We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“WHAT SORT OF MAN – and other
stories” by Breton Dukes (Victoria University of Wellington Press, $NZ 30)
You
never judge a book by its cover, but it’s worth stopping to consider Keely
O’Shannessy’s cover design for Breton Dukes’ third collection of short stories What Sort of Man and other stories . Although
no stories in this collection have anything to do with deer-hunting, the cover
image is of a deer’s antlers and on both front and back covers are images of
bloody fingerprints. At least for an older generation of readers, the cultural
reference is clear. It harks back to Barry Crump’s best-known blokey, hunting,
shooting, deer-culling romp A Good Keen
Man, which was first published with a prominent image of deer’s antlers on
the cover. But the bloody fingerprints on What
Sort of Man and other stories suggest something more brutal and more
complicated than the world as seen by Barry Crump. O’Shannessy’s cover design
is more relevant to Breton Dukes’ world than the cartoonish images by Dylan
Horrocks which were on the covers of Breton Dukes’ first two collections.
When
I reviewed Dukes’ first collection BirdNorth and other stories on this blog back in 2011
(a review for which the author mildly rebuked me over some inconsequential
inaccuracies),
I said one of his stories was “not the blokey world of a Barry Crump
anecdote” and another was “like a
collision of A Good Keen Man
and the Slacker”. When I
reviewed Dukes’ second collection Empty
Bones and other stories for Landfall-Review-on-Line
(September 2014), I noted that “a sense
of sickened machismo hung over the collection, as if these young men ached to
be Good Keen Men but had somehow been damaged before reaching that goal.”
At the very least, many of Breton Dukes’ stories suggest that his male
characters are struggling to find their place in the world; or, as the
back-cover blurb to What Sort of Man and
other stories puts it more sententiously, these “stories go head to head with the crisis of contemporary masculinity”.
Now that pioneer days are over, now that rugby-racing-and-beer is no longer so
firmly the national religion, what are young Pakeha New Zealand men now, and
what exactly is their role? With stories specifically set in either Dunedin or
Auckland, Breton Dukes examines various states and habits associated with
received ideas of masculinity.
Apparently
one male tendency is competitivness (although I’d suggest that women are as
prone to this as men are.) In the story “Stone vs Cog and Rabbits”, three boys
play beach-rugby on Cheltenham Beach, and it gradually becomes apparent that,
for one of them, it is so important to win because of what is going on a home.
(Where style is concerned, the real craft of this story is the way Breton Dukes
is able to give a full account of the game despite its complexity.) For
masculine competitveness at the other end of the age spectrum, there is the
collection’s final story “The Swimmers” wherein two octogenarian men (both
middle class, one a former school principal, the other an academic) compete
fiercely in a swimming race. Their competitiveness in sport is fuelled partly by
another sort of competitiveness. One of them is incensed that the other has
made advances to his wife.
As
prominent in this collection as it was in the two earlier ones is the matter of
parenthood – more specifically fatherhood – and yet even this is tainted. Some
fathers are clearly unbalanced. “Kid and the Tiger” has a father who thinks he
has found Jesus and wants to be a good father, but he is so high and buzzy on a
prescription drug that he suffers paranoid delusions and attempts crazy,
dangerous stunts. The opening story “Ross Creek” has a father who is not fully
self-aware. The senior school teacher Gary is alienated from his wife and his
teenaged daughter because he was caught, at school, with files of teen
pornography on his computer. He is under investigation and has been stood down
from his job. His wife is disgusted with him. His daughter is shocked and
depressed. Gauchely, Gary tries to reconnect with his daughter, but the story
implies that his self-justifications mask his failure to understand his
daughter’s angst. Only at the last moment does he realise that she is now in a position to judge him.
Other
fathers are more balanced and have good intentions, but still have debilitating
doubts about themselves. Told in the first-person, “Malcolm” is a sketch of a
father in his 40s attempting to protect his 2-year-old son from a fierce dog,
but also worrying that he doesn’t have the right sort of masculine courage. He
thinks: “Even with all the drinking I’ve
done, I’ve never been in a fight. Never stood up for myself or someone else, or
broken up some beastly act by, say, wrapping my arms around an offender, or
crash-tackling some dick. I don’t like violence. That’s part of it. But the
main part is cowardice. When the thing happens and the brain is charged with
the chemical that imposes either fight or flight, I’ll fly. But not if the
thing was a person drowning in a river, or if a bedroom was burning up; then, I
think, I’d go in. But not fighting. I mean, I’d defend [my son and wife]”
(p.165)
A
much more extreme, and probably less justified, form of this doubt is found in
“Meat Pack”. In this first-person story we know that the narrator is a domesticated
and caring father. He is looking after his sick young son. But as he does so,
he is caught up in memories of his attempt, and failure, to be a macho hero in
a pub fight years before. In memory he berates himself: “From birth I’d been released only into safe zones. School, Moana Pool,
the movies, friends’ houses. University was more of the same. Flatting,
attending lectures, flocking to the pub with others from the same background.
But the building site was a new plane. Like TV prison, where hard-bitten
inmates endlessly monitor for signs of weakness.” (p.47) Part of this seems
to reflect how physically abashed men with middle-class manners are when they
mix with tougher working-class men – a condition which always makes me think of
Stephen Spender’s poem “My parents kept
me from children who were rough”. But even without the class element, there
is that deep-seated male sense that you’re not a real man if you don’t have
physical courage or can’t use violence effectively against an enemy. Two hundred-plus years ago, Samuel Johnson
said “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or
not having been at sea.” This statement has often been ridiculed, or
attempts have been made to discredit it – especially by men begging to explain
that they’ve never wanted to be a soldier. But essentially Johnson was right.
Even part of the most peaceable man’s mind thinks that virility is best
expressed in winning a fight, and that is the condition that is addressed in
“Meat Pack”.
Competitveness,
fatherhood, and men’s lingering doubts about themselves are somehow addressed
in all the above stories, but the most complex story (and the longest) is the
eponymous one. The title “What Sort of Man” could as well be written with a
question mark, as we are asked to work out what exactly the main character, Evan,
is and what his values are. Evan is a young father, solicitous for his son’s
welfare, who has taken on the job of caring for Carl, a severely autistic man
who is apparently also a danger to children. (Interestingly, in his first
collection Bird North and other stories,
Breton Dukes also had a story, “Maniatoto”, about a man looking after a
mentally-impaired man.) “What Sort of Man” has many explicit excremental
details when Carl soils himself
messily and copiously and Evan has to deal with it. In the course of doing so,
he does something mean and a little selfish, more to salvage his own dignity
than to help his charge. Yet later he finds a more genuine self-respect when he
helps somebody out. This is a complex mix – Evan’s concern for his child, his
official position as “carer” of the dependent man, his moment of callousness
and his act of altruism. So what sort of man is this? A credible one, I think.
One
story only focuses on a woman, “Being Sonya”. In an earlier review, I suggested
that Breton Dukes’ novella “Empty Bones” showed greater interest in the way
women think and that this might lead Dukes in a new direction in his writing.
But apparently not. It is hard to see “Being Sonya” as anything other than the
story of a self-deluded woman, a little drug-addled, in a failing relationship
which isn’t helped by her chronic lying.
Even more resistent to arousing my sympathy is the story
“Bullfighter”. In the same disgusting hell-hole of a Dunedin flat live Lance
and Michelle. Lance stacks shelves at Countdown. Michelle sells Lotto tickets.
Their jobs stink. They stink. They eat junk food. They chill out on Friday
evenings by smoking weed. They’re on the bones of their bums. Sometimes Lance
suggests, only half-jokingly, they do a robbery to get funds. He steals some
money. She gambles it away. A long section of the story covers her gambling and
her mistaken idea that she’s going to win big. With no money, no food and the
power cut off in their flat, they mug a man carrying parcels of food. They race
home and eat the (junk) food, well pleased that they have fed themselves
another day. We have no indication that their lives will ever change. They will
go on living in the same way.
This
is not a story that questions masculinity. Lance and Michelle are equal
partners in their way of life and in the assumptions they make. But I do
question what the story’s purpose is. I am aware that “Bullfighter” could be
seen simply as documentary reportage or a slice-of-life. No doubt there are
people who live like Lance and Michelle. But I simply cannot fathom what the author’s own attitude is.
Could “Bullfighter” be a subtle critique of addiction, given that Michelle’s
gambling is virtually an addiction and given that it takes up so much of the
story? I do not expect or want Aesop’s-fable-like “morals” at the end of
stories, neatly telling us what to think, but I would have been helped by some
indication of the author’s own attitude. As it stands – and doubtless not the
intention of the author – “Bullfighter” is one of those stories which allows
middle-class readers (like me; like you who are reading this review) to feel
superior to a pair of desperate losers. So does it have anything to offer above
its sordor?
I
am sorry to end on this negative note. Most of the stories in What Sort of Man and other stories are
well-crafted and certainly show much skill in their close observation of
physical details. Breton Dukes can tell a story well and, after three
collections with much focus on the topic, he said much about male behaviour
that is worth listening to. But is he going to beat the same drum in future?
