Something New

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

“BIRD CHILD & OTHER STORIES” by Patricia Grace (Penguin, $NZ37); “THE GREAT DIVIDE” by Cristina Henriquez (4^th Estate – Harper Collins, $NZ36.99); “MY HEAVENLY FAVOURITE” by Lucas Rijneveld – translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison (Faber & Faber, $NZ37)

Now 87 years old, and with many short stories and novels to her credit, Patricia Grace is very skilled in different genres. Re-workings of ancient mythology,  childhood memories, satirical anecdotes and hard realism – all can be found in her latest collection Bird Child & Other Stories. An introduction tells us that Bird Child & Other Stories is divided into three parts. Part One – reworkings of ancient Maori myths and legends. Part Two – stories about Mereana, a young girl and her life in wartime Wellington. Part Three – her most recent stories dealing with problems of the current era. Seeing as these are three quite different forms of narration, the only way one can read this book is to take each of the Three Parts as three quite different books.

Part One: Patricia Grace begins with the title story of the book “Bird Child”, a variation on ancient myth. It is set in some primeval time when gods are not fully formed and birds are wise, cunning and articulate. A child is born but the spirit is taken out of the child’s body and the spirit becomes part of the bird clan. The child’s bird mother is Kaa, presumably a kea. The bird child is both respected and feared by other birds, but he brings warmth into the world. In a way, Grace’s reworking of ancient beliefs is dominated by the richness of forests before human beings came along. There is a respect for a very verdant nature, so that “Bird Child” becomes an epic of forest. The three stories that follow are shorter, and one reviewer (Paula Morris) has already suggested that these stories are aimed primarily at school-children, enlightening them about Maori lore. I agree with this suggestion. The story “Mahuika et al.” is set in the world of gods, goddesses and spirits. The great mother Mahuika directs how things will benefit human beings when they finally wake up. Fire flashes from her fingertips and gives fire to the people… but Maui the trickster tricks Mahuika and steals the making of fire. “Sun’s Marbles” is the epic story of the gods who, tired of being embraced too tightly between Earth and Sky, are led by Maui to push Earth and Sky apart, to the advantage of the gods. “The Unremembered” takes the traditional story of Rona who cursed the Moon and was forced to be part of the Moon, but who eventually did much to preserve the literal health of the Earth. Grace uses this fable to consider the need for ecological health on Earth. The tone is admonitory, and certainly a tale readable for adolescents.

Part Two is very different in style and attitude. There are twelve anecdotes about Mereana, a young Maori girl living near Wellington in the 1940s when the Second World War is in progress. Given that this was the time and place of Patricia Grace’s childhood, it is hard not to see these stories as at least partly autobiographical. In one story, Mereana experiences wartime night-time black-outs. In another she waves her father goodbye as he goes off to war. She and other kids are excited when G.Is. give then chewing gum. Her uncle jokingly says he’s going to give his children a monkey when he’s back from his sailing... but in the end it proves to be a joke. Mereana learns how to fish in the company of her uncle and her cousins, and after much trying she does land a fish. Being a Catholic kid, she and her school-mates wonder if they’ve committed a mortal sin by blowing out the red candle that is supposed to stay alight always. When she hears that her father is coming home, she frets that she might have forgotten what he looks like; but she does join in the celebrations of her extended family when the soldiers return home… and this shows that the stories run across a number of years. Mereana is growing up. There is one very sober tale called “The Urupa” in which a child is taken to a cemetery  and learns about his whakapapa. There is also one very chastising story when Mereana was still very young – she is sent off to buy a loaf of bread, but she is accosted by two older Pakeha girls, who first throw away her purse and then physically wound her with a piece of broken glass. When her mother confronts the mother of these two girls, their mother curses her, says Mereana is lying and slams the door on her. This is the one story that raises the issue of racial prejudice in New Zealand. The final story in Part Two has Mereana now a grown-up young student attending a hop, and the problem when gate-crashers butt in. The earlier stories show the simplicity and sometimes purity of a child’s mind, but also carefully and persuasively depict the world she inhabits. 

Part Three, as it deals with the present age, tells us of both compassionate things and brutal things. All the major characters are Maori. Dare I say these are the most grown-up stories in the book? On the challenging side, there is “The Machine”, a sad realist tale of a woman working as a machinist while having to look after an invalid mother. The monotony of machine-work and tiring factory protocols drum through the story. “Green Dress” is about an unhappy domestic situation – a daughter is in conflict with her mother, especially when the daughter marries an unreliable man. The mother nags and can be very quarrelsome but in the end, her traditional scale of values proves to be more resiliant than the daughter’s ideas. “Hey Dude” (deliberately referring to the Beatles’ song “Hey Jude”) is a very short tale plunging into the very discursive thoughts of an elderly woman. One of the most positive and ultimately optimistic stories is “Matariki All-Stars”. A widower has seven daughters – just like the seven daughters of Matariki. He is a hard-working man, but he doesn’t quite earn enough to look after all his girls. Still he doesn’t want to have his family broken up. He often finds himself at odds with his [childless] sister, who is bossy and thinks it is for the best for her to take some of the girls into her care. But the father battles through and ultimately raises all his daughters well. They are his shining Matariki stars. Is this sentimental? No – because among other things Patricia Grace shows how hard single-parenthood is and how it takes a special sort of heroism to raise children well. Speaking of single parents, “Thunder” has a young boy having to look after his even younger siblings and then finding a lost kid who has wandered away from his home. Again the issue is how very difficult single-parenthood is, and how prejudice is often directed at single mothers. And after all these telling stories, there comes the one story which suggests real anger. This is “Seeing Red”. A Maori civil servant in a government department becomes more and more angry at the way his Pakeha colleagues either misunderstand or regard as unnecessary certain Maori norms. This is about the matter of education and how Maori teenagers should be taught – and one thing the author correctly hits on is the way many schools simply “tick boxes” by going through the motions of dealing with Maori concerns without really setting up appropriate programmes. This is where Patricia Grace is an activist.

From all the above you can see that Grace has produced a very varied collection of stories, using many different types of narration but all, in their very different styles, enlightening us about different phases Maori culture and mores.

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Cristina Henriquez’s The Great Divide covers a lot of issues and a lot of characters. Set mainly in the year 1906, it gathers together a cast of people who are somehow connected with the construction of the Panama Canal, when the U.S.A. has expropriated from the state of Panama a “canal zone” six miles wide, which is in effect ruled by the U.S.A..

To give you the general flavour of the novel, the best this I can do is to list some of the major characters. The old Panamainian Francisco Aguina is a fisherman who wants to stick with the traditional ways. But his son Omar never wanted to be a fisherman and he runs away to make money joining with labourers digging the Panama Canal. So there is a father’s loss of his son. The resourceful young woman Ida Bunting, of mixed race, runs away from her home in Barbados because she wants to raise money to pay a doctor who will cure her beloved sister Millicent’s damaged lungs. And in her story there is her formidable mother Lucille Bunting who has to deal with the plantation owner who impregnated her. So there is a mother missing her daughter and many domestic problems. In the “canal zone” there is the family of the American doctor John Oswald, who is trying to find a way of curing malaria now the Yellow Fever has abated. Ida Bunting, by good fortune, becomes the nurse for John Oswald’s wife. The Panamainian husband-and-wife team Joaquin and Valentina bring together a troop protesting against the Yanquis’ plan to destroy their village to made way for a dam as part of the great canal. And there is the sadistic foreman Miller who drives his labourers so harshly that there is a violent outcome for one character. For good measure, I must note that Cristina Henriquez drops in two fantastic characters who come close to the “magical realism” that once flourished in Central and South American literature. One is the soothsayer Dona Ruiz, who is presented almost as a witch. The other is the fisherman Francisco Aguina’s deceased wife Esme, who comes back to him in dreams and in apparitions.

There are many other characters I could mention, but this probably gives you the general idea. The Great Divide is a kind of saga, with many characters, many different problems, and always some new event happening. A page-turner certainly. For me, the tempo is somewhat stop-start. Whenever a new character is introduced, we have at length his or her back-story. This should not worry most readers, however.

The Great Divide is a novel intended for mass readership and so it has a happy ending for at least some of the most tried and mistreated characters. That’s as it should be, I suppose. But though Cristina Henriquez touches on the making of the canal, she does not really dig deeply into it. Another author might have focused even more on the harsh and dangerous conditions in which the labourers had to toil, the poor wages they were given, the authoritarian way the Americans overlorded them, the segregation of races that was practiced, the quelling of any discontent from the indigenous Panamanians  – in short, all the practices used by a new colonial power. In these matters it might be worth your while to look up on this blog my review of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo , in which I mention the Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s The Secret History of Costaguana, which really concerns the way the U.S.A. took over the “canal zone”.  In fairness Henriquez does make some reference to all these things and there are some brutal episodes. But The Great Divide is more focused on the adventures of her main characters and how they fare.

Clearly written and showing real research, I see no reason why this shouldn’t be a very popular novel for a large readership.

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            How very different is Lucas Rijneveld’s My Heavenly Favourite .

In Death in Venice, Aschenbach ogles a young boy but never lays a finger on him. In Lolita, Humbert Humbert drools over a pre-pubescent girl but barely gets to possess her. But when the Dutch novelist Lucas Rijneveld writes about a paedophile, he gives us all the explicit details of a 14-year-old girl being sexually groomed and exploited by a middle-aged man.

This is Rijneveld’s second novel. His first, The Discomfort of Evening, earned acclaim and won the International Booker Prize. It concerned in part a 12-year-old girl being introduced to sex games. Rijneveld identifies as non-binary, but he was born and raised a girl and was then subject to much teasing. The ultimate vulnerability of young girls concerns him, as does the abuse that can plague them. [NB Rijneveld by choice prefers to be called “he” when he is spoken about in the English language.]

Kurt is a veterinarian working in a rural farming area (the country Rijneveld comes from) with a wife and teenage sons. He is occasionally shocked, such as finding the corpse of a farmer who hanged himself when his herd of cattle was fatally diseased. But otherwise Kurt is generally happy doing his rounds, offering advice to farmers or thrusting his gloved hands up cows having difficulty giving birth.

Then he meets a farmer’s 14-year-old daughter. He is bewitched by her. He is fascinated by her odd talk about Hitler and Freud and the destruction of the Twin Towers. He plays along with her favoured pop music, everything from the Cranberries to Bowie, Kurt Cobain and multiple others. He takes her to movies. He buys her sweets. He calls her “my heavenly favourite”. He dreams about her and masturbates with her in mind. And bit by bit he fondles her a little, then a lot, then in an extreme way. This is where the explicit sex scenes come in, finally amounting to rape although Kurt doesn’t see it that way. He likes to see himself as avuncular.

There are some side issues. At one point, Kurt’s son is attracted to the girl – unaware of his father’s behaviour – so Kurt had to find ways of warning him off. Kurt has nightmares about his mother, suggesting that he has been warped by incest in his family. The Calvinist Reform Church seems to have done him no good when he was young.

But the skill of the novel is not in the situation. It is in the narration. My Heavenly Favourite is told throughout in the first-person by Kurt, who is addressing the girl in a sort of on-going confession. He speaks in sentences that scamper through page after page without a full-stop in sight. This is the narration of a man’s fevered mind. His brain is crowded with desire, fear, guilt, lust, grandiose schemes, a sense of victimhood, and of course some self-vindication. Most unnerving is the way he introduces animal penises to the girl before he introduces his own penis to her. His animal imagery has the tendency to equate the girl with just another animal. Yet in all this, he is aware of clear warnings that he will ultimately face trial and retribution. Which he does.

It is hard to categorise this novel. It could be read as the analysis of an unbalanced mind, even if the protagonist has sharp observation of the world he inhabits and is apparently quite sane. It could be an exercise in being – to use what is now a cliché – “transgressive” just for the hell of it. It could simply be condemning paedophiles. But here is the greatest problem. The prose often rises to brilliance with unexpected turns of phrase, startling metaphors and shrewdness. But you always have to ask yourself – what purpose is this virtuosity serving?