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.

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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.