the dangerous south, on a quest to free blind Lorna and bring her back
to the north.
This is a good
and straightforward quest story. The contrast between perceptive Fliss and
self-centred Kirt makes for clear characterisation for young readers. Kirt
learns much from the hardships of the journey and is often on the verge of becoming
more human and understanding. But Maurice Gee doesn’t make his transformation
an easy thing. There are perils and escapes in the hostile southern country.
Fliss and Kirt make contact with a sympathetic old warrior called Mutch, who
seems to be leading some sort of resistance movement against the enslaving
Families. (Later, Mutch’s words seem to open the way to a possible sequel to
this novel.)
Some incidental
elements of the story are far more frank than they would have been in a YA book
half a century ago. As Fliss and Kirt pass through a land of starving people,
there are hints (pp.71-73) that the inhabitants have turned cannibal and waylay
people to eat. Some “mummers”
approach Kirt, who poses as Fliss’s slave-owner, and ask if they can buy Fliss
for the night for their pleasure (pp.84-85). In one low dive where they have to
rest, the questing travellers are “kept
awake by the sounds of rutting.” (p.94) A woman tries to entice Fliss into
prostitution. (pp. 96-97). One also notices a number of vicious knife fights,
including one bloody affray around a gallows. Fliss herself is very handy with
her knife.
Reading a YA
book by an author who writes as often for adults, you almost feel that you
should decode what the author is really up to in terms of ideas. Of course it
is now almost de rigueur to have an assertive and confident young woman as hero
– perhaps an acknowledgement that girls are, after all, at least half the YA
readership. The evils of slavery are obviously displayed (free north and
enslaved south – is this some distant echo of the American Civil War?). So are
the evils of colonialism, as Mutch’s movement seems to be a national liberation
movement. Most of all, though, Gee shows the inequities of a society rigidly
divided by class distinctions.
As Fliss and
Kirt hide in a southern city, they observe this:
“They sat on a bench in a dusty square and
ate what was left of their food. Although enclosed by buildings, each was aware
of Galp [the name of the city] stretching
away – the river and wharves, the port with the workers’ houses and dormitories
behind, the slums and stews running inland to the factory belt. And south on
the coast Fountain, a town within a city – wider streets, green parks, business
houses, town houses where merchants, lawyers, agents, administrators lived,
keeping their servants and carriages and their respectability. Beyond and above
on the promontory called Steeps officially, but Up There in the popular tongue,
the Families had built their mansions….” (p.95)
It would be too
easy to read “values” or social commentary into the tale, however. Gee is too
experienced at the game to let a YA novel bog down in preachiness. The Severed Land is an efficient and
engaging quest story with enough of characterisation and action to engage a young
readership. Enough said.
* *
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * * *
For a few years
now, Awa Press has been producing its “Ginger Series” of long essays (each
about a hundred pages), in which various New Zealand worthies set out to
enlighten us on accessible aspects of life. Kevin Ireland on “How to Catch a
Fish”, Richard Hall on “How to Gaze at the Southern Stars”, Steve Braunias on
“How to Watch a Bird”, and so on.
Fourteenth and
latest contribution to the series is journalist Alice Galletly’s How to Have a Beer.
Let me admit,
before I say anything else, that I am not a great beer-drinker. I’m not opposed
to the brew; but my experience of beer is that, especially if I drink it in the
afternoon, and even in small quantities, it tends to send me to sleep or make
me perfectly useless for any activity whatsoever. So – except if I’m a tourist
in a brewery (as I once was in Kilkenny in Ireland) – I tend to avoid beer. In
order of preference, my favourite tipples are (a.) black coffee (mornings
only); (b.) wine (anytime, so long as don’t I have to drive); and (c.) black
tea (putting milk in tea is an abomination).
I have of course
met many wine snobs, all of whom I regard with polite amusement. According to
my well-educated palate, there are only three types of wine (a.) very good and
having a distinctive flavour; (b.) acceptable, especially after a few glasses; and
(c.) swill to be avoided. There are no other categories, and outside
professional wine-tasters, I think there is not one person in a million who
would really be able to discern more categories of wine than these.
As for BEER
(which is supposed to be the subject of this notice), I have so far in my life
met only one beer snob – a chap who discourses on the demotic horrors of lager
and proclaims the superiority of craft ales made in obscure English villages.
I’m sure he knows what he is talking about, but a more experienced beer-drinker
than I would probably be able to challenge him. I recently drank a beer with
great delight – the mass-produced Belgian La Chouffe – but one of my sons
advised me that I was really reacting to the alcohol content. For strange
historical reasons, Belgian beers have a much higher alcohol content than
German or English beers. La Chouffe is 7%.
Alice Galletly
is a self-proclaimed “beer geek”. The origins of How to Have a Beer were a blog she produced when she decided to
drink one new craft beer every day of the year – that it, she sampled 365 craft
beers. The inspiration to do this sprang from her sudden realisation that in
some New Zealand supermarkets, there are now as many varieties of craft beer on
offer as there are varieties of wine.
Galletly is
serious about her subject, and tells us about the agreed protocols of being a
beer geek. For example, she recounts with shame how she once got drunk at a
meeting of beer enthusiasts, and threw up a very expensive and much-esteemed
craft beer:
“There is an unspoken notion among craft beer
enthusiasts that we should never get drunk. Drinking beer to the point of
intoxication (let alone regurgitation) is a sport reserved for the
unsophisticated masses, the consumers of cheap pale lager who wouldn’t know a
Belgian lambic if it hit them on the head. Never mind that craft beer sometimes
has double, even triple, the alcohol content of those lagers, we are supposed
to share our craft beer with friends, sip it slowly, and drink it with food. In
short, we are supposed to know better.” (p.13)
If she’s serious
about the subject, however, her tone is most often light-hearted, flippant and
filled with zingers and punch lines. It’s amiable but not exactly fine prose.
As a beer
ignoramus, I was interested to discover quite a few things from her essay.
First, her revelation (to me) that hops are a relatively recent addition to
beer. The beverage has been brewed for about seven thousand years, but hops
became part of the ingredients only about 500 years ago in Germany. Water, malt (malted barley); yeast; and hops
are the basic ingredients of the stuff as it now exists. Second, Galletly
schooled me in the fact that the famous German “Reinbeitsgebot” (“Purity
Pledge”), which you will find printed on the labels of many a pilsener, is not
a guarantee of quality and never was. It is simply an assurance (dating from a couple
of hundred years ago) that the contents of German beers have not been
adulterated.
Then there was a
lot of miscellaneous information that amused without really enlightening me on
what is or is not a good beer. Ah yes, but then Galletly has a reason for not
offering us a list of recommendations. As she winds us saying in the last
chapter, the basic joy of drinking beer is the joy of associating with other
people – and if your preferred type is something despised by beer-experts,
ignore them and drink up anyway.
Most enjoyable
section of the essay? The section where Galletly gives a glossary of terms
which beer geeks will know, including the irresistible “brandwank” (it means
those meaningless words with which certain niche brands attempt to market themselves
– “premium”, “hand-crafted” etc.)
No comments:
Post a Comment