Something New

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

“KATARAINA” by Becky Manawatu (published by Makaro Press, $NZ37)

 

 

            When I reviewed on this blog Becky Manawatu’s break-out novel Aue, I noted that, great as that novel is, I was sometimes confused about which characters were related to whom. I am therefore grateful that Becky Manawatu’s second novel Kataraina begins with a whakapapa, making clear who the main characters are and how they are related. I also noted that sometimes Kataraina has been referred to as a sequel to Aue , but I would prefer to see Kataraina as an extension of Aue. Some of the new novel elaborates events that have been touched on in the earlier novel. In Aue, Kataraina was called Kat most of the time and was a minor character, although we did hear of her failed marriage, the bullying of her Pakeha husband Stuart Johnson (Stu), and her eventual flight from him. But in Kataraina, she is the centre of the novel - an account of how she had become the woman she is and how she eventually embraces her traditional culture.

 The style of Kataraina is similar to the earlier novel. Once again Becky Manawatu does not tell her tale in sequential order. Chapters deal with the present or the near past or the distant past, not necessarily in order – we are thrown back and forth in time. Chapter headings refer to the momentous event when Stuart Johnson was shot dead by the young girl Beth – thus headings say “Twenty-two years before the girl shot the man”, “A hundred and twenty-eight years before the girl shot the man”, “The moment before the girl shoots the man” etc. etc. Is this the drum-beat of Kataraina’s guilt or is it the ghost of whatever trauma has haunted her? Or is it simply reminding us that Stu’s death was a turning point in Kataraina’s life? Then there is the voice that the author often uses. “We”, the first person plural voice, narrates much of the novel, suggesting the voice of a whole community of wise kuia.

 

It's important to note that Manawatu does not present Kataraina as a paragon. She has very many faults and her behaviour is sometimes self-destructive… but then she has a major identity problem. When she’s a little girl, she prefers to live with her grandparents Jack Te Au and Liz Wixon rather than with her parents Henare Te Au and Colleen Davis, even though she knows her grandparents are often very quarrelsome. The family appears to be a tightly-knit one. There is much talk of food and many family gatherings, though the grandparents quarrelling becomes more violent. As a teenager, Kataraina has many of the adolescent problems. She has a sense of being awkward and is self-conscious. She gets drunk. Sex begins to interest her. Later she knocks around with her brother Toko and meets up with a friend called Pare, who isn’t necessarily a helpful role model. She is disoriented – perhaps through drugs. Aged 16, she has unwanted sex forced on her by an older man, Jared in his 40s. She is assertive enough to walk out of a job at a restaurant when her boss has pushed her too hard. And then she gets together with Stuart Johnson. At first their life is perfect – he’s a young healthy Pakeha farmer, she’s attracted to him and they marry. But gradually their marriage goes sour, Stu becomes more bullying, more violent, throwing things around, more suspicious of his wife… and Kataraina does have an affair with the nearby Tom Aiken, whom we saw in Aue as a very sympathetic character.

Then there is this unresolved matter of Kataraina’s major identity problem. It comes in the form of a piece of land. On Stuart Johnson’s land there is what is colloquially called Johnson’s Swamp. It is regarded by the Maori community as tapu – partly because of a death that happened there in the nineteenth century, but also because it is connected to ancient lore which says the swamp should connect with the sea and that water should always flow through it. A researcher, Eric Green, is interested in the health of wetland geology. He – a Pakeha -has one view of the swamp, seeing it as interesting for scientific research. Cairo, who is Maori, is another researcher specialising in braided rivers. She has a radically different attitude to the swamp after having been told about the history of the swamp by her kuia [grandmother] Moira Sterling, seeing the swamp as sacred and understanding it teems with living things. When he first married Kataraina, Stu had no interest in the swamp and was happy to let it lie. But as his farm loses money, he begins to obsess about the swamp and tries to expand his grazing fields by draining the swamp. Kataraina’s mother Colleen Davis sides with Stu on this issue, but when he tries again and again, he merely ends up with some sedge-e fields and the swamp renews itself. And Stu’s anger grows worse, partly taken out in violence on Kataraina. She sees him as a man “with no interest in poetry or the way a lyric in a song could declare love without using the actual word, and no interest in land too wet to fatten cows…” (p.111)

But what about Kataraina’s major identity problem? The whole narrative of the swamp, and different attitudes towards it, appears to symbolise the difference between pragmatic Pakeha views and Maori deeply-held beliefs. The Pakeha wants to make a buck and ignores the sacred. The Maori want to preserve what is sacred…. and they have an awareness that Pakeha settlers have taken much land that is sacred, such as the swanp. Kataraina is placed between two different cultures – her mixed Maori-and-Pakeha forebears and the Pakeha farmer she has married. What is her culture? Only shortly before Stu is killed does she  understand what culture is really hers. “She knew that she was tearing up, and it wasn’t Johnson’s place, that way, or Aiken’s place, that way. [i.e. she is not trying to chose one of two men] It was a new ancient world inside her, trying to escape her ribcage and fold over the whenua with her, spread out from her, and remember its way up towards the sun.” (p.277) She has embraced the land and its ancient beliefs. And years after Stu’s death, Kataraina laughs and “A crevice open, widens, and her laughter is like cool water, and her cool-water laughter finds this new channel and rushes through it, like a dam has suddenly collapsed, and the cool-water laughter rushes through the channel, right back through time, rinsing us clean.” (p.279) Symbolically, Kataraina is identified with the swamp opening up and cleansing the flowing water. She is now firmly aware of her Maori identity.

And the land is regenerated. After Stu is dead, we are told that there is a flourishing of nature when young Beth and Arama [important in the earlier novel, but minor characters in this one] return to the deceased Stu’s farm and they see “the entire landscape of farmland appeared to have reverted, wild with life: manuka, rimu, kowhai, nikau, ponga. Some grew overnight. Bold. Hungry. Obscenely generous, the air was fresh and rich.” (p.19 – note that this is said early in the novel, but then the novel is not presented in sequential order ].

It would be very amiss of me if I did not note that there are moments in this novel where Becky Manawatu writes in a style that is very lyrical, especially when Cairo is dreaming of, or thinking about, nature and its bounty. And then in complete contrast she presents extreme psychological stress when Kataraina “loses it” . Take the sad moment (pp.132-133) when, months after Stu’s death,  Kataraina virtually takes on a new persona, and considers thus: “ For some tasks she’d been letting loose the ghost of her. Ghost-Kat escaped the towering bowls to do the basic things that proved she was a person. Ghost-Kat faked flesh and substance. Trained itself to hold things )and associated skills such as not falling into the earth, through floors etc.); to toast sandwiches (and associated skills like making Bolognese, cooking whole roasts, peeling and chopping vegetables but not wrists); to hold a glass to drink water (and associated skills like drinking beer, wine and top shelf, even putting the salt on the side of her palm, locking it, dropping the tequila, pressing the lemon to her mouth, but not ramming it down her throat); tidying up, sometimes cleaning even (but not drinking bleach or window cleaner); had even mastered yahooing, bouts of laughter and some facial expressions to reply in the group chat (and associated skills such as making/cancelling dinner plans sending funny GIFs and memes and pressing the happy, sad, angry, hundy-per-cent emoji buttons to react to people’s online lives but avoiding writing I WISH I WAS FUCKEN DEAD….” This is despair before her life is regenerated.

It's up to the reader to wonder where Kataraina goes after she has accepted who she is. Will she have a happy life or a fruitful one? Does embracing a culture necessarily make for happiness? How long will Kataraina’s epiphany last? In Aue, Becky Manawatu depicted much that was negative in both Pakeha life and modern Maori life (gangs, drugs etc). In Kataraina she basically focuses on the positives of Maori life.

I conclude with one personal view. By focusing on one major character, I think Kataraina is a more pared back and focused novel than the earlier Aue, and all the better for it.

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.

     “THE CHOUANS” by Honore de Balzac ( first published in 1829; revised in 1845 to become a “scene from the military life” in Balzac’s “Human Comedy”)

            Anybody who had read this blog regularly will be aware that Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) is one of my literary idols. In fact on this blog I have, over the years, written reviews of eight of his novels and a review of a collection of his short stories. To put them in the order in which I would judge his best and his second best, you can find on this blog his very best Le Pere Goriot [Old Goriot],  La Rabouilleuse [known in English as The Black Sheep], Le Cousin Pons [Cousin Pons], and La Cousine Bette [Cousin Betty].  Second best – in my humble opinion -  are Eugenie Grandet , La Peau de Chagrin [The Wild Ass’s Skin], and the disjointed Les Illusions Perdues [Lost Illusions]. And, as I have often declared, if you really want to be turned away from reading Balzac, then torture yourself by reading his dullest and most tiresome novel Cesar Birotteau . As for the volume of Balzac’s Selected Short Stories it contains some of the Master’s best work.

            All this is by telling you that I am about to inaugurate a series of other novels by Balzac that I have not yet covered. I begin with Les Chouans [The Chouans] because it was the first novel Balzac wrote under his own name  -   hitherto he had been churning out pot-boilers under various pseudonyms, which he himself regarded as rubbish (even now, learned professors have not been able to track down all the pot-boilers he wrote under false names). Les Chouans is an historical fiction – a genre that Balzac rarely wrote. He preferred to write about his own times. Many have suggested that the thirty-year-old was inspired to write Les Chouans by the success Walter Scott had in writing his Waverley (published in 1814). Scott’s novel was a very romanticised version of the mid-18^thcentury Jacobite Rebellion – in which the romantic Scots were defeated. Les Chouans (first published in 1829) is also about an uprising that ended in defeat, replete with romantic asides. Yet in some ways, romantic moments and all, Balzac is more realist than Scott. First, his tale in set in recent times, Brittany in 1799-1800, when Balzac would have been a baby. Second, when he deals with soldiers and battles, he does not glamourise. 

            Here’s the general historical situation. The French Revolution has happened. The king has been executed and many émigrés have fled from France. The new regime is unstable and Napoleon carries out his coup (Brumaire), making himself the First Consul. France is a republic. But in much of the countryside, including Brittany, there are still many royalists and some aristocrats who want to bring back the Ancien Regime. So there are uprisings. In Brittany, the insurgents are called Chouans. Marie de Verneuil, the beautiful bastard daughter of an aristocrat, is sent by Fouche (Napoleon’s master spy and general thug) from Paris to Brittany in the hope that she will penetrate the Breton royalist conspiracy and possibly capture the “Gars” (Breton slang for the royalist leader). The Gars is the young returned émigré, the Marquis Alphonse de Montauran. The novel opens with a relatively realistic account of Chouans ambushing Republican troops (whom the Bretons call “Blues” because of their uniforms) and freeing Bretons who had been pressed into Republican service. This is all very credible with the soldiers on both sides calling insults and curses at one another.  But then the melodrama steps up. Marie de Verneuil and Marquis Alphonse de Montauran fall in love with each other. This often puts Marie in conflict with Corentin, the agent of Fouche who is supposedly at her command. Early in the romantic tale, Marie helps Montauran to evade arrest when he has entered France under disguise. Later, Republican troops march into a trap on Montauran’s old estate, but they are slaughtered by Chouans. After this atrocity, Marie is denounced by Montauran’s mentor, who reveals that Marie is spying for Fouche. But this time Montauran lets Marie go. There is much suspense (and further meetings) where Marie is not sure whether she wants to unite with Montauran and marry him or to betray him – her mixed feeling because part of her really believes in the Republic. Eventually she leads the Republican troops to where Montauran is hiding… but at the last moment she realizes that her true love is Montauran. She marries him in secret… and the two lovers die romantically when they are about to escape.

            Horribly melodramatic isn’t it? The shadow of Walter Scott hangs over him. Here is a doomed rebellion on behalf of a dying regime. Elements of the Marquis de Montauran are very like Scott’s version of Bonny Prince Charlie – a personally brave man but too weakened by his amorous interests. Like Scott, Balzac lays on the minute descriptions of the landscape (in the case of Brittany, hedgerows  and scrub, just right for ambushes and guerrilla warfare). After its lively and realistic start, Les Chouans becomes melodrama, filled with oaths, vows, declarations of love, curses, vengeance etc. The major improbability of the novel is Marie de Verneuil’s ability to go anywhere (Chouan side or Republican side) without ever being challenged or questioned until the last moments, simply because Balzac wants her to be in the right place to witness various events. Grotesque minor characters are also in the spirit of Scott, especially the Chouans with their noms de guerre (March-a-Terre, Mille-Piche, Galop-Chapine). Incidental grotesqueries  in action flavour the romantic melodrama with Grand Guignol, such as the miser D’Orgemont, with his secret cell and his brother walled up in it; Galop-Chapine decapitated on his own table by other Chouans who believe he has betrayed them, his head then being hung up as a warning. Unlike Scott, however, there is a relative frankness about sexual matters and some sophistication in analysing the passions of women and man. Frankly, after all this I think young Balzac was straining a picturesque style he was soon to outgrow.

            Les Chouans seems to be a case of romantic-but-irresponsible rebellion pitted against a realistic-but-dour authority – rusticism versus advanced “enlightenment” civilisation – or at least that is what the Republicans believe.

Balzac’s sympathies seem mainly on the side of the “Blues” – the Republican soldiers – with a French pride in their achievements regardless of their politics. Thus the professional soldier, Commandant (i.e. Colonel) Hulot, and the salty Sergeant Beau-Pied, with his sneer shouted out at a speech made by a royalist in the midst of battle: “Less talking gentlemen – one can hardly hear oneself kill.” Yet to balance this, there is the Republican police spy Corentin who is presented as devious, cold and heartless, which was the popular idea of spy-master Fouche (who does not appear in the novel, though he is much talked about.)

By contrast, the Chouan guerrillas, clad in their sheepskins and goatskins, are rural barbarians – superstitious, constantly crossing themselves and swearing oaths by Saint Anne of Auray, led by a fanatical clergy like the Jesuit Abbe Gudan with his fake miracles. Of course Balzac [who was more-or-less Catholic] balances this image by creating the  pious Breton girl Francine (Marie de Verneuil’s maid) and the self-sacrificing priest who appears in the last pages marrying Marie de Verneuil and the Marquis Alphonse de Montauran. But the abiding impression is of a backward people.

Balzac’s constant theme is that the Chouans were being led on by émigré place-getters who were merely seeking their own advancement and the restoration of privileges, should the Republic come crashing down. On the last page, the Marquis’ final wish is that his younger brother “should not bear arms against France, although I hope I will never cease to serve the king”. The ambiguity is Balzac’s own. He was the liberal monarchist opposed to both Chouan fanaticism and the Republican coldness, but a patriot withal. Remember, too, that when Balzac was writing, France once again had a king.

Les Chouans has been translated into English a number of times, but is not regarded as one of Balzac’s more important novels. Tastes have changed, and the scenario of - essentially – lovers dying heroically seems more appropriate for a bel canto opera than a hard-headed account of a rural uprising. A little research tells me that Les Chouans has a couple of times been turned into a movie, but it seems never to have been seen outside France.

Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him. 

                                                  IN PRAISE OF THE TUI

I’m a volunteer guide going out every so often to the open sanctuary island Tiritiri Matangi. Birds, being saved from the predators found on the mainland, are one of the great attractions, and of course over the years I’ve become more aware of our indigenous birds  - the cheeky toutouwai [North Island Robin] who will hop ahead of people on the tracks looking for mites to eat; the piwakawaka [fantail] who has a similar strategy, though it comes behind walkers, not before them; the endlessly chattering tieke [saddleback]; the elegant and very elusive kokako, hiding in the forest but occasionally giving out its mournful cry, the nearest thing to the out-breathing of an Aue! But when it comes to the birds on the island, my favourite was the kereru – formidable and bulky in size, falsely called a wood pigeon, flying through the tracks with the woop-woop sound of its long and busy wings; and also known for its eating and sleeping routines. The kereru eats berries and then sits on a bough allowing its food to ferment as it sleeps. I regard the kereru as a happy drunk. My ideal of the lazy life.

                                                       A happy fat kereru

But there’s another bird that now gains my attention. In the right season, when you have tramped up to the centre where you can get a cup of tea, you will find tuis quarrelling. Tuis are aggressive and quarrelsome birds, not attacking human beings but attacking one another, vying to be first to sip the sugar-water that has been prepared for them. Tuis are nectar birds - that is, they drink the sweet water from flowers. But then there are smaller nectar birds, korimako [bellbird] and hihi [stitchbird] who seek the same sustenance. To protect these smaller birds, cages on the island, holding sweeter water, are deliberately designed with openings too small for the aggressive tuis to get in. If tuis could go in, they would intimidate and chase away the smaller birds.

            So far, I’m giving tuis a bad rap, aren’t I? This is very unfair. Unlike some other birds, tuis are in no danger of extinction. They proliferate all over suburbia  … at least that is true in Auckland. And as I write, a group of tuis are occupying our Australian bottle-tree with its bright-red flowers, giving the same pleasure we get when the pohutukawa blooms in our back yard. The tuis come along when summer is approaching, unlike the nuisance magpies that worry our back yard with baleful noises and take over the tree in winter. It is a pleasure to hear the click-wark-rattle-awk-ock of the male tui asserting his presence. No – despite old lore, tuis do not have two voice-boxes. What they do have are nine sets of muscles that allow them to amplify and produce many noises. And of course tuis feathers are not only black and white. That idea was the fault of colonial settlers in the 19^th century, who quaintly called the tui “the parson bird” because they didn’t notice how iridescent the tui’s feathers were.

                                                         Tui in its glory
 

Incredibly cheeky footnote: I was never persuaded that Denis Glover’s “quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle” sounded anything like that call of a magpie. But I do think I have caught a tui’s “click-wark-rattle-awk-ock” accurately… or at least the tui in my tree.

Something New

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

     “BEGINNINGS IN AOTEAROA AND ABROAD” by Michael Jackson (published by Ugly Hill Press, distributed by Bateman Books, $NZ 39:90 )

            Michael Jackson – academic, anthropologist, poet and traveller – is now 84 years old. Beginnings in Aotearoa and Abroad is the nearest he has yet come to a full autobiography, although he has dipped into personal things in others of his books. [I admit that back in 2019 I wrote a not-very-positive review on this blog of his The Paper Nautilus,which had many personal asides.]  In his preface to Beginnings in Aotearoa and Abroad he explains what he means by “beginnings”. In his view, we are always changing. We say goodbye to one phase of our life and a new one emerges – a new beginning. It can simply be growing up, but it can also mean understanding new things, meeting new people or  going to other countries and immersing in different cultures, which is, of course, Jackson’s profession.

            Jackson divides Beginnings in Aotearoa and Abroad into two halves.

            Part One is headed “A Taranaki Childhood Around 1950”. Born in 1940, Jackson grew up in a lower-middle-class family. His father was a bank-clerk. The family was not exactly poor but they sometimes had to struggle to make ends meet. Mount Taranaki dominated the countryside. By 1945, the little boy was aware of uncles coming home from war. It was also in 1945 that he first went to school, feeling deprived of his mother. Although he was never good at games and sports, he still pitched in, even if he often found himself practising all on his own. He did begin to understand that there were separate social classes in their small town, with working classes on the other side of the railway track from the side where the Jacksons dwelled. Still when he was very young, he learnt some lessons about farming, which was not his family’s metier. He once fell into a pit if cow dung to the great amusement of farming kids. [Jackson insists that “dung” is really a euphemism and the correct word should be “shit”]. His family did sometimes go on holidays at the beach, but at first he saw the sea as a daunting, frightening thing. [On this I sympathise with him – when I was very young I felt overwhelmed and frightened when I first holidayed at the sea.] He says the experience of the sea at first shook him, and in a way shaped much of his early thinking, as in this reaction: “Was this the first inkling that I could manipulate my dreams and, by extension, use my imagination to gain some mastery over things that threatened to overwhelm me? Certainly, I have never given up on the fantasy that I can travel through time and forewarn my childhood self of the perils lying ahead of him, and perhaps advise him on how to face them. Although most of us are destined to have children of our own and worry about their vulnerability; it is also true that we become the parents of the children we once were, and sometimes wish we could retrospective show them an easier path through life than the one we took so blindly.” (pg. 34).

            Jackson tells us that his parents had different interests. His mother had great fortitude, though she was often sick. One of his most vivid memories is of how onerous it then was for a woman – his mother -  to shoulder all the housework that had to be done before there were refrigerators or washing machines. He remembers his mother boiling clothes in a hopper, wringing clothes by hand and then struggling with a clothes line. Mother was interested in painting and worked in a Toss Woollaston style. His father, as a hobby, was interested in technical things. Jackson says it was “an uneasy relationship between the technical and aesthetic”.

            Together with his older sister Gabrielle, young Jackson slowly came to terms with the presence of Maori in Taranaki and gradually began to understand how nearly all the Maori land had been “confiscated” [i.e. stolen] in the 19^th century. Later, when he got a bicycle, he roved around parts of Taranaki, acquainting himself with Maori settlements and Maori art… perhaps being the origin of his life as an anthropologist.  Countering this, there was the fact that as a youngster he was brought up on English comics and books and often thought of England as the promised land. Like many young people, he did have a sort of religious crisis, wondering if God could help him. Once, when he lost a cricket ball, he asked God to help him find it… and he found it… so maybe God could help him further… though that was not the direction he went. In his solitary rambles, however, he took to admiring plants and trees and the wind and did come close to the quasi-religious attitudes of Wordsworthian romantic poets. But this attitude did not last for his life. He writes: “In the English romantics, I would, years later, discover my spiritual forebears, though I would discover also that nature was a poor substitute for the company of friends, and that the writers who made a religion of nature were often conflicted rather than enviable figures.” (pg. 65) Becoming a young teenager, he also inevitably wondered about sex (the chapter dealing with this is called “Sexual Awakening”) and often heard the more uncouth lads of Inglewood speculating on what “rooting” involved.

            Turning the spotlight away from himself, he considers some of the eccentrics who lived in Inglewood and environs, also noting that the area was known for having a higher rate of murders than most country towns. Two eccentrics behaved in very different ways – one ultimately violent. Their different behaviour led him to wonder if he himself had to “choose between withdrawal and engagement, changing myself or changing the world”. This really leads to crossing into young adulthood. But before he moves into adulthood, he gives some background to his family. His grandfather was the sole police officer of the town, mainly having to deal with rowdy drunks but sometimes dealing with more weighty things. He remembered how, in the First World War, exiles (European foreigners) were targeted by thugs regarding themselves as patriots.

            Jackson did almost broke from his father when he believed that his father was making things hard for his mother. His father had him inducted into the local Masonic Lodge but young Jackson quickly broke from it and in fact denounced Mason-ism. Oddly enough, his father came to agree. All of which brings us to the end of the first part of Beginnings in Aotearoa and Abroad.

Now here is a very odd thing whenever I read an autobiography. I always find that the first part – the childhood and adolescent part – is more vivid and engaging that the second part – the adult part. Could it be that childhood and adolescence are remembered better than adulthood? Are memories branded in our minds when we are seeing things for the first time? And to revert to Wordsworth, “the child is father of the man” – that what happens in childhood is likely to form what we become as adults. I am not here suggesting that the rest of Beginnings in Aotearoa and Abroad is less interesting than the first part, but I found Michael Jackson’s account of his childhood something I could identify with – and he has great skill in describing his youth, though he does sometimes interpose at length psychological theories he cherishes.

Which brings us to the Part Two, called “The Startling Unexpectedness of New Beginnings ”.

 

After childhood, in adolescence Jackson was sent to a dull secondary school. He gained some relief in visits to his sister in Wellington and the bohemian crowd she dwelt with. Starting in a new way after some time at university, he travelled for five years. He went to India experiencing a new culture and in London he helped homeless people. He also volunteered for work in the Congo. As a welfare worker in Australia, he was disgusted by the way Aboringinals were being forces into assimilation. What really gave him a new perspective, however, was when he met Petra Hawarden, who became his wife. He says “Just as every beginning is foreshadowed by false starts and tantalising glimpses, so too is love. In my attachment to my mother, or the two teachers at my primary school, or my infatuation with the high school French teacher, or the several short-lived affairs in my early twenties, I can retrospectively trace the lineaments of the love that finally flowered in my relationship with Petra Hawarden. Falling in love is like being born again. Instantly the past is eclipsed by the present, and even the future is not given a second thought. But just as every traveller on the threshold of a new departure may get cold feet, even so romantic love is accompanied by doubt, hesitancy, and a sense of loss.” (pg.122)

There followed when Jackson and his wife Petra lived in various parts of New Zealand. He gives a very affectionate account of husband and wife spending time with Sam Hunt, sometimes sharing Hunt’s shack…. But some years later, he says, Sam Hunt had coarsened as he gained fame:  “I was … dismayed that Sam’s acclaim seemed to encourage in him a vulgar popularism that consisted of trashing married couples and academics…” (pg. 143)

Jackson and his pregnant wife Petra went to Sierra Leone where he blossomed as an anthropologist. Petra had a very hard and painful birth, but their daughter Heidi was born safely. Jackson studied initiation rites. This included clitoridectomy. Jackson sees this as essential to the tribal people in preparing for hardship and becoming stoic. He writes:  “By construing clitoridectomy as ‘genital mutilation’ we lose sight of the transfigurative power of the rite of passage in which girls are prepared for the hardships of childbearing, child-ready, and marriage.”  (pg. 156) Doubtless this was how the tribes saw it, but not everyone will agree. Frankly, I am glad that Jackson notes widely in Sierra Leone now the ritual is no longer practised.

Upon returning to New Zealand he took up a university role. Petra and Jackson sought  a rural house in Manawatu and settled there. He studied with Te Pakaka and made himself more aware of Maori cosmology and Maori beginning beliefs. But Petra was inflicted with cancer. Calming herself, she took to Zen as her health declined. Eventually she died. Like so many in this narrative, there are beginnings – one being Jackson’s turning to Yoga. He discusses how he deals with it and what different perceptions he had. In the longest chapter in the book, called “Epiphany”, he visited a self-sufficient family in a remote part of Coromandel. The visit changed his view of the world – simplicity and fellowship being most important. He returns to overseas research, going back to Sierra Leone which he sees as having declined since her was last there. The visit gives him the opportunity to talk about the slave trade that once sailed from Sierra Leone, with side comments on how former imperial nations still benefit from what was plundered. Later he spends time helping refugees in New Zealand. He marries again to a woman called Emma – yet another beginning in his life… and where his final chapters he has a sense that life is an eternal cycle, and that our true home is the people we love.

For anyone who reads Beginnings in Aotearoa and Abroad will be outraged that I have simplified what Michael Jackson has written. I have given the outward chronicle of his life, with only passing comments on his ideas and theories about the nature of human thought. Often his detailed comments require close scrutiny and can be thorny to read. These things are to be respected… but it is the chronicle that is most readable.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.

     “AUE” by Becky Manawatu. First published in 2019 by Makaro Press

            I am writing this review in 2024. Becky Manawatu’s novel Aue was published in 2019. It rapidly became a bestseller. It won many awards. It is regarded by some as a modern New Zealand classic and it has been reprinted a number of times. So how did I not get around to reading and reviewing this important novel when it was new? Simple. A case of my own stupidity. I requested a copy of Aue from the publishers, and they generously sent one. But by then the novel had been around for months, a horde of reviewers had already had their say, and I thought I was way behind the beat. So I set it aside and I didn’t get around to reading it until recently when I heard the rumour [now confirmed] that Becky Manawatu had written a sequel to Aue. So here I am. Late.

            A couple of obvious things to note. First, Aue is largely a Maori story written by a Maori. I am Pakeha and am therefore not fully attuned to many Maori attitudes and ideas - not that this makes for difficult reading. Second, that title Aue. It is often translated as howling, weeping, crying etc. In this case I see the better translation of Aue would be something like “lament” or even “alas”, because the novel is filled with many lamentations and sorrows for families being broken up, degeneration of some men with violence and drugs, some racism and deaths that should not have happened. Unlike the majority of Maori novels, which tend to be set in the North Island, Aue is set in a small South Island area in Kaikoura. 

 

Becky Manawatu divides her [longish] novel into two halves, the first called “Bird” and the second called “Song” – in the latter of which we are introduced to a voice [or voices?] presented in italics and speaking in a sort of mystic or prophetic way. The many chapters of the novel focus on three sets of people – the young boy Arama, his older brother Taukiri, and Jade [sometimes accompanied by Toko]. I’ll simplify the narrative by dealing with each group in turn.

8-year-old Arama is an orphan. Both his parents are dead. His elder brother Taukiri has left him with foster-parents, and then gone away. Young Arama spends much time hoping his brother will come back and trying hard to contact him without success. He is looked after reasonably well and is more-or-less home schooled. Aunty Kat [only very late in the novel we get her full name Kataraina] cares for him. But Uncle Stu – sometimes called a “redneck” so probably Pakeha – is often angry and a bully. Arama makes friends with the country girl Beth, who is the same age as Arama. Beth is in some ways more mature than Arama [fair enough – it is well known that girls mature earlier than boys], but she also introduces him to violent movies like Django Unchained and shows him some of the nastier elements of wild nature. However, most of what they do together is rambling around the rural area with the dog Lupo, or pranks and naughtiness – such as a very mean trick played on their teacher when they have to go to school at last. The best influence on Arama is Tom Aiken, who guides the kids into a more fruitful way of living. All the chapters involving Arama are written in the first person, told by Arama himself, so we get a child’s-eye- view. Becky Manawatu is very skilled in allowing us to see how Arama understands the world, naïve but questioning, often trying to understand what adults really mean and only partly understanding the relationships of adults.

Meanwhile older-brother Taukiri – who also tells his story in the first person - is determined not to come back to his little brother. He leads at first what amounts to a n’er-do-well life, wandering, not settling down. He lives in a car. He values his guitar and tries to make a living as a busker, even if he sometimes almost wrecks the guitar. For a while he has a factory job. Then he falls in with Elliot who knows a lot about illicit drugs. Taukiri doesn’t exactly get hooked, but he lives on the fringes of the drug community. He tries to seduce a number of young women and finally loses his virginity. For a while he busks on Cuba Street (in Wellington) and sometimes jams in a dive where he hears much about gangs and he learns how his father died. He has vague memories of how his mother was abducted and killed. Briefly he gets in touch with his kid brother. Tears. A drug-peddler offers to pay him well if he takes a consignment of drugs to a specific place at a specific time. Taukiri misses the target and becomes a marked man. He finally, as punishment, has to face up with an angry befuddled meth-taking gangster called Coon, a king pin of the gang, who is prepared to kill Taukiri

 

Then there are Jade and Toko – and here Becky Manawatu changes the tone considerably. The “Jade and Toko” sections are not only written in the third person, but they are anterior to the stories of Arama and Taukiri. In fact the narrative leaps back twenty-plus years earlier. Jade has experienced rape. She has slept with more than one man. Her parents used drugs. In fact her father Head had led a gang. Jade’s cousin Sav was pregnant but was embedded in the gang led by Coon. “Sav made herself a dodgy appointment when the boys had the run. A big boys’ mission. They were bringing in new shit – even newer to them than meth – and this shit was hard to get. Coon was breaking ground. An entrepreneur. Unlike Head, so stuck in his ways. Jade had encouraged it. ‘You’re gonna be a king.’ But she knew the gang – the game of gang – was already destroying itself. Smack would save them a drawn-out version of the inevitable. Coon would get him and his dumb entourage hooked and bring then down. Meth spurred on their violent tendencies. Heroin. Jade hoped, might just fuck them up, make them broke, maybe even make them dead. Jade saw an end. She and Sav just needed to ride it out.” (Pg 90  - page number quoted from the original publication). Jade wanted to save her cousin Sav by getting her out of the gang. But when Coon finds out that Sav is pregnant, sheer horror follows. Coon, buzzing with drugs, kicks and beats Sav, injects meth into her body and ultimately kills both Sav and the child in her womb. Jade breaks from Coon and his gang… and falls in love with Toko, a gentle man who plays his guitar and fishes. Toko sells his father’s house, buys a fishing boat, becomes a professional fisherman and brings Jade with him. Jade is totally entranced by this virile but gentle man. Her devotion is seen in one sequence after he’s been fishing “And he grabbed her and pulled her to his overalls, and she could smell the fish guts and blood on them, and could feel the dampness – the sweat from his days hard work – through her T-shirt. He smelled so earthy, so dirty, so masculine and good.” (Pg. 170) Their life is idyllic. They have a child. … at which point I halt this synopsis. You already know that both Jade and Toko die – you will discover that they both die by violence.  It is in the “Song” half of the novel that we hear the posthumous voice of Jade speaking to the future.

I confess that while I diligently read Aue, I sometimes found it hard to understand who was related to whom – there are so many people in the novel I left unmentioned. I have also skipped some sub-plots. One concerns Aunty Kat, who is tired of being abused by Uncle Stu and who runs away from him when he has beaten her once too often and blacked her eye.

What are the main ideas of this novel? Certainly domestic and gang abusiveness are highlighted, Maori (in the gangs) and Pakeha (in the form of redneck Stu). When Aunty Kat runs away from Stu, she is asserting her right not to be abused and understanding that she can do much better on her own. A clearly feminist decision. Also highlighted is the necessity for good family ties – whanau –  which finally bring Taukiri and Arama  together again. Then there is the need for the positive upbringing of children.  Tom Aiken is the character who most mentors Arama, teaching him traditional skills such as trapping and killing eels. Tradition also means honouring one’s forebears. The moment Taukiri has to face up to angry, befuddled, meth-taking gangster Coon, we expect Coon to kill Taukiri. Instead, Coon talks at length, admitting that his life has been pure waste. Then he shoots himself. Moral? Taking hard drugs is a road to nowhere. A form of nihilism. These are hard but true morals.

I could add a few quibbles. Surely some readers of the novel other than I would see the improbability of a young kid (Beth) taking on angry Uncle Stu in a stand-off near the end of the novel, when Stu is recklessly waving firearms around. Maybe too, I could suggest that the reconciliation of some characters towards the end of the tale is a touch too easy. But those are only quibbles. Five years later, Aue still stands up very well. 

IMPORTANT FOOTNOTE: When I reviewed Aue, I noted that sometimes I became confused with the relationships of some characters.  Who was related to whom? Among other things, I thought that Taukiti and the boy Arama were both the children of Toko and Jade. In fact Toko and Jade were the parents of Taukiri, but young Arama was the son of  Toko and another woman, Aroha. Pakeha would call them half-brothers. I aplogise for my mistake, and hope I didn't make many more.

 

 

Something Thoughful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him. 

                                                    MAGGIE SMITH, GONE ALAS

            Maggie Smith died a few weeks ago, aged 89. Many obituaries were duly written, most of them covering briefly her seven decades of work in stage, film and television. It’s regrettable that most younger people connect her only with her journeyman work in the children’s Harry Potter series or the period soap-opera Downton Abbey. These were the least important of her work, performed when she was old and basically playing undemanding, stereotypical characters – but she was a professional and she trooped on.

I remember her for much better things in her earlier work. The brisk, and ultimately deluded, Scottish school-teacher in the 1960s film version of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was one of Maggie Smith’s highlights. It was a very rare occasion when Hollywood for a change got it right and gave her an Academy Award for her performance. Then, years later, when she really was well on her way to old age, there was her eccentric old lady in Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van. My wife and I had the pleasure of seeing her live performance of the play in London. She was equally good in the 2015 film version of The Lady in the Van even if the film coarsened some of the original scenario.

I could quote many more of her best work, but there is one I remember for all the wrong reasons. Way back in 1965, aged fourteen I saw the film of the English National Theatre Company’s Othello. The film was really the record of a stage play. Laurence Olivier both directed and played Othello. [He played in blackface – probably the last widely-seen blackface Othello, given that blackface performances are now regarded as racist.] Am I allowed to say that I thought Olivier’s performance was over the top, verging on the ham? Desdemona, however, was played by a young and, dare I say, a buxom and very attractive Maggie Smith. I found her very convincing. But – alas – my young self was distracted near the end of the play. Othello had just strangulated and killed Desdemona and was delivering his last solemn words. But in the background I could see Maggie’s bosom still heaving up and down. This was very intriguing for a male teenager and surpassed whatever solemnity I was supposed to be attending. How foolish our young perceptions can be – but it stuck in my mind.

            Okay – I won’t give you any more nostalgia but I will express one gripe. I’ve noticed on You Tube and other platforms there is a game called something like “See Them Now” or some such, in which we are supposed to be appalled by how old film stars and celebrities have aged and no longer look as glamourous as they once did… as if we don’t all age and get wrinkles. There’s nothing wrong with getting old, so I am happy to give you images of happy Maggie Smith young and happy Maggie Smith old.