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.

“THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE – A Winter’s Tale” by Robert Louis Stevenson (first published 1889)

            Gentle Reader,

            If you have never read Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae, then please read no further, as I am about to indulge my disgusting habit of narrating the whole plot as I have written it up in my reading notebooks. There will therefore be many “spoilers”.

            In simple summary Stevenson (1850-94) tells a story with elements of an old ballad – or the Biblical tale of Cain and Abel. Two brothers, of contrasting temperament, fight over the mastery of their family’s estate, and eventually destroy each other. That is the plot in a nutshell, but unfortunately this novel has no nutshell. It is a diffuse, rambling tale with varied incidents, sometimes interesting in themselves, but badly lacking focus. Its characters change, but they do not develop – in other words they undergo sudden transformations purely at the expedience of the plot. It is easy to see why this particular adventure story is less often read than either of Stevenson’s more overtly juvenile works, Kidnapped or Treasure Island. Characters are neither sympathetic nor particularly consistent (save, perhaps, the rather priggish and moralising narrator, the family steward Ephraim Mackellar).

            Now let’s get specific after this damning general judgement.

In 1745, at the time of the Jacobite Rebellion, Lord Durrisdeer of Ballantrae decides that one of his sons will support Bonnie Prince Charlie and the other will support King George, as a means of preserving the family estate whichever side should win. A flip of the coin decides that the older brother James Durie (known throughout as “the Master”) will support the Jacobites. He rushes off… and in due course word comes back that he has been killed at the Battle of Culloden. Alison Graeme, Lord Durrisdeer’s ward, is stricken with grief, as she loved James and was betrothed to him.

Two or three years go by.

Alison marries the younger stay-at-home brother Henry Durie, making it plain that she does so out of pity. By him, she has an infant daughter Katherine… Whereupon, disguised and under a false name, James returns home. He was not killed at Culloden at all. Instead, through the journal of his friend the Irish soldier of fortune Francis Burke, we learn what happened to him after Culloden (it involved becoming a pirate captain, roving through Indian-infested North America, burying treasure and making his way back to Scotland by a circuitous route).

Now that James is back, Henry’s marriage is unsettled. Old Lord Durrisdeer has become an ineffectual person. James makes it plain that he regards his brother Henry as his usurper, and Henry is aware that his wife shows James too much affection. By now Henry and Alison have a young son, Alexander. Henry is afraid that James will steal Alexander’s (and Alison’s) affections. He is even more afraid that James will steal the estate, which Henry now regards as his own.

Eventually Henry is goaded by James into fighting a duel – at midnight, by candle light. Surprisingly the bookish Henry wins, running the seasoned fighter James through the body and apparently killing him. Henry runs to get help. But when he returns to the spot where the duel was fought, James’ body has mysteriously disappeared…. And so we come to a second mysterious disappearance by James, about which we are once again informed by the journals of his mate Francis Burke.

In James’ second long absence, Alison realizes that she really does love, and wishes to remain loyal to, her husband Henry after all. Among other things, her shift in affections is fired by the discovery of letters, which prove what a treacherous beast the adventuring James really is. While claiming to support the Jacobite cause, he was secretly drawing a pension from King George’s men to spy on the Jacobites.

Gentle reader, I will spare you a detailed synopsis of the rest of this novel. Suffice it to say that James returns yet again, James’s attempts to wrest the estate off Henry become more extravagant and extreme, and all the main characters see fit to flee to North America. The climax involves an Indian fakir, Secundra Dass, from whom James has learned dastardly occult arts, including the art of resuscitating one who appears to be dead. There is a hunt for buried treasure and a fight in the American wilderness, there is business over the fakir’s attempting to revive a corpse, there is a fatal heart-attack at a climactic moment and, ironically, the two brothers who hated each other so much in life end up buried side-by-side in the same wilderness under the same marker.

Be it noted that in the last quarter of the novel the patient, bookish, forbearing Henry becomes as obsessive as his destructive brother as he seeks revenge – simply because the conclusion demands it.

The Master of Ballantrae was originally published in serial form, but clearly Stevenson planned it out before he began writing it and did not “make it up as he went along”. The narrator Mackellar, from fairly early in the story, refers to Henry’s son Akexander as the present Lord Durrisdeer, so we are promptly told how the story will turn out. The early mention of the buried treasure and of the fakir Secundra Dass also point the way to the conclusion. Nevertheless, despite the evident planning, the story refuses to hang together coherently. This is partly because there are too many incidents and too many inconsistencies in the main characters.

The premise is a good one, with typical Stevensonian duality in the contrast of the adventurous, amoral, world-travelling brother and the cautious stay-at-home brother. (Think of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, Deacon Brodie and so forth). But with the strong streak of treachery in James, and the strong streak of priggishness in Henry, they play like more extreme versions of Alan Breck Stewart and David Balfour in Stevenson’s best novel Kidnapped. Henry’s solicitude for others, however, becomes rather abruptly a desire for revenge and delight in his brother’s downfall. To make matters worse, and apart only from his improbable victory in the candle-lit duel, Henry is an impotent and passive character who can rarely do things without the help and planning of the steward Mackellar.

Alison’s love for the man she did not marry would again make an excellent premise, but it is not developed. Instead, at about halfway point in the novel, Alison is turned against James and then she virtually disappears from the tale. Stevenson is simply not interested in a psychological account of her position.

There is a certain skill in the moralising, self-justifying voice of the narrator Mackellar viewing all these incidents; but I do not for one moment believe Stevenson meant to read him ironically (as we read through the narrating voice of Marlowe in Conrad – the pioneer of the “unreliable narrator”). Mackellar – like his fellow narrator Francis Burke, whose memoirs take over some chapters – is a narrative convenience, his presence at certain key events being very unlikely. The novel feels clogged in the machinery of its narration. The two voices telling the adventure story are the wrong ones.

And now, gentle reader, let me introduce you to something extraordinary about this novel. Everyone who has read it feels let down by the improbable hocus-pocus in the last chapter, involving the fakir’s skill in resuscitating the apparently dead. It seems a hasty, sensationalist way of bringing the story to an end after all the novel’s varied adventures. The first reviewers of the novel, even those who quite admired it, chastised Stevenson for this plot point. Stevenson himself seems to have become embarrassed by it, warning his friend Henry James that he would have to suspend a lot of disbelief to read the last chapter of The Master of Ballantrae. Yet – miraculo! – it turns out that the story of the fakir and his ‘miracle’ was in fact the thing that inspired Stevenson to write the novel in the first place. I have this information from two sources. First, there is Neil Munro’s introduction to the very old (possibly 1920s?) Collins Clear-Type Press edition of The Master of Ballantrae, which sits on my shelves. Then there is Claire Harman’s very good biography of Stevenson (Robert Louis Stevenson, A Biography), which I reviewed for the Listener when it first came out in 2005. Both tell me that, in an essay on his working methods, Stevenson revealed that once, when he was stuck for a story, he remembered an anecdote his uncle had told him of a fakir who claimed to revive the dead. And from this anecdote he worked backward to develop the whole rambling plot of The Master of Ballantrae.

All of which proves that inspiration is not the same as achievement. Even if Stevenson did devise the novel in this manner, the ending still seems arbitrary and a cheat.

Now why am I being so harsh on this piece of tale-spinning? Because, like H.G.Wells’ Tono-Bungay [look up my review via the index at right], it strikes me as evidence of a supremely talented writer who was too often tempted to improvise incidents rather than giving his novels narrative coherence, even if he did have the overall arc of the story in his head before he began writing it. I love Stevenson best in his short stories (“Thrawn Janet” – a great piece of horror – “A Lodging for the Night” etc.) and in the novella Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and perhaps in Kidnapped, where his creative powers are more concentrated. Give him a novel’s length, however, and he begins to ramble and improvise.

At least, that is the respectable reason I am giving you for my critical dyspepsia. The real reason may be that (unlike the more famous works of Stevenson), I didn’t read this one when I was a teenager. Indeed, I first read it only about ten years ago. Perhaps if I’d read it as a kid, it would have beguiled me as much as the two novels of David Balfour’s adventures.

On an historical level, The Master of Ballantrae may imply something about the mixed, guilty feelings that bourgeois Scots had about the Jacobite rebellion; but it remains an unsatisfactory rambling romance more than anything.

            Two marginally-relevant footnotes:

(a.) The novel is subtitled “A Winter’s Tale”, which means colloquially a tale that holds one’s attention for a long time, such as one that might be told around the winter fire. However, I wonder if, with the great leaps in time that the story makes, and the sudden reappearance of a major character much transformed from what he was, Stevenson wasn’t at least alluding to the plot of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Just a thought.

(b.) Despite my misgivings about the novel, I know that it has had a powerful influence upon some people. I remember once being told by a bookish chap who had a dodgy and raffish younger brother that, as a teenager, he used to think of himself as Henry Durie and his brother as James Durie. For myself, I can’t help comparing its contrast of active brother and passive brother with Honore de Balzac’s much superior tussle over a family inheritance La Rabouilleuse (The Black Sheep), which I may one day cover on this blog.

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 ONE TRUE GOOD WAR

            Allow me to take you by the hand and lead you on a mild excursion I recently undertook.

            It was a Sunday afternoon, with rather indifferent Auckland weather, now rain, now shine, as is the way with this temperamental isthmus in early spring.

            I had been indoors too long and was feeling stale and irritable, probably the result of reading all these damned books that I cover on this blog. I needed fresh air and exercise. So I hopped in the car and drove to Takapuna Beach, meaning to stride vigorously up and down it for about forty minutes. But as soon as I arrived at my destination and got out of my car, the gentle Irish mist turned into light spitting rain, and then the light spitting rain turned into a hard driving downpour.

            I hastily changed plan, and sought shelter in the Takapuna Library, which I visit very infrequently.

            The old horrors returned, of course. I consider myself a reasonably well-read person. But in the fiction section was shelf after shelf of authors, in shiny new jackets, of whom I had never heard. This set off those familiar gloomy thoughts on how impossible it is to keep up with everything that’s published – and how redundant much that is published probably is anyway. Not sour grapes, my friend. Experience.

            So I turned to the non-fiction sections, wondering why so many flashy self-help books had infiltrated what would once have been the soberest section of the library. The Science parts looked interesting, but scant. There was a reasonable amount of Sociology, much of it on wimmin’s themes. But it was the History section that really gave me pause, and induced me to write this little memoir.

            There were some volumes of New Zealand history with an emphasis on colonial wars and Maori issues. There were a few general histories of European, American and Asian countries. There were quite a few books on ancient wars and nineteenth century wars (Napoleon, the American Civil War etc.) and a respectable number on the First World War, with an emphasis on Gallipoli and Passchendaele and the Anzacs. At times it seemed that the words “history” and “war” were regarded as synonymous. But, at a very rough and approximate estimate, I would say that fully half the books in the History section had to do with the Second World War. All aspects of that war – Nazis and death camps; the European war; D-day and the Russian front; the War in the Pacific; commando raids and bombing raids; occupied France; collaborators and resistance movements; The Home Front; experiences of prisoners of war etc. etc. etc.

            Librarians do regularly check on what books are most often borrowed; do relegate unread books to the stacks or biff them out in cut-price sales; and do ensure that what is on the shelves – apart from the [very] few “classics” and the indispensible reference books – follows a rough sort of market demand. So I do not for one moment believe this dominance of the Second World War in the History section was the result of some malign plot. It simply meant that there is a steady demand for books on the Second World War. Yes – there is a lesser interest in the First World War, and doubtless it will spike next year when we begin commemorating that war’s centenary. But to all intents and purposes the Second World War remains king.

            Of course this phenomenon is not confined to just one Auckland branch library. It is fairly universal in our public libraries. Old codgers come to get books that will help them re-fight Crete or the Battle of Britain or their dad’s time as a coast-watcher in Oz. Teenage boys get books that let them ogle Nazi uniforms and believe the heroic stories about the Dam Buster raid and pretend they are researching an important history assignment for school. Women want to see what their auntie was doing as a nurse during the war and how their grandpa survived Stalag Something.

            To extend the evidence, this phenomenon isn’t a uniquely New Zealand one. Some years ago, and for a relatively short time (about six months) I subscribed to a TV pay channel which purveys fictions loosely based on history. It is called the History Channel. In my first week as a subscriber, I thought that some important event in the Second World War was being commemorated that week. Every second programme on the channel was about US Marines at Guadalcanal or how the atom bomb was made or what exactly was the armament and payload capacity of the B17 or a “now it can be told” tale of a “secret” raid on Nazi Germany. The trouble was, I found the same sort of programming in my second and third and fourth weeks as a subscriber to the History Channel until it clicked that this was the channel’s standard fare. Like the History section of an Auckland branch library, “history” on the History Channel meant the Second World War with guest appearances by a few other things.

            All of which brings me to this overwhelming question; why is there such a popular fixation on the Second World War?

            In the 68 years since 1945, wars have been fought and atrocities have been perpetrated which, collectively, have destroyed as much of humanity as the Second World War did. (Count your way through Korea, Vietnam, Algeria, Afghanistan, colonial struggles in Africa and Asia, civil wars in many parts of the world, and mighty bust-ups in eastern and south-eastern Europe as the old Soviet Empire collapsed.) But - rivalled only by the Taiping Rebellion - no other single war destroyed as many people as the Second World War did. This may be part of its ongoing fascination. There is a clear “before” and “after” in history, with the Second World War as the divider.

            But I can think of a more compelling reason for the Second World War’s enduring popularity.

Unless we have not yet got past propaganda concepts generated when that war was being fought, we now know that the Second World War was filled with ambiguities and dark areas that do not reflect well on anybody. I do not mean the Nazis’ attempted genocide, or Japanese atrocities, about which we have always been informed. I mean ambiguities and grubbiness related to the winning side, which have been revealed only piecemeal in the intervening years.

There is, for example, the awkward historical fact that to defeat one rapacious and genocidal totalitarian power (Nazi Germany), the services of another rapacious and genocidal totalitarian power (the Soviet Union) were required. And the largest and most significant defeats of Nazi Germany took place on the Eastern Front, where opposing armless were equally ruthless in their methods. The war was not a simple game of goodies and baddies.

There is the fact that kamikaze pilots and the Japanese will to defend their homeland were, in the end, countered by history’s sole use of nuclear weapons. And there were the dubious deals that carved up countries and spheres of influence in the east after the war was over, basically betraying people like Poles and Czechs who had tried to resist Nazi aggression. And there were nasty things like the bombing of Dresden and the frying of non-combatants in the fire-bombing of Hamburg and Tokyo. At least one of the Allies (France) tried to reassert its mastery of a colonial empire once the war was over; while another (Britain) was also very reluctant to let its empire go. Hardly good publicity for the values of democracy, which the Allies were supposedly upholding.

Yet in spite of all this, we can still see the Second World War as a “good thing” – a war justified by the need to defeat things that were universally recognised as wrong. This, I believe, is its real trump card as the popular war that still dominates the History sections of libraries. You can make up all sorts of pacifist fables if you are dealing with the First World War, with its meat-grinder slaughter of soldiers for no purpose that is easily discernible from our point in history. But (despite the odd effort to do so), it is much harder to write pacifist fables about the Second World War because it still seems to most people that defeating Hitler was worth doing. Using the old “just war” morality, it was the most just of wars.

So it still defines what History is for browsers in libraries, as I found on a rainy day in Takapuna. The Second World War is the archetypal Good War.

CODA: A few weeks after this soggy day in sight of Rangitoto, one of my three teenage daughters decided she wanted to revive a family custom by having us all watch a movie together one Friday evening. I pointed to the living room’s untidy pile of DVDs and told her to choose one. She chose Noel Coward’s 1943 flag-waver about the Royal Navy, In Which We Serve. So the five of us sat down and watched it.

Sometimes the girls laughed at Noel Coward’s rapid-fire clipped delivery of lines. Sometimes the class stereotypes (frightfully proper middle class officer with country home and servants; cheerful, cheeky working-class sailors and their women) were too much for us. But as the movie progressed, I kept taking surreptitious looks to see how the girls were coping with it – and most times I saw nothing but absorption and delight in the domestic scenes of husbands and wives (Noel Coward and Celia Johnson; Bernard Miles and Joyce Carey; John Mills and Kay Walsh) and admiration in the naval scenes where the ship gets blown up and the men cling to a life-raft. We could easily pick the scenes that would have had British audiences weeping when the film was first shown – the Christmas dinner scene where Celia Johnson gives a speech on how sailors love their ships; the scene where John Mills breaks to Bernard Miles the news that his wife has been killed in an air raid. They still play well.

And then, just before the closing credits, laughter returned when the patriotic music blared and a commentary trumpeted the virtues of the Royal Navy for “our island race” over montages of ships and naval parades. The crudity of the appeal was too much for us, let alone our teenage daughters.

So what am I saying here? Of course we could see that it was wartime propaganda and play-acting. The cynic in me is aware that neither Noel Coward nor “Dickie” Mountbatten (upon whom Coward’s character in the film is based) were as interested in the opposite sex as they were in handsome young sailors. There are huge elements of falsity in the film, and it rigidly supports the class system with its capable upper crust officers and its lower class other ranks who badly need to be led.

Yet in spite of all this, we could still watch it with affection and some degree of admiration. After all, flaws and all, it was about people fighting in a good cause against something that had to be stopped.

You see, the sense of the Second World War as a justifiable war had invaded my living room, and coloured the way my family and I watched a wartime film.

Something New

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

“MATTERS OF THE HEART – A History of Interracial Marriage in New Zealand” by Angela Wanhalla (Auckland University Press, $NZ49:99)

            I recall that when I was a teenager, I was reading an American article on social problems and I came across a word I had never met before. The word was “miscegenation”. It sounded like an unpleasant disease. Curious, I looked it up, and I discovered that it merely meant marriage between people of different races. “Why should this be a problem?” I remember thinking; and then “Why have Americans invented such a nasty name for it?”

            I could turn this into a smug little image of how good race relations were in New Zealand in my teenage days. After all, a Pakeha kid like me didn’t think there was anything odd or wrong about people of different races marrying, and I hadn’t been brought up to think there was anything wrong with it. I sat in primary and secondary school classes with Pakeha kids, Maori kids, “Islanders”, and kids of various mixed parentages, including a bunch of Chinese-Maori kids.

            On the other hand, there’s a little shadow hanging over this idyll. I do recall some grown-ups (not of my family, I hasten to add) saying what a pity it was that Miss XYZ had gone and married a Maori. I also remember that, while we thought the term “half-breed” (as used in Western movies) was a bit crude, we didn’t think twice about using the term “half-caste”, which is now regarded as demeaning and patronising. To put it another way, while there was clearly no apartheid in New Zealand and no legal barriers to interracial marriage, there were pockets of prejudice and some thoughtless racist assumptions.

Angela Wanhalla’s Matters of the Heart sets out to tell the whole story of interracial marriage in New Zealand, from the earliest years of Pakeha settlement to the early 1970s, when the institution of marriage began to be challenged as the chief form of cohabitation by adults. The research for the book was made possible by a Marsden Grant and, according to the Acknowledgements, was mainly conducted in 2008-09. While “Affairs of the Heart” is the more common English-language idiom, I’m sure Wanhalla consciously avoided it in part because this is a book about marriage – not affairs! So Matters of the Heart it is.

Wanhalla’s preface argues that despite a common myth, interracial marriages have historically been as stable as any others. She previews some of the historical themes her book will develop. Unlike parts of the USA and elsewhere, interracial marriage was never illegal in New Zealand, but there were periods when it was seen at best as a way of taming and assimilating Maori to Pakeha norms, or even as a way of gaining control of Maori land. And there were indeed periods of social disapproval.

She then sets to work (Chapter 1) with a survey of interracial unions in the pre-colonisation period up to the end of the 1830s. This was the high tide of whalers and traders and “Pakeha-Maori” before the establishment of British authority. Wanhalla acknowledges the existence of a sex trade servicing sailors and transient Pakeha men, but says that even in the most disorderly times “temporary marriage” and formalised monogamy were the norm between Maori women and Pakeha men. In chronicling this, she is determined to defend the validity, sincerity and durability of most interracial unions at this time. She notes the variety of motives that led to such unions:

“Historians have debated the extent to which marriages forged between Maori and traders or whalers in the pre-1840 decades were simply strategic alliances, simple commercial transactions devoid of love or affection. There were many reasons why male newcomers welcomed marriages, with most couples coming together for a combination of love, comfort, politics and pragmatic need. While visiting northern settlements in the early 1830s, Edward Markham concluded that arrangements between interracial couples there were entered into for pragmatic reasons to secure the safety of men so they were ‘not robbed or molested’, in addition to offering domestic comfort and a cure for loneliness. Sentiment was also part of the equation, for Maori women sometimes made their own choices and would ‘suffer incredible persecution from the men they live with.’ ” (p.11)

A few pages later, she takes issue with the frequent interpretation that, should Pakeha men leave their Maori women spouses, it was always a case of callous abandonment:

            “Abandonment is a problematic interpretation because it does not leave much room for the possibility that women exercised choice when it came to ending a relationship, nor does it recognise the full array of marriage customs applied by Maori, which included managing marital breakdown.” (p.17)

When she turns to the period of early missionary influence (Chapter 2), Wanhalla depicts missionaries wishing to regularise interracial marriage by a Christian ceremony. This was part of their concern to “tame” whalers, traders and other possibly lawless Pakeha while at the same time “civilising” Maori women. There were controversies among missionaries over whether they should conduct weddings between Pakeha and unbaptised Maori. There was also anxiety over the need for missionaries themselves to be married, so they would not be tempted to seek irregular sexual comforts among Maori women. The Church Missionary Society (Anglican) and Wesleyan Missionary Society (Methodist) both had sexual scandals of their own (involving the likes of Thomas Kendall, William Yate, William White and William Colenso) and this made their mana suffer among Maori as exemplars of desirable morality. As Wanhalla notes:

“These transgressors of the sexual and moral codes of Christian marriage undermined missionary claims about the excesses of ‘renegade’ settlers in pre-1840 New Zealand, and challenged the ideal of the mission as a model of morality and sexual propriety. We must not forget that they transgressed Maori codes of conjugality and morality, too, and were subjected to Maori censure.” (p.42)

Moving into the mid-19^th century (Chapter 3) Wanhalla reiterates that while interracial marriage was never legally forbidden as in “anti-miscegenation” American legislation, there was the general context of a policy of racial “amalgamation”, which was pioneered by Wakefield’s New Zealand Company and gradually became New Zealand government policy, especially under George Grey. When a male Pakeha married a female Maori, property laws said that the title of any land owned by the Maori wife would pass automatically to the Pakeha husband. Thus the extension of Pakeha title would lead to the gradual opening for Pakeha settlement of Maori-owned areas of the country.

Marriage laws were gradually amended to invalidate customary Maori marriages; and even in the 1950s, welfare assistance to Maori was tied to marital status, which had to be according to a legally-registered minister, and therefore not according to Maori custom. Many 19^th century Pakeha males acquired land through marriage to Maori woman, but were anxious to secure the land claim by having the marriage witnessed European-style rather than according to Maori custom.

Oddly Chapter 3, while also touching on anxieties about the status of “half-caste” children, comes to concentrate more on issues of property related to interracial marriage than on interracial marriage itself. During one famous property dispute in Auckland in the 1850s, it was widely claimed that the government was encouraging the “concubinage’ of Maori women with Pakeha men rather than marriage. Wanhalla comments:

“Interracial relationships, as practised in the second half of the nineteenth century, were in fact far different from how they were popularly portrayed. Maori women were not widely taken up as the ‘concubines’ or ‘mistresses’ of colonists. Instead, in a context in which it was easier to get married, monogamous relationships forged within legal marriage were the norm.” (pp. 66-67)

The whole of the next chapter (Chapter 4, called “Wives or Mistresses?”) elaborates on this same theme. Between Maori and Pakeha, married monogamy was the norm. In the later nineteenth century, there was a widespread perception that interracial marriages belonged to the wilder pre- and early-settler period. There were a few high-profile cases of married Pakeha men keeping a “second family” with a Maori mistress. Wanhalla notes how exceptional these arrangements were, however, with reference to her research database. Taking case studies of 1100 interracial couples between 1840 and 1910, her sample reveals that 63% of them were married and 365 in common law or customary marriage, most of which were later regularised. The idea that many Pakeha men kept a Maori mistress proves to be a fiction. An additional matter is that colonial soldiers who married Maori women often left them behind when their regiment had to move on. Wanhalla does not interpret this as desertion or wilful callousness, but shows that Pakeha soldiers with Maori wives were often forced into this action because army regulations did not allow for women’s removal expenses to be covered when a regiment changed its base of operations.

The end of the 19^th century (Chapter 5) showed a more severe Pakeha attitude to interracial marriage when “assimilation” became the new catch-cry. Wanhalla does note the extent to which white men “used” interracial marriage to acquire title to Maori land, but adds:

“Only detailed research into whakapapa and kinship connections of interracial families and the cases pursued by them in the Native Land Court can help unravel the degree to which white men, or their mixed-race children, were complicit in the erosion of Maori land, or can confirm the extent to which they manipulated the court system in favour of their own Maori families.” (p.101)

She also cautions that it is all too easy to harp on idea that Maori were thus beguiled out of land:

“This kind of approach elides the agency and desires of Maori who may have sought some advantage from men who were well versed in the language and ritual of the land court system, as well as the practices of colonial administration and the culture of governance.” (p.101)

After the Taranaki and Waikato wars, interracial marriage was still officially encouraged, but it was seen as a means of assimilating Maori to European domestic norms:

“The point is that, despite a hardening of racial attitudes, interracial marriage was still welcomed by government officials, but it had to work in aid of cultural assimilation, involving men of good standing, education and respectability who could teach their children the English language and act as models of propriety.” (p.107)

Furthermore:

“For assimilation to have an effect, it needed a ‘half-caste’ population raised in orderly households, and inculcated in English language, values and culture. It was a problem, however, when the mixed-race population generally lived amongst Maori, and was well integrated into Maori culture and life.” (p.108)

There is another glaring fact about interracial marriage between 1840 and 1900. Judging from her sample of 1110 interracial unions, Wanhalla notes that only just over 6% were Pakeha women marrying Maori men. In some detail, she considers that white women who married Maori men were popularly seen in the press and in letter columns as either morally degraded or the victims of rape; and there were plenty of lurid newspaper stories to reinforce this view.

The end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th century (Chapter 6) were the high tide of “scientific” racism, heavily tinged with eugenics. In New Zealand, this took the form of an hysterical campaign against Chinese immigrants and there were strong prejudices against Asian-Maori marriages because Maori were seen as “Aryan”. Fear of such “miscegenation” came to a head in a government enquiry in the late 1920s, chaired by Sir Apirana Ngata. This shows the extent to which Maori too bought into this form of rationalised racism. It is possible that at this point Wanhalla could have made here more of the fact that, in a way, Maori were saved from the grosser forms of Pakeha racism by the fact that Pakeha had chosen to hate Asians more.

The final chapter , “Modern Marriage and Maori Urbanisation”, brings the story up to Wanhalla’s terminus ad quem. Given that this is the 1970s, it seems odd a mere twenty pages are given to interracial marriage in New Zealand from the 1930s to the 1970s. In some respects, this last chapter is the saddest of the book. It is clear that there was a major change in Maori social life and values after the Second World War with, first, the manpowering of Maori women into urban industry during the war, and then the huge urbanisation of Maori from the late 1940s on. In this period interracial marriage became more common than it had ever been. But Wanhalla’s account reveals – via advice columns, editorials and anecdotal evidence – huge pools of resistance to the idea that this was desirable. Many opinion-makers were still ready to say that Maori and Pakeha could not live compatibly together because of differences of culture.

As a general critique of Matters of the Heart, I would say that, despite the author’s clear personal engagement with the topic, interracial marriage is seen from the “outside” – that is, as a social phenomenon, with emphases on government policy with regard to interracial marriage, and popular prejudices and attitudes thereto. But this misses the inwardness of what every marriage is – the intimate relationship of a man and a woman with all its satisfactions, happinesses, tensions and stresses. I suppose I am saying that every marriage is in some way unique. But then perhaps to have a book which dealt with the real intimacies of interracial marriage in those terms, you would have to have access to more personal testimonies than actually exist. I should also note that, despite a few nods in other directions, interracial marriage in this books means almost exclusively marriage between Maori and Pakeha, so there’s nothing on those New Zealanders I know with mixed Dutch-Indian ancestry, or others who are Croat-Samoans.

I do not wish to end this review on such a negative note, however. Wanhalla’s scholarship is formidable (over 60 pages of endnotes, bibliography and index) and she writes clearly and with as little specialist jargon as possible. There is another very attractive thing about Matters of the Heart. It is one of the best-produced large-format paperbacks I have come across in some time. Margins for the text are generously wide, so that nothing is lost down the central chasm where the pages meet. It also has five generous sections of photographs, each image being given a long and very informative caption. One of the last is the wedding photograph of Wanhalla’s parents. She is of mixed Irish, Maori, German and Manx ancestry, and brings this perspective to her scholarship.