Something New

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

“THE CATASTROPHE” by Ian Wedde (Victoria University Press, $35)

I have to admit that I am not as well acquainted with the work of Ian Wedde as I should be. I know that he has published a dozen collections of poetry, that he is currently New Zealand’s Poet Laureate, that he now has six novels to his credit and that, at the age of 65, he is firmly established as part of the national literary scene. But, blushing furiously at my word-processor, I confess that the only one of his works I had read before The Catastrophe was his 2006 novel The Viewing Platform. That was both biting satire on the tourism industry and shrewd comment on the way the whole concept of tourism changes our perception of culture.

So, coming to The Catastrophe, I was primed to see Wedde as pre-eminently a satirist of the mores of the affluent.

In a way I was not disappointed.

There is a strong satirical element to this trim and well-organized novel and it does have its funny moments. But it is not comedy so much as a collision of two cultural realities. And sometimes it is a sad and slightly absurd story.

‘The Catastrophe’ is the name Palestinians give to the way over a million of them were stampeded out of their homeland at the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. But the novel begins with a very personal catastrophe.

Christopher Hare, down-on-his-luck New Zealand-born food writer and restaurant critic, sits in a restaurant in Nice. His wife Mary Pepper – who used to feature in his columns as “The Glace” (“Iced Tea”) – has left him and set up as a successful artist in her own right, photographing food in arty ways that amount to a sort of food pornography. His editor has basically given him the boot. Tastes have changed. Lip-licking spreads and superior articles on food aren’t selling glossy magazines as fast as they used to. Now is an age of financial collapse.

Into the restaurant dashes an armed woman, who shoots dead a man and a woman and dashes out again, leaving a Gucci bag behind her. On an impulse, Christopher Hare picks up the bag and rushes after the woman to return it. He finds himself in the getaway car, her hostage. It turns out that she is a Palestinian paediatrician, Dr Hawwa Habash. The couple she shot dead were her estranged husband and his new woman. But her motives were as political as they were personal. She was appalled to discover that her estranged husband was a profiteer who made money by ripping off Palestinian refugees in their miserable camps in Lebanon and elsewhere.

Here is the basic set-up. A guy who lives as a “junket journalist”, in a superficial world of consumerism, is now mixed up in a deadly serious political situation.  In the Palestinian doctor’s hideout, Christopher Hare waits uncomfortably as his captors decide what to do with him.

For this novel to work, you have to simply accept that Christopher Hare would act as impulsively and recklessly as he does in the opening chapter. Maybe he’s miserable enough to risk throwing away his life by returning a bag to an armed woman who has just killed two people. Maybe Hare is really hare-brained. It’s never made entirely clear.

Told as I’ve told it here, the premise could sound a bit like Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul – political naïf  brought up against the realities of terrorist tactics. But that is definitely not the way The Catastrophe develops.

The novel runs on two time streams.

In the present, Hare gets to know the Palestinian doctor, who understands his consumerist world better than Hare at first assumes she will. Wedde writes with a detailed knowledge of Palestinian culture and poetry and efficiently suggests the complexities of Palestinian society. Perhaps to avoid clichés about the Islamicist influence upon Palestinians, he makes Dr Hawwa Habash and her circle Christians.

In the past, we get Christopher Hare’s Bay of Plenty and Tolaga Bay background reconstructed in his memories (complete with Italian and Maori forebears); and Mary Pepper’s junketing and photography career reconstructed in her memories.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking.

In an interview with Iain Sharp in the October issue of Metro, Ian Wedde says he’s particularly proud of this novel because he thinks he has succeeded in creating a “well-told story”. He’s right. He has. And he reels it in when he has explored just enough of the cultural ironies.

The yawning gap between professional gourmet and starving refugees lurks in the background. The phrase “food is love” is often quoted. To feed the starving is an act of love, but is there really love in the eroticisation of food as found in wine-and-food-peddling media? Or for that matter in all those tiresome chick lit novels we’ve had recently which mix recipes with sex?

In the foreground is a man whose wife sees him as having a “maddening combination of indifference and excess”, almost the perfect description of a lifestyle journalist. The hearty love of food of his Italian forebears has been corrupted into a commodity. Of course there are multiple meanings in the characters’ names. Hare runs from the realities of his upbringing and the big political situation. Pepper goes well with a served dish like hare (or maybe once spiced up his life).

This is satire on one strand of our media-made reality and – like The Viewing Platform – comes close to being a reflection on reality itself. 

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "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 five or more years ago.

“SHROUD” John Banville (first published 2002)

“GOOD FAITH” Jane Smiley (first published 2003)

The new novel I looked at this week, Ian Wedde’s The Catastrophe, could reasonably be called satire because its story points to a trend or fashion in the modern world, in part ridicules it and in part admonishes it. But, although it has some light moments, it is not the sort of satire that’s designed to get laughs. Its admonitions have a strongly moral edge. Isn’t satire meant to mend our morals, after all?

For this reason, and this reason alone, it has something in common with two very different good novels I enjoyed reading in the first decade of this century.

Irish novelist John Banville’s Shroud is definitely no comedy, but it does take apart one element of modern thought and lets us see how corrosive it is. This is a moral lesson.

Its main character Axel Vander is an ageing, cynical, world-weary postmodernist literary critic who earns a comfortable living in American universities by teaching the gullible that there is no such thing as the ego, that personality is a delusion, that “the author is dead” and similar deconstructionist dogma.

Then one day Vander gets a nasty shock. A young Irish researcher Cass Cleave has been looking through yellowing files of Second World War-era newspapers from Vander’s native Belgium. She has discovered the opinions that Vander published as a young man. Working for the collaborationist press during Belgium’s occupation by the Nazis, Vander had written pro-Nazi, anti-Jewish criticism. The credibility of his later post-war career would, of course, have evaporated if this had ever been known. Cass Cleave asks Vander if he would like to meet her in Turin to talk this discovery over.

The novel’s initial premise echoes the notorious factual case of the prominent deconstructionist critic Paul de Man, who was posthumously discovered to have had just such a collaborationist background. Naturally Banville does allow us some directly satirical moments. Part of the novel is written in the fussy, pedantic, self-justifying voice of Vander himself. We are allowed to reflect that verbal obfuscation, denial of personality (and personal responsibility) and theories which say an author’s opinions are all irrelevant to the texts the author produces – all are very convenient for people who have something to hide. They are keystones of deconstructionism.

But Shroud goes well beyond satire. In an extraordinary whammy, Banville introduces a plot element that forces us to reassess our reaction to Vander and his motives. By setting the story in Turin, Banville symbolically makes the novel an interrogation of the very concepts of truth and authenticity. (Turin is the home of the shroud which is venerated as an authentic image of Christ but could well be a fake.) He writes convincingly enough to make such an interrogation credible.

One warning about this novel, which I am recommending strongly. Do NOT go on line and read the New York Times review of it. The reviewer praised the novel highly, but also managed to completely ruin it by giving away the crucial twist. This is as mischievous as giving away the culprit in a whodunit.

Much brisker and more direct is the satire of the American novelist Jane Smiley in her Good Faith. Although first published in 2003, it is set in the 1980s and is in part a polemic against the “greed is good” acquisitiveness of that decade.

In upstate rural New York the narrator, Joe Stratford is a reasonably successful real estate agent. He makes fair profits, wheels and deals a little bit, and has to perform such mercy work as coaxing a neurotic builder into actually letting go of the houses he’s built on commission.

Enter smooth-talking developer and deal-spinner Marcus Burns, who says he knows everything about finance-gearing and tax dodging. He used to work for the tax department and declares he hates paying taxes. Marcus is able to dazzle and charm everyone – the city fathers, the local building authority, the builder, the banker and especially Joe. Marcus has this huge property development that’s supposed to attract big-city interest. Marcus is going to make everybody a billion, just so long as they invest with him. Naturally everyone begs to scramble aboard.

You can see where this is going and how the satire is loaded. The irresponsible individual (who hates taxes) is set against the common good. The whole concept of “good faith” – supposedly the cornerstone to all fair bargaining – is undermined in a culture where “the deal” is the Holy Grail, substituting for love, loyalty, family and social concern. Acquisitiveness corrupts and raw unregulated capitalism kills. The message travels far beyond the 1980s.

In case this sound too simplistic and obvious as a piece of satire, there are two things about Good Faith that make it first-rate.

One is the utterly convincing male voice that this woman novelist has created for her narrator Joe. We feel sympathy for the guy even as he staggers from one bad decision to the next.

The other is Jane Smiley’s admirably clear prose, which makes vivid and interesting those precise details of real estate bargaining that would have been tedious in other hands.

The satire of Good Faith is grounded in close observation of reality.

Something Thoughtful

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

THE SONG, NOT THE SINGER

For those of you wanting to identify the enemy, let me tell you a story.

Recently I was surfing the ‘net, looking at on-line comments about modern music. Some of them were quite intelligent. Most were hasty, unfunny or angry one-liners (you know what on-line discussions are like). A couple were appalling. But among them, I identified the enemy.

The enemy was a chap who claimed to have a “profound” appreciation of music because, he said, he didn’t just listen to the words and music of songs. He researched the life of the musician and found out about his politics and beliefs. Then, he said, he was able to judge the music more accurately.

In these words, I believe the guy stands self-condemned as the enemy.

His approach violates what should be the most basic rule in all reviewing and criticism. We should judge and appreciate the work of art itself – not the person who created it. A song is neither better nor worse because the person who wrote or performed it votes the same way you do, supports the causes you support or shares the beliefs you hold. It’s a gross distortion of all criticism to start praising or condemning works on the basis of how kindly you feel about the people who created them.

Why am I making a big issue of this?

Because I believe the “personality” approach has become one of the many things that plague modern critical discussion.

Let me switch from music to literature, about which I know more.

A culture of personality often means that a new book is first hailed with a journalist’s profile article on, or interview with, the author, giving an account of the book’s genesis, how he or she feels about the finished product, relevant matters in the author’s private and professional life and so forth.

All of this is perfectly valid as background to reading a book. I do not embrace deconstructionist theories about the “death of the author” and the irrelevance of  the author’s personality to the text. The author and the author’s worldview are very relevant to the text. But the moral character and the likeability of the author have little to do with the literary achievement or talent of the author. To put it another way, in literature, right bastards may have plenty of talent and very nice people may have little talent at all, but it is the talent that makes the work and that is what should be judged. (Yes, there are talentless bastards and talented nice people too, but let’s not lose ourselves in side issues.)

Problems arise when the categories are confused in criticism. As a reviewer, I define my job as reviewing the book, not the author. Once a Books Page editor asked me with annoyance “Aren’t you a fan of XYZ or something?” after I had filed a less-than-flattering review of XYZ’s latest novel. The question and the word “fan” assumed that once I had decided to like a writer, I would switch off my critical faculties about all that writer’s subsequent works. In this context, I am reminded of a situation in which C.K.Stead was getting grumpy at a girly piece of criticism where a woman writer was praised for her contributions to the cause of feminism. Stead riposted that he would judge her by “the words on the page”.

That, I hope, is my own approach.

Judging the author’s personality rather than the work can lead to those dire situations in which something is considered “worthy” because the author is a pleasant chap who writes about admirable causes. Witi Ihimaera, New Zealand’s “first Maori novelist”, has written about Maori political prisoners in nineteenth century Tasmania (The Trowenna Sea) and the mistreatment of Te Whiti’s followers in nineteenth century Taranaki (The Parihaka Woman). Gosh, he’s such a nice chap when he’s interviewed and his books are about such absorbing historical topics that, even before we’ve read the book, inspire oodles of sympathy. So, sight unseen, his books must be beyond criticism. Right?

We praise 14-year-olds if they write competent school essays or stories which we would regard as poor or mediocre had they been written by an adult. It is perfectly valid to respect their persons and not discourage them in this way. But that is not a valid approach to published works written by adults.

Ideally, in judging a piece of writing, it should make no difference to us that the author is a paraplegic war hero suffering from AIDS who climbed Mount Everest barefoot and has just generously endowed a worthy charitable cause. The only question should be – can he write?

Do I make any exceptions to this austere words-on-the-page, the-work-not-the-writer approach to criticism?

Consider the ordinary published thoughts of a bright, but not outstandingly gifted, young teenager as she reacts to her environment. She says little that millions of teenagers wouldn’t say in her circumstances, so I should really be quite critical of her work, shouldn’t I?

            But what if she’s writing as she hides from persecution in an attic in wartime Amsterdam? Then, as I read, I am judging her work as a “human document” – not as work of literature in its own right. I’m not being blasphemous in saying Anne Frank was not a great writer. We are touched and moved by her diary because she wrote in those particular circumstances, because what she says is so ordinary, so like a likeable bright kid and because we know that she died in a death camp. So there are these documentary occasions where the words-on-the-page rule is reasonably suspended.

This has led to a number of interesting phenomena, however.

One is the existence of what is now called “misery literature”, where memoirists (or their publishers) realize that there’s plenty of money to be made in accounts of appalling childhoods and awful backgrounds, in the full awareness that critics will apply my “human document” rule and suspend critical judgement as they proceed to sympathise with the (sexually-abused kid, refugee kid, orphan kid) authors.

The other is that such “human documents” are notoriously easy to fake. Read a good account of literary frauds and hoaxes sometime, and you’ll find that a very high proportion of them are fake autobiographies of stressful lives. First-person accounts of misery are almost the weapon of choice of literary hoaxers.  So even when reading “human documents”, we should keep our wits about us.

Utter honesty compels me to admit that something else may compromise by reviewer’s creed. New Zealand is a small country with a small literary community. Sometimes, when I review a work by a New Zealand writer, I pause and wonder if honest comment will lead to a punch in the face next time the author meets me at some literary function. In short, I do think about the writer rather than the work, and that thought has occasionally led me to be more tactful that I should have been. Oh dear.

By the way, a note for anyone wondering about the rather obscure title of this week’s thoughtful bit. Before it was the title of a Rolling Stones number, The Singer, Not the Song was the name of a High Camp, mildly homo-erotic British-made Western of the early 1960s. In it, a Mexican bandido (Dirk Bogarde in tight-fitting leather pants) decides that he respects a priest but won’t be buying his religion. He says he likes “the singer, not the song”.

In reply, I say criticism should be based on the song, not the singer.

Something New

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

“NIGHTWOODS” by Charles Frazier (Hodder/Hachette, $39:99)

I had the pleasure of reviewing Charles Frazier’s first and best-known novel Cold Mountain when it appeared in 1997. It’s set in the dying days of the American Civil War and chronicles a deserting Confederate soldier’s walk back home, through the ravaged and nightmarish landscape of a defeated South, to reach the woman he wants to marry. (It was made into a reasonably good movie, though not entirely like the novel.) I remember praising the novel for the way it refuses to accept sentimental stereotypes of the Old South but also avoids an easy cynicism. It’s an intelligent and thoughtful historical novel, and they are rarities. It won some prestigious literary awards.

Charles Frazier does not rush his work. After Cold Mountain he wrote the rambling Thirteen Moons.  His latest novel, Nightwoods, is only his third book in fourteen years. He is a Southerner. All his novels are set in his native North Carolina, with much prominence given to small communities living among the mountains. (I’m tempted to call them “hillbillies”, but that might not be the right term). He likes to describe the landscape in detail, and isn’t averse to dropping in general reflections on the ways of history.

I imagined that he would continue to mine historical subjects like Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons. But Nightwoods isn’t exactly an historical piece. It’s set in living memory – sometime about the early 1960s to judge by the movies mentioned as  playing at the local movie house (Thunder Road, The Defiant Ones, Light in the Piazza). Bootleggers and lawmen and honest citizens drive around in Fords and Chevys and the odd eccentric Vauxhall. Yet in a sense, it really is the distant past, as the chief determinant of modern culture, television, has only begun to make inroads into the remote North Carolina community. (There’s one fleeting mention of somebody watching The Twilight Zone). In the mountains, this is still a time when shady characters can drop out of sight by simply moving to the next town, police surveillance is unsophisticated, and society is bound by church, bar, local radio stations and a weekly movie.

           

Though the plot is different, this novel has the same configuration of man questing after desired woman that held together Cold Mountain. In Nightwoods the honest landowning farmer Stubblefield falls in love with, and hesitantly courts, the ageing Luce (Lucinda). Stubblefield is a soulful, mature chap (he loves listening to Mile Davis’s Kind of Blue). But Luce is a damaged and unhappy woman who has essentially withdrawn from society and lives by care-taking a large, disused tourist lodge. We discover, long before Stubblefield does, that Luce was raped as a young woman and has been hyper-cautious about men ever since. Nevertheless, a kind of courtship happens, hesitant, strained and with Luce giving nothing away easily. Her curt replies to Stubblefield, masking a growing attachment, are among the best things in the novel

Overlaying this, however, there is a plot reminding me of a film which just might have played at the local movie house at the time the story is set. I mean Charles Laughton’s 1955 film The Night of the Hunter. You might recall that was the one in which a psychotic preacher (played by Robert Mitchum) chases after and threatens two young children, in quest of money he believes they have hidden. The two young children are protected by a tough older woman (played by Lillian Gish).

In Nightwoods, Luce takes charge of two children Dolores and Frank, whose mother, Luce’s sister Lily, has been murdered by a brute called Bud. The two children are almost mute and completely uncommunicative. There is the strong implication that they have been sexually abused by Bud. When Bud gets loose, he comes looking for the kids, thinking they have hidden money. The tough and independent Luce protects them, with the courting Stubblefield drawn into the situation.

There are some things in this novel that Frazier does extremely well.

One is his account of the way Luce attempts to socialise the traumatised kids, before Bud returns to make their lives even more complicated. Her experiments in social education, her failures and renewed efforts could have carried the novel on their own, without the more melodramatic elements of the plot.

Another is the vivid delineation of the nasty Bud, whose viciousness seems to come with a strong death wish, expressed in religious language about “the blood of the lamb”. He buddies up with a bent and Benzedrine-popping cop called Lit. They are most convincing and repulsive villains and naturally there is a quota of explicit violence.

There’s also the strong sense of time and place carefully observed.

But Nightwoods has its downside. Without dropping in any spoilers, I can say that we are not told about a key and important relationship between two characters until well into the novel, by which time it comes to seem like one of those tricks which  crime writers pull when they withhold essential information to provide “surprise” twists. I can also say that the ending – especially a part set around a huge gravel pit – creaks with overt symbolism, and there are moments when Frazier lapses into attitudinising about history and community and the wildlife of the mountains. The keen observation of the novel comes, regrettably, with doses of cliché.

As the awards and the favourable reviews show, some people love Charles Frazier’s work. But, in America, there is also a strong group of critics who can’t stand him. They accuse him of peddling tales ripe for Hollywood, and especially of pandering to more sentimental women readers, with his themes of love won after many obstacles and of strong women finding good men. A New York Times review described Thirteen Moons as  “cornmeal mush” while another reviewer called it “a disgrace”. If you are so inclined, you can have the fun of ferreting out these negative reviews on line.

For myself, I don’t see Frazier in these extreme terms. I think he is a novelist who has so far produced one excellent novel (Cold Mountain), one unfocussed one (Thirteen Moons) and now one that gives some of his strongest and some of his weakest qualities. Fine evocative description and good sense of character, but melodramatic plot development.

On the whole I enjoyed reading Nightwoods and think it should win a large audience.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "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 five or more years ago.

 

“MARCH” Geraldine Brooks (first published 2005)

“THE AMALGAMATION POLKA” Stephen Wright (first published 2006)

Because I’ve been reading a novel by Charles Frazier, I am put in mind of his American Civil War novel Cold Mountain. And this sets me thinking of two other good American novels I have read in recent years, which dissect aspects of the same conflict, even if their approaches are not the same as Frazier’s.

Both share an unsentimental view of the war, a refusal to be misled by sanitised Gone With the Wind-type images of the Old South, and a focus on the unpleasant issue of slavery.

Geraldine Brooks’ March burns with anger, yet manages to contain it in an restrained, rational, and therefore doubly disturbing prose style.

You may recall that in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Mr March, a right-thinking Protestant clergyman from Concord, Massachusetts, goes off as chaplain to Union troops during the American Civil War. Apart from the odd letter, we don’t hear much about him until “Marmee”, the dutiful Mrs March, rushes off to tend him in hospital. He then returns home for the story’s happy ending. Intended for a juvenile female readership,  Little Women is mainly about the daughters Meg, Beth, Jo and Amy. The father of the family is little more than one of the “noises off”.

I know Louisa May Alcott’s books drip with sentimental pieties that many now find hard to stomach. But I wouldn’t belittle her. Anyone who can write books that still hold a young audience over a century later has to have some sort of talent. From reading all four of her books about the March family to my own younger daughters (Little Women, Good Wives, Little Men and Jo’s Boys), I know girls can still enjoy them, in spite of their patches of heavy moralising.

Geraldine Brooks doesn’t belittle Alcott either. Her (very adult and not-for-children) novel March is not one of those tiresome rewrites of the classics which assume that we are now so much more intelligent and perceptive than earlier generations were. Brooks respects her characters’ intelligence, but she sets about imagining what the Reverend March was doing in the year he was away from his family.

A devoted abolitionist, March has been happy to join the North’s crusade against slavery. He is horrified to find that many in the Union army are not as idealistic about the issue as he is. The novel gives us the horrors of war, but even more grisly is its revelation of the realities of slavery and the cynicism of many of those fighting to overthrow it. In effect, a somewhat naïve man discovers that human motivation is a trickier thing than he had imagined.

One episode is particularly shocking. Momentarily (in a flashback to a antebellum visit to the South), March has been seduced by the cultured and cultivated conversation of a slave-owning Southerner, a man who can quote Shakespeare and the Romantic poets at need and wax lyrical about soulful aspects of literature. Thinking he is in a land of the civilised, March is therefore devastated to see the same man, a few hours later, order the merciless flogging of a woman slave who has learnt how to read.

           

There is also the matter of interracial sex. Geraldine Brooks doesn’t wallow in it. Sexual incidents are implied rather than described, but enough is told for us to understand that there were some things the clergyman would not have included in his letters home.

One of the best things about this accomplished novel is its narrative voice. Until about three-quarters of the way through (when “Marmee” takes over) the Reverend March himself tells the story.  Geraldine Brooks gets the 19^th century tone and vocabulary just right. It is perfect pastiche, even better than Owen Marshall’s narrative voices in his recent historical novel The Larnachs. March’s voice also allows us to confront a theme so dear to the South African novelist Nadine Gordimer – the priggishness of liberals, even when they are supporting an unimpeachably good cause. We sympathise with March, but also see the limits of his sympathies for others.

I think Brooks’ novel suffers a slight failure of nerve in the last pages, when Brooks feels compelled to spell out its message. Otherwise (like Frazier’s Cold Mountain; like Janice Galloway’s outstanding Clara) it gives the impression that the author knows how people once lived and thought and were inspired. She has had the imaginative sympathy to think herself into a past age.

Stephen Wright’s The Amalgamation Polka is not quite in the same league, especially as Wright is even more ready than Brooks to spell out a moral to us. The Amalgamation Polka has passages of rich and evocative prose, but also occasional crashes into bathos. I’d have to say, too, that Wright’s technique is as much surrealistic as realistic.

In 300 pages we follow the picaresque adventures of Liberty Fish, symbolically named son of abolitionists in the years before the civil war. White Southern mother ran away from her Carolina plantation home, disgusted with her slave-owning parents. Father is a real Yankee. Liberty grows up dimly aware that they are involved in the “underground railroad” for escaped slaves.

In the novel’s leisurely first half, Wright lets his sentences ramble through more luxuriant sub-clauses than most writers this side of William Faulkner. And glorious rambling it is too, taking us on a trip up the filthy, polluted Erie Canal, a peek at P T Barnum’s museum of bunkum in New York, and a four-page description of a fairground dentist extracting a man’s teeth without benefit of anaesthetics. We’re being served, graphically, the messiness and unpredictability and “otherness” of the past, with the subtext that the industrialised North in which Liberty grows up is a radically flawed society. Yet its war against slavery is still a righteous one.

Wright’s civil war battle scenes are surprisingly dull and conventional; but the novel regains its strength when Liberty visits the plantation of his demented slave-owning grandfather. Babbling a mixture of racist mythology, the Old Testament, and Social-Darwinist pseudo-science, the obscene old man offers copious justifications for racial inequality. This is where the novel is at its most surreal. We can see the old man is a lunatic because Wright vividly shows us so.

Unfortunately, Wright is not content with showing us. He has to tell us too, and the novel deflates a bit. We are solemnly warned that grandpa is talking “a vicious farrago of humbug, deluded fancy and crackpot ethnology”, in case we didn’t get the point for ourselves. Other moral-pointing nudges its way into the final chapters. A pity, as otherwise this oddity is nearly the equal of Frazier’s and Brooks’ takes on the same general situation.

Taken as a whole, however, both these novels are good examples of historical novels for grown-ups, conveying past documentary realities without seeming mugged-up; and not allowing their characters to be embodiments of historians’ textbook judgments on the past. Well worth hunting out.

Something Thoughtful

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

 

SHOULD NATURAL THINGS BE COPYRIGHTED?

There’s a very good article by Jonathan Milne in the latest NZ Listener (1 October 2011). It concerns the contentious Wai 262 claim that has been put to the Waitangi Tribunal. This is the one in which certain iwi are seeking to copyright not only traditional Maori medical practices, but also the plants (and their names) that are used in such practices. A feature is made of manuka honey, and its incorporation into products that make massive profits for multinational corporations. The Wai 262 claim argues that iwi should receive compensation (i.e. a lot of money) for such uses.

At this point, I could raise side-issues, some of which are touched on by Milne.

One is the fact that, in the New Zealand political context, governments are now reluctant to dabble in these matters lest they face a replay of the Foreshore-and-Seabed brouhaha. The prime minister and his Treaty Negotiations minister are keeping diplomatically quiet about it in an election year and will address the matter in 2012 at the earliest.

The other is that, should the Wai 262 arguments be made into law, only a minority of any iwi would ever benefit from them; namely, that part with the commercial skills (or legal advice) to make the most out of the financial settlements. Sometimes, generous-hearted liberals assume that pay-outs to an indigenous group automatically benefit all disadvantaged members of that group. They are seen as an extension of egalitarian social welfare. In reality, it never works that way. The beneficiaries will be a handful of astute Maori entrepreneurs.

These are interesting issues, but they’re not really the issues that most interest me.

I’m more concerned by the notion that things existing in the natural world can be copyrighted at all. If a flower, root or leaf has medicinal properties, its exploitation could doubtless make a fortune for the commercial outfit with the expertise to develop it, much to the annoyance of those who dislike the profit motive anyway. But to copyright or patent such a naturally-existing object would not be to end profitable exploitation. It would merely change the names of those doing the profitable exploiting.

I have heard the argument that indigenous plants are the  taonga –  or “treasure” –  of an indigenous people, and therefore have special cultural or spiritual significance to which non-indigenous people are not privy. In the New Zealand context, the concept taonga is recognised under legislation pursuant to the Treaty of Waitangi. (Not under the treaty itself, of course. It is a very vague document and of itself has no legal standing.)

But I am not persuaded by this argument for a number of reasons.

First, we all invest things with cultural and spiritual significance. I won’t turn autobiographical and give you my own responses to the natural world. It’s likely that they are different from those of indigenous peoples in many places. But they have a strong spiritual (I prefer the most robust term “religious”) element. How I respond to plants, trees and leaves in New Zealand is as genuine and important to me as the response of anybody else in this country. I do not believe modern Maori – any Maori – have insights into the natural world superior to my own, although in some cases they are likely to be different from my own.

Second, there is this whole problem of indigeneity. Who has the right to be seen as “native”? If naturally-existing things are copyrighted in the name of one group, on the assumption that they are more indigenous than another, then other groups are effectively being told they have lesser rights, or at least a lesser connection to the natural environment in which they live.

Put bluntly, then, I oppose putting patents or copyrights on things that are not human creations anyway.

This objection is not a challenge to the concepts of ownership and property. I appreciate that patches of land are natural things and can be owned. But land itself cannot be patented. You can own that patch of manuka and I can own this patch of manuka, but I do not believe either of us should have the right to claim all manuka as a monopoly. Neither of us created it.

Should we therefore say that, for example, groups of French vignerons should not be allowed to copyright (as they do) names of wine like Champagne and Bordeaux, and forbid others to use them? But in that case, it is not a natural thing - the regional variety of grape  - that is being monopolised. It is a human invention – the method by which a certain regional type of wine is produced from the grape, which can be traced to specific individuals.

This is a quick and superficial response to the whole issue on my part, but it does lead into even thornier cultural questions.

Can copyright be given to groups who have inherited a traditional craft or knowledge, for whose invention or discovery no individual is responsible? Part of the argument over medicinal plants has to do with the idea that an indigenous group first discovered their medicinal properties. They should therefore be rewarded with patents the way pharmaceutical researchers are.

The problem here is that age-old remedies and crafts were no one person’s invention. You cannot point to an individual as the originator of traditions. Therefore no individual (or modern group) can really claim credit for them.

What of purely cultural (and human-made) phenomena? Should non-Maori perform haka, or use traditional Maori motifs in their art-work or wear moko on their faces? After all, isn’t this a species of “cultural theft”? Postmodern cultural commentators are always ready to dash in with words like “appropriation” whenever they see an artist using motifs from a culture other than the artist’s own.

Again, I would argue that none of these things was invented by an individual, and attempts to restrict their use or development to one ethnic group would be a species of censorship, as well as an intrusion on the expressive freedom of artists.

This is not the same as an individual’s copyright on an individual work of art. If, as a poet, I expect to hold copyright on a sonnet I have written, I am not assuming that others have to apply to me if they choose to write sonnets of their own. Haka, motifs like the koru, and moko are artistic forms. Unless they are specific works by specific creators, there is no case for patenting them or copyrighting them or limiting their use to one ethnic group.

There is, of course, the wider issue of cultural sensitivity. (A few years ago, the disingenuous term “cultural safety” was invented in some bureaucratic documents. This can only be read as an attempt to pretend that the matter was in the same category of urgency as literal physical safety.)  There is the possibility that vulgar and otherwise insensitive performances of haka by non-Maori will give offence to Maori, or that moko will be debased if used as a fashion statement.

I, too, find vulgar misuses of traditional motifs distasteful. But this is an argument for sensitivity, not for legislation, copyright or restricted use. As the member of a particular cultural sub-group, I am often offended by the misuses that are made of symbols and images that are important to me. But I have never thought that the uses of these symbols and images should be limited by legislation, lest by sensitivities be hurt.

 

The case for patented restriction of traditional human cultural motifs is feeble. But it is nevertheless stronger than the argument for the patented restriction of natural things, for which there is no case at all. 

Something New

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

“BIRD NORTH – AND OTHER STORIES” by Breton Dukes (Victoria University Press, $35)

When it comes to literature, it’s important sometimes to draw a distinction between respecting a work as genuine, and actually liking the work. Worthwhile criticism isn’t just the child’s tantrum of saying “I like” and “I don’t like.” It has to recognise that something can be well-written and insightful, succeed on its own terms and properly be praised without necessarily appealing to everybody, including the critic. I’m not bound to like all the classics, for example, but I am bound to understand why they are regarded as classics and why other people commend them.

I’m carefully establishing this to begin with because I think Breton Dukes’ first collection of short stories (and first book) is the genuine article – sharp, hard and allusive stories, very skilfully written, that convey certain male mentalities. But I also found myself squirming at much of the sordid detail, actively disliking many characters for their insensitivity or dumb brutality, disliking the deadpan, hopeless tone of many of the tales, and wondering whether I really needed to know everything I was being told.

The cover blurb places Dukes in “the great tradition of New Zealand writers – Frank Sargeson, Maurice Duggan, Owen Marshall – who have looked at men’s lives.” The blurb also quotes Damien Wilkins (apparently one of Breton Dukes’ mentors) saying Dukes has “zeroed in on his subject and delivered an intense, necessary book.” I take “his subject” to mean the idea of masculinity, and “necessary” to mean that Wilkins believes Dukes has diagnosed accurately in his stories what is wrong with New Zealand men.

But has he?

Asking this question is part of what makes me distance myself from this book, even as I admire its literary skill.

The brief bio of Dukes suggests he is still a young man. One of his stories (Other People’s Houses) has a woman narrator. But protagonists of the seventeen stories of Bird North and Other Stories are mainly young men – of student or first-employment age, usually hanging out with other young men, sometimes shacked up with women, but not really being committed to women and certainly not interested in settled domesticity. There’s a story about an unhappy honeymoon (Three Bikes), another about a dysfunctional marriage (Racquet) and one where a guy breaks up with his girlfriend and goes to live with his married brother who has a pregnant wife (Soup). When this is noted, however, it remains true that all the significant psychological and physical events in these stories are man-to-man.

The collection begins and ends in what could be called traditional Kiwi macho settings. The opening tale Shark’s Tooth Rock has two young men out on a diving-fishing expedition. The closing tale Thinking About Stopping  has a bunch of jokers pig-hunting in the bush. But this is not the blokey world of a Barry Crump anecdote. As much as anything, in its tragic and literally chilling outcome, Shark’s Tooth Rock  is about the limits of male bonding and boastfulness, and the defeat of kiwi machismo. The protagonist of Thinking About Stopping is more concerned with where he’ll get his next drug fix than with outdoorsy activities. It’s like a collision of  A Good Keen Man and the Slacker.

For whatever reason, the old male paradise of New Zealand mateship is poisoned. Dukes has chosen the second story in the collection, Bird North, for his book’s title, so presumably it’s meant to highlight this theme of Paradise Stuffed. In Bird North there are again activities traditionally associated with healthy outdoors living (tramping and running) but again undermined by a piece of new-style nastiness  - the sexual violation of a younger man by an older man.

I won’t list all the stories and their contents, but they do include unhappy young men failing to connect with their fathers, or worrying about whether the girl they picked up on holiday is going to go off with another guy, or hanging out hopelessly in cheap motels and grotty student flats, or wondering where they’re going to score their next drugs, or thinking about sex, or having sex in a disconnected, uncertain way, or failing to decide whether they can move on from the dead-end jobs they’re in.

One or two stories come close to deadpan reportage. Orderly is a slice-of-life of the miserable, harassed experience of a male orderly in a hospital. Johnsonville is like a 6-page sociological report on the typical activities of a bunch of boozing, TV-watching, time-filling womanless blokes. But Breton Dukes is not essentially an “I-am-a-camera” man who just looks and reports. These stories are crafted and shaped.

           

Often, a closing paragraph or two is added to a story. At first it seems to have nothing to do with the story itself, but closer reading shows it has some sort of symbolic value. This technique is most blatant in the story Pontoon. A young man who loves swimming is thwarted by a boring job at a call-centre. The final paragraph has a pod of dolphins stranding and drowning. The reader can easily make the symbolic connection. Elsewhere, however, the technique is more opaque, and in typical explain-nothing Postmodern fashion, the reader has to work harder to connect the dots.

I think I have described this book accurately. Sometimes, I was tempted to moralise and ask such questions as :- Is the story The Moon saying that bad parenting will lead to a life without commitment? But I don’t think moral questions or social improvement are really Breton Dukes’ intention. He wants to convey vividly how some young men think, feel and act. If his brief bio is any guide, he seems to be drawing (at least in part) on life experience. His stories dump a lot of behavioural problems in our lap, but it’s up to us to draw conclusions or moralise.

To return to my original misgiving – is this an accurate diagnosis of New Zealand men?

I don’t doubt that Dukes has caught accurately certain types of young Kiwi men. But, asking “Where are their brains? Where are their loves?”, part of me is glad that I don’t know many of those young men.         

Semi-relevant footnote: Dylan Horrocks is a very good artist and his image of a sweating runner (illustrating the title story) graces the cover of this book. But I’m not sure it was the appropriate choice as a cover. It’s too cheerfully cartoonic. I was halfway through reading Bird North when one of my kids asked “Is that a children’s book you’re reading?” Nope. It isn’t.  

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "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 five or more years ago.

“MORTAL COILS” Aldous Huxley (first published 1922)

For the sake of perversity as much as anything, I choose as this week’s “Something Old” a volume of short stories which face aesthetically about 180 degrees away from Breton Dukes’ Bird North.

If the young New Zealand writer in 2011 has the Postmodern allusiveness, grot and refusal to provide neat endings, Aldous Huxley in 1922 had the brittleness and dazzle of intellectual Modernism. Dukes’ Kiwi characters are slackers and losers who are taciturn and can’t quite put what they mean into words. Huxley’s English characters are frightfully articulate upper-middle-class types who chatter and chatter. And so does the author.

Mortal Coils came early in Huxley’s literary career. He’d written only one novel (Crome Yellow) and one earlier, unsatisfactory collection of stories (Limbo) and he was weaning himself off trying to be a Decadent poet. This was years before the heavy-duty novels, including Brave New World, and even more years before Huxley’s descent into being an addle-headed, doped-up California sage.

Even in 1922, Huxley was a man who thought with his brain, not with his heart. His prose it always commendably lucid; but at his worst he can sound like a clever chap scoring points at an Oxford Union debate. In some ways, his work resembles the plays of George Bernard Shaw. Overt intellectualism turns many of his characters into mouthpieces for his ideas, or the walking embodiments of other people’s ideas which he wishes to knock down. Moral and social lessons are drawn explicitly.

Mortal Coils consists of four longish short stories and one playscript.

The playscript, Permutations Among the Nightingales, is a tiresome affair from its self-conscious title on. Various national stereotypes (Italian, French, Jewish, American etc.) converse in attempted aphorisms about the nature of Love. The cynical conclusion is that Love is merely sensual pleasure, delusion or wooing for material gain.

Two of the short stories are only so-so. Green Tunnels has a daydreaming girl caught between a hard-headed strike-breaking Fascist, and an aesthete who keeps chattering about Art rather than life. She learns neat lessons from her situation. Nuns at Luncheon is a bit of a cliché about a nun being seduced by the man she was attempting to convert to religion. Huxley has his cake and eats it by making his narrator a cynical woman who remarks on which elements of the story are clichés. Presumably this is meant to ward off the obvious criticism.

So why am I drawing to your attention this apprentice work of a well-known writer?

Because the other two stories of Mortal Coils are very accomplished and very readable. And because I am puzzled that it is what I see as the lesser of these two that has become the more famous.

The Giaconda Smile is the best-known piece in Mortal Coils. Huxley later turned it into a play, and he wrote the screenplay (its ending adjusted to meet censorship requirements)  of the now-forgotten 1948 film adaptation A Woman’s Vengeance, which had Charles Boyer in the lead. The story is often anthologised. As a representative of Huxley’s work it is almost as well-known as Brave New World.

If you don’t know The Giaconda Smile, I won’t spoil the plot, but it involves a thwarted love affair among the country gentry, a murder, and a male writer’s idea of the inscrutability of women. One moral is that a man cannot tell what a woman is thinking by the smile on her face – the Mona Lisa smile of the title. As Shakespeare put it, “there’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.” Throughout, the tone is sardonic, verging on the cynical, with a view of human nature that assumes self-interest as the most powerful motive.

After ninety years it still reads well (Huxley’s lucid prose!), though I think the edge may have been taken off it by the fact that its tone has so often been imitated, in films and TV shows as much as short stories. Perhaps cynicism of the possessing classes and nastiness in the horsey set no longer surprise us.

The story that really appeals to me in this collection is The Tillotson Banquet, a bright work of wit and real social satire. A young art critic finds out for a wealthy aristocratic patron that an ancient and forgotten pre-Raphaelite painter, long since thought dead, is still alive in wretched circumstances. A benefit banquet is arranged for him. But time has reduced the old man, a genuine artist, to caricature. He repeats over and over again the same few phrases that were the epitome of High Culture in his heyday fifty years previously. The rambling speech he gives at his benefit banquet causes his young admirers to slip away, one by one. They are embarrassed as much by the realization that all taste is transitory, even their own, as by the old man’s near senility.

As you can see, this is an “ideas” piece. In this case I don’t mind giving the plot away, as the force of the story depends on its observation of the art scene, of cultural snobberies, of the self-consciousness (and over-intellectualisation) of art critics and especially of the fact that fashion is a slippery beast and is no grounding for a real aesthetic. It’s also one of those rare cases where Huxley gets in some self-criticism. The story’s enthusiastic young art critic is clearly an unflattering self-portrait.

I repeat, The Tillotson Banquet still appeals to me more than the more-feted Giaconda Smile. Despite its time-and-place-specific setting, it has worn well and still has relevance. But the only way you will find whether you agree with me is by getting  copy of Mortal Coils and comparing the two stories for yourself.

Unless you are a Huxley completist, you can forget the other stuff in the volume.