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.
