Something New

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

     “THE MIRES” by Tina Makereti  (Ultimo Press $39:99) ; “SERVICEMAN J. The untold story of an NZSAS Soldier” by Jamie Pennell  (HarperCollins NZ $39:99);      “THE SURVIVORS – Stories of Death and Desperation” by Steve Braunias (HarperCollins $39:99)

 

Tina Makereti’s novel The Mires is in many ways written like a fable – that is, a story meant to point a moral, or in this case a number of morals. It begins with a clear conservation statement about the importance of “swamps”, or if you prefer, wetlands. They conserve water and are in a way the heart of life for human beings. “Swamps” feed trees, nurture many animals, and provide people with water. We are reminded that all the waters of the world ultimately join one another, and this relates to the novel’s reminder that ultimately all peoples are connected too. There is a oneness to everything.

The main narrative is set in a small suburb near a “swamp”  in Kapiti on the West Coast of the North Island. In the same driveway, three women live close to one another in state houses.

Keri is Maori but her whakapapa also includes many Irish. [NB When Tina Makereti presented her first novel Where the Rekohu Sings, she made it clear that while she is Maori she had some Pakeha and possibly some Moriori ancestors.] Keri lives with her teenaged daughter Wairere [often called just “Wai”] and with a younger kid Walty, who come from different fathers. Both of Kere’s partners have long gone and she is a single mother relying on a benefit. But she is hard-working and optimistic, generous and gets on with people - although she worries about the moodiness of Wairere. Wairere often goes walking to the swamp and has basically mystical ideas about nature and the gods.

Then there is Sera who, with her husband Adam and her little daughter Aliana, has come to New Zealand as a refugee. We are not told exactly what country she and her family came from – only that it was somewhere on or near the Mediterranean Sea. But this vagueness may be relevant to the fact that the story is set in the near future, where the northern hemisphere is burning up and heatwaves are literally killing people. This is very clearly a tale about the dangers of climate change, and the novel has much to say about ecology.

Both Keri and Sera are welcoming and generous people, with Keri often enlightening Sera about ways in Aotearoa / New Zealand. Also both are partly reliant on public assistance, Sera and Adam with assistance as refugees and Keri with “The Ministry of Public Assistance, Work and Development” - a ministry which, as the author admits in her notes, she made up, presumably to represent all forms of annoying bureaucracy.

But the third woman is a different kettle of fish. Janet Bloom – sometimes rudely called Mrs. B. – is a Pakeha who doesn’t particularly like his Maori and refugee neighbours. She is sometimes polite to them, even giving a gift to one of them and trusting Keri’s daughter Wairere to walk her dog Zadie. But she still sees Maori as a threat and refugees as unwelcome. She too has been deserted by her husband and has a very bitter demeanour. Some way into the novel, we learn that she has a layabout son, Conor, already in his thirties but a loner and a keyboard jockey who spends his time filling his mind with extremist ideas. He is well on his way to becoming a white supremacist. Where this leads him to go is not for me to say. Not being a swine, I do not reveal the endings of new novels.

Most of The Mires concerns the interaction of these three women. Men – apart from bigoted Conor – are very much in the background. Sera’s polite and thoughtful husband Adam is a minor character and of course Keri and Janet Bloom no longer have husbands or partners.

Tina Makereti’s prose is admirably clear and she can create believable situations. One of the best is the episode where Keri goes to pick up her benefit and witnesses a Pakeha beneficiary losing his temper and turning to violence when he is denied the benefit he needs to feed his kids. Not only is it believable, but Makereti is giving a nod to the fact that some Pakiha go through hardship too. Another engaging situation is when Keri attends a party, flirts with a man but then, when she begins to see through him, she has the problem of getting rid of him. This event leads later in the novel to problems with the man she flicked off. At it’s very best in the prose is when Makereti has teenaged Wairere going to the swamp and sees the majesty of nature in the raw. I cannot forebear to quote it in full.: “One time she saw a matuku out on the water, a thick eel caught in its beak. The eel squirmed and wriggled until it found the heron’s neck, then coiled its body around the bird while the heron tried to swallow the eel and keep hold of it simultaneously. They were locked in a battle like that for twenty minutes: the heron swallowing as much of the eel as possible, then regurgitating it when it wouldn’t stay down; the eel never letting go of the outside world, holding fast to the body of its predator. Wairere felt the wonder of it, this drama playing itself out right in the middle of suburbia, houses all around her but no other humans to be seen. It was glorious, and she was all alone. Maybe that was why it was glorious.     Eventually, the heron began to triumph. The eel went down more and more each time until the bird managed to close its beak over its sleek, dark opponent. Wairere had been rooting for the eel, but the bird was strong and graceful, and deserved the prize after the battle. Neck bulging, the bird swam to a post, knocked a smaller heron off, and perched there, content in the sun. The heron would be sleeping it off for hours, days maybe, confident in its status and capacity to survive. Wairere left the scene, filled with the birds contentment. If an eel had to go, she thought, good for it to go to a bird rather than a human. She had this other feeling too: that they came out for her, the beasts of the swamp, that they had let her see things they revealed to no one else.” [Chapter 16, pp.168-169]. 

This is a brilliant depiction of struggle between two animals, and acknowledges “nature red in tooth and claw”. But Wairere’s belief that “ the beasts of the swamp… had let her see things they revealed to no one else ”  is a very teenage impulse to interpret things as if they were staged just for her. In the novel there is a clear clash between realism and fantasy. The apparently sharp insight of the unhappy teenager Wairere, who intuits things that others cannot, is very close to fantasy. This is particularly true in the denouement. A flood fortunately brings people together and resolve their different perspectives. In fact I would go further and says it’s a little neat to bring together as protagonists one nice Maori woman, one forbearing refugee woman and one very grumpy Pakeha woman. They are set there to make a point about tolerance, bigotry and accepting different ethnicities – almost like a homily. There are really extremist nutters in New Zealand, like gullible Conor… but how representative are they? Maybe more than we would like.  [In her notes, Tina Makereti refers to the mosque massacre in Christchurch – so extremism can rear its head in New Zealand.]

As I said at the beginning of this review, The Mires is designed to point a moral (or morals). But nothing I have written here is meant to belittle this novel. It reads very well. The author has a strong skill in framing and resolving situations, she has a sharp eye for relevant description, and it scores by being very readable. 

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“Serviceman J” was the code for New Zealand SAS soldier Jamie Pennell. To protect individual soldiers from being targeted by hostile groups, personal names were not used in communications when forces were engaged in operations. Serviceman J is Jamie Pennell’s first-person account of his years in the military. It is a chronicle as much as a narrative as Pennell takes us in sequence from event to event.

It took him a long time to decide whether he wanted to join the military. When he did sign on, his aim was to join the elite SAS. At Waiouru he underwent tough training, but in his first attempt he missed out on being selected by the corps. He tried again years later and did make it, but only after very gruelling exercises and training – indeed to an outsider like this reviewer, much of the training sounds as daunting and dangerous as actual warfare. He thought about joining the British SAS but changed his mind and rejoined his New Zealand battalion joining ops in East Timor maintaining the disputed border with Indonesia.

And then, in what is really the core of this memoir, he and the NZSAS were engaged in Afghanistan. He writes vividly of moving into Taliban areas in the mountains (this was at a time when Afghanistan still had a more-or-less democratic government trying to ward off the Taliban). He was involved in searching caves that could be stashing Taliban weaponry and ammunition. The NZSAS had to deal with warlords who were not Taliban but who controlled the massive opium trade – basically, the NZSAS was instructed to ignore this trade.  He quickly understood that most of the villagers they met were not Taliban but simply wanted to be left alone. When he took leave in New Zealand, like so many military men he was perturbed to find that few people in New Zealand cared about what was going on the Afghanistan. After he had been promoted to sergeant, he was often called to be part of a protection team escorting New Zealand government ministers to foreign countries. When he returned to Kabul, he was part of a team training the CRU – Crisis Response Unit (Afghan National Police) which was trying to build up a stronger force against the Taliban.

Inevitably, the NZSAS had to deal with fire-fights and real combat. Jamie Pennell was involved in a major fight clearing out a hotel in Kabul which the Taliban had infiltrated. They were setting the hotel alight while shooting civilians. Many died but the Taliban were finally forced out. Pennell was also engaged in the major fire-fight in one of Kabul’s main market places, Pashtunistan Square. It was in this fight that Willie Apiata won his Victoria Cross, the highest military order. Jamie Pennell himself won the second-highest military order, the New Zealand Gallantry Star.

Like many servicemen, when he finally left the NZSAS and returned to civilian life in New Zealand, he went through periods of deep depression before he found his feet again – but he now appears to be enjoying life training adolescents in outdoor projects and physical fitness, as well as helping to train the Warriors (top Rugby League team).

Serviceman J is strictly about Jamie Pennell’s experiences. While we can admire the soldier, we can also be saddened by the way the war in Afghanistan ended, which Pennell does not discuss. Basically, intervening countries gave up and left, and the Taliban took over once more. Instead of caring for those Afghans who fought against the Taliban, the U.S.A. failed to protect them and left them to be imprisoned, tortured or killed. A pity that the story ended that way.

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Steve Braunias is a very capable journalist and reporter, and he has often written about cases of crime, murder and unexplained disappearances of people in New Zealand. Often this has placed him in courtrooms, hearing and reporting on trials. His two earlier books in this genre were The Scene of the Crime and Missing Persons. But in his latest book The Survivors he declares in his introduction that he will, after this third book, no longer do any more crime reportage. He says he is now worn out by witnessing the sordor and the soul-destroying nature of so many trials, especially in cases involving the plague of methamphetamine. The Survivors follows the structure of The Scene of the Crime and Missing Persons, with cases of murder but also with profiles of harmless, likeable or eccentric people. Of the twelve stories told here, only four are directly about murder and there are two that dig into unpleasant events from nearly a century ago. The remaining six stories are accounts of harmless and sometimes admirable people.

Let’s start with the positive tales. The opening tale concerns Volker Pilgrim, a German who disowned his aristocratic family because they had sided with the Nazis. Pilgrim first moved to Australia and then to New Zealand. He had already become well-known in Germany as an author, he wrote prolifically in New Zealand, but he lived like a pauper in very straitened circumstances. There is no mystery about this man; just the interest of a man who was able to live so frugally and remain dedicated to his writing. Braunias goes back to Pilgrim in the last tale, where we hear of Pilgrim’s theories about Vampires [possibly metaphorical] who disturb peoples sleep. This Braunias expands into a discourse on the nature of sleep and insomnia.

The story of the young Frenchman Eloi Rolland is not really a crime story although the police did follow it up. While visiting New Zealand, Eloi disappeared and was never seen again. Apparently Rolland had some sort of mental breakdown. He was last seen walking into the Waitakere ranges. Possibly he was killed by somebody. Possibly he took his own life in the bush. But the fact is nobody knows. His body was never found. Like so many unsolved mysteries, reading this story leaves an unnerving sense.

Two tales are very positive profiles of people whom some would see as handicapped but who in fact lived fulfilled lives. One is Tim Fairhall who had Downs Syndrome but got on well with many people and generally enjoyed his life. The other was a man who had some mental problems, apparently couldn’t find a job, but happily turned himself into “The Singing Cowboy” performing often in clubs and bars where he was much admired. These upbeat stories are built on Braunias’s interviews. Then, quite different, there is the story of the Holocaust survivor who connected with Braunias because he had acquired a complete 42-set of books of all the documents authorised by the prosecutors of the Nuremburg Trials.

And what of the two stories of long ago? One excoriates the loudmouth John Yelash, who thought he was a great writer on the basis of one very thin ephemeral book; and deals in more detail with the poetaster D’Arcy Cresswell, universally disliked for his pomposity assuming that he was a great poet – but even more hated now because, although he was homosexual, he was the man who, in 1926, dobbed in the homosexual mayor of Whanganui Charles Mackay. At that time, homosexual behaviour was a criminal offence and Mackay had to do jail time before he left New Zealand  (Cresswell eventually left New Zealand too). The other ancient event deals with Leo Hollobon who had sex with Frank Sargeson in 1929 and went to jail for it. In this case Braunias does rather draw out this tale very long, carefully explaining why young Sargeson was not sent to jail.

As for the four cases of murder, they are inevitably very depressing. One is essentially about the daylight murder of Constable Matthew Hunt. Another concerns the “Innocent Agent” Stephen Ewart, a simple-minded man who was lured into committing arson and died for it. Very unhappy is the tale of the Chinese man Chao Chen, provoked into killing a colleague who had apparently slandered him – but he immediately repent what he had done. Most wrenching of all, however, are the two accounts of infanticide, when young men, irritated by noise and crying, killed babies.

Any readers of true stories, and especially true-crime stories, will feel they have enjoyed a sort of prurience in taking in other people’s sorrow and tragedy as entertainment. Thus in this collection. But Braunias does examine things carefully and does question some conclusions that others have made. It is clear reading.