Something New

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

“THE BURNING RIVER” by Lawrence Patchett (Victoria University Press, $NZ30)

Set in an alternative New Zealand, probably many centuries in the future,  The Burning River is Lawrence’s Patchett’s first novel. As he says in his acknowledgements, it “has been many years in the writing”. He has been working on it since his short-story collection I Got His Blood on Me appeared in 2012. The novel shows once again his great skill in pure story-telling, but also his ability to create a believable world.

In this future New Zealand, both Maori and Pakeha exist, but urban life seems to have disappeared. At least it is not mentioned in the narrative and we understand that some great ecological disaster has happened. Society is divided into distinct bands, or tribes. Swamp people subsist by trading, and live in unsanitary wetlands where water is polluted and poisoned. The novel’s protagonist Van “mines” for plastic, which he turns into valuable and tradeable trinkets. This suggests a post-industrial world with a deteriorated environment which has been ravaged by industrial chemicals and the like. Most of the swamp people are apparently Maori, apart from the Pakeha protagonist, who has been raised by the wise old woman Matewai. Van is  “the scared kid she’d taken in as a Wayside orphan and helped to set up in the mongrel trade of plastics, a stray Pakeha without known waters or a place to stand, sheltered by Matewai her only child had found him trapped in a pond of swamp-seep and pulled him free and brought him back to her hut.” (p.96)

The swamp people are dominated by the Whaea people who have built a closed, fence-surrounded community on higher ground, where there are springs of fresh and clean water, and therefore better health. These two discrete groups associate only in the complex protocols of “trade” and in a yearly summer festival, where even intimate relationships can be formed. But clearly the Whaea people, who seem to be exclusively Maori, are essentially the aristocracy looking down on the unhealthy artisans and peasants. Nevertheless, so long as the accepted rules are observed, healthy Whaea people and unhealthy swamp people coexist peacefully enough.

In this alternative New Zealand of the future, however, these are not the only groups. There are also Scarpers, who appear to be sheer bandits; and the Burners, who are destroying the forests by fire, and whose role in the story becomes clear only late in the piece. And far, far away are the Inlanders, whom rumour presents as very warlike and whose movements and migrations seem to be putting pressure on other groups and displacing them from their homelands. This may hint at satire of New Zealand’s real history of colonisation.

It is interesting that in this ravaged future New Zealand, there are no cattle, sheep, or horses.  Indeed while there are forest birds and small animals, like possums, which are trapped for food, larger animals do not figure. We are made aware that a New Zealand in which travel is exclusively on foot suddenly becomes a huge country. It takes many days to walk though bush between places which we would consider to be close together. Part of the novel’s most bizarre effect is that it sets the reader off, trying to work out which specific part of New Zealand could possibly be its setting.

Patchett is very consistent with the world he has created and presents it in convincing detail, including such matters as burial customs, tribal diplomacy, and forms of belief.

His skill in story-telling is seen in his use of suspense – not the immediate cliff-edge variety of suspense, but the slow burn which makes us wait eagerly for the outcome of some situation he has set up. The novel opens with Van, the swampland plastic “miner”, being summoned to the fenced Whaea territory by the girl Kahurangi (generally called Kahu in the novel). Who is this girl? Why has she been sent to summon him rather than somebody older, and why is he being summoned anyway? Once we know this, and once we learn of Van’s relationship with the Whaea woman Hana, Van is then persuaded to go on a long and potentially dangerous mission with a group of Whaea companions. What exactly is the purpose of the mission? It is never my purpose to spike surprises in new novel, but I can say once these things are made clear, the novel conforms to the arc of a quest: a fraught journey towards a goal or a final ordeal. As this unfolds, a good part of the narrative’s focus is on the developing relationship between Van and Hana and the girl Kahu; and on Van’s anxiety about his future ordeal.

If The Burning River were a movie, you would say it was low tech – there is no magic and and there are no “special effects” in the sense that (apart from the mention of healing potions) there are no wizards or fantastic beasts. We are not in Lord of the Rings country. The quest takes us through credible dangers – the perils of ascending and descending rough hill paths, especially for a swamp man who is used only to water and level ground; encounters with hostile human beings of one sort and another, and therefore a number of fights; and what turns out to be an existential threat to the apparently-dominant fenced Whaea community.

It would be very easy to over-think this book and look for intended lessons or messages.

Much of the novel has an implicit ecological theme. There is a repeated focus on the purity or impurity of the water which different groups have to use. While emphasising that clean water is essential for life, and that it can easily be polluted by the industrial process, this also relates to current debates on the pollution of waterways in New Zealand by the run-off from farming.

Yet “waters” here also refer to the way people define themselves in their whakapapa (geneologies) by their “waters”, or the sources from which they came. Again, this suggests an image of all humanity as braided together, for sources ultimately run into one greater river.

Given that Maori characters dominate, some of the dialogue is in Maori (the Pakeha author acknowledges help that was given to him with te reo), though context makes most exchanges comprehensible to non-speakers of Maori. I might be mistaken in my reading, but there may be another implied theme here of the durability of indigenous culture; and the possibility that in a low-tech future, Maori might be better equipped than Pakeha to survive a subsistence way of life. Permit me to suggest that a future country, as ravaged as the one in this novel, might not hold out such a promise, and Maori too are now as much a part of an industrialised culture as anybody else.

The neatly-uplifting ending of The Burning River will not be to all tastes after we have been presented with such a bleak environment. But perhaps there could be an intended irony here. The apparent conclusion may be merely a hiatus in the midst of ongoing tribal and sectional conflicts.

I come away from The Burning River admiring what I began this review with – Patchett’s skill as a story-teller and the depth and credibility of the speculative world he has created. As for the major ideas he intended to convey – on these I admit to being a little confused.