Something Old

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

                            THE FICTION OF MICHELLE DE KRETSER, PART ONE

 

            Some months ago, I suffered from one of my periodical literary crises of conscience. Much as I like writing the “Something Old” section of my blog, I wondered if I was leaning too much on books from long ago – not only “classics” from earlier centuries, but books written back in the mid-twentieth century. This had to do with my making myself read, for “Something Old”, books that had hitherto stayed unread on my shelves, many of them fairly old. So I got in touch with a good friend and asked him if he could name some living writers whose work he had read and admired and which might be worth my delving into.  But the treacherous fellow, instead of listing writers he had read, sent me instead a list of three writers he had heard were very good, but whom he hadn’t got around to reading. I went through the list, checking out the credentials of the three nominees, and decided that Michelle de Kretser looked the most interesting.

 

            To introduce you to the novelist if, like me, you knew next to nothing about her before reading her work. Michelle de Kretser was born in 1957 in Sri Lanka, when it was still widely known as Ceylon. Her mother was Sinhalese but her father was of “Burgher” descent, meaning some of his ancestors were early Dutch colonials, hence her Dutch surname de Kretser. Her family migrated to Australia in 1972 when Michelle was 14. She took a degree in French at the University of Melbourne. She went to Paris to study for a Masters degree but did not go into academia. Instead, she worked a number of years as an editor for the Lonely Planet travel guides. Only when she was 42, in 1999, did she produce her first novel The Rose Grower, which gained much attention. Since then she has written five more novels, one novella and a literary biography. Nearly all her novels have been awarded prestigious literary prizes in Australia and elsewhere – The Miles Franklin Award, the ASL Gold Medal, the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize etc. She is widely regarded as Australia’s pre-eminent living novelist and she has sometimes been described as a possible Man-Booker Prize winner – but so far she has made it only to the long list.

            Over three weeks I set about reading all her novels, but with one exception. As it happens, her debut novel The Rose Grower is the only one of her novels that is not available from the New Zealand Library service. Apart from knowing that it was widely applauded, all I know of this novel is that it was a kind of fantasy in which a (modern) American lands in revolutionary France. Sorry I can say no more about it. And now for my comments on the five de Kretser novels and one novella that I have read.

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Here is a question that might puzzle some readers. Why is The Hamilton Case (first published in 2003) called The Hamilton Case?  The very title suggests a cosy whodunnit of the Agatha Christie era, and of course this novel is no such thing. Yes, there is a crime when the tea-planter Angus Hamilton is murdered on a lonely jungle path and there is an investigation, trial and judgement. But the actual details of the murder and its outcome occupy at most 50 pages of a novel which runs to about 360 pages. Yet somehow this wretched case of murder has resonance and manages to be referred to, even years after it was thought to be resolved. Somehow it becomes crucial as a touchstone for attitudes of different races, classes and communities in a colonised country.

Hamilton is murdered in the 1930s when the island state, then a British colony, was still known as Ceylon, long before it became Sri-Lanka. Chief protagonist is Stanley Alban Marriott Obeysekere, known to his Ceylonese enemies as “Obey” because he is said to obey, follow too closely and fawn upon British colonial attitudes and laws. His personal initials S.A.M. also spell Sam, by which name he is also often known. Obeysekere narrates, in the first person, the first third of the novel, and we quickly understand what an unreliable narrator he is. He is boastful, self-justifying, a tell-tale sneak when he was a schoolboy, ambitious, toadying to British authority (he goes to Oxford and sends his son there), envious of other people’s success and always admiring British mores and law. Son of an Anglophile family, he becomes a lawyer and revels in being on the side of prosecution in criminal trials. He hopes to become a judge.  But is he really accepted by the British overlords? Probably not. Far from being a whodunnit, the novel really charts the fortunes of Obeysekere’s family as Ceylon goes through the 1930s, the war years, independence in 1948, and by 1956 a growing Sinhalese (Buddhist) majority nationalism at odds with the large Tamil (Hindu) minority. Indeed the dominant Sinhalese political party encourages Sinhalese supremacism.

In the third-person narrative of the rest of the novel, we are shown the disintegration of Obeysekere’s family – there are long and detailed accounts of his mother Maud, once the belle of the ball, now a desiccated and often deluded old woman; the tragedy that befalls his marriage; the deep background to his own childhood; the loss of one of his siblings when he was a boy; and much later the tragically unsuccessful marriage of his sister Claudia when she wed an old classmate of Obeysekere, Donald Jayasinghe, commonly known as Jaya.

On a certain level, this is a novel about de-colonisation in the real sense of that term, as Ceylon / Sri Lanka moves towards being a sovereign state. As it does so, the status of Anglophiles like Obeysekere is drastically lowered. Seen from this perspective, Obeysekere is something like the Prince in Giuseppe de Lampedusa’s The Leopard. The Sicilian aristocrat has to, ruefully, accept the fact that he has become an anachronism. Obeysekere is eventually in the same situation, his Anglophilia and Anglo-mores no longer being advantageous as paths to status and power. But this states the novel’s perspective too simply; for while Obeysekere represents a regime and a way of thought that are dying,  Michelle de Kretser is not so simplistic as to see de-colonisation as an unmixed blessing. It creates its own major problems. It is clear that Obeysekere’s one-time brother-in-law Donald Jayasinghe is a cynical opportunist. “Jaya” has never been a devoutly religious person, but when independence is looming, he suddenly starts wearing saffron Buddhist robes, professes to be a devoted Buddhist, and makes himself a political leader, giving rabble-rousing speeches about Sinhalese supremacism and generally stirring up contempt for the large Tamil minority. In other words, freedom from British rule opens an opportunity for racist demagogues. Amidst all his self-deception, Obeysekere might have a point when he longs for the old Ceylon where everyone was simply Ceylonese and – allowing for the many disadvantages of British overlordship – everyone was more-or-less on the same footing.

Incidentally, the novel’s brief coda reverts to first-person narration, but this time it is the voice of a Tamil once again giving an account the Hamilton case, and showing how judgements and rumours about that case influenced attitudes and shaped the directions in which the novel’s leading characters were pushed. [To enhance your own reading, if you choose to read The Hamilton Case, I have deliberately not gone into the specific details of the case.] In her Acknowledgements, Michelle de Kretser notes all the history books and memoirs that she used as references when writing this novel. Many of them touched upon the element of social caste, true stories of murder, and how the law worked under British rule. Surprisingly, she also references a long short-story by Somerset Maugham, Footprints in the Jungle, as an influence. Remember all those stories and plays (notably The Letter) which Maugham wrote about decadent and wilting British planters in Malaya? There’s at least a whiff of that in the fictitious Hamilton case, even if it’s not set in Malaya, and some specifics of the “Hamilton case” are indeed similar to Footprints in the Jungle. But de Kretser’s approach is very different from Maugham’s.

When all this is noted, however, I find that the real strength of The Hamilton Case is not the narrative thread but Michelle de Kretser’s powers of evocation. Her observation of specific details is precise in clothes and wealthy peoples’ houses and pastimes, and ageing and signals of petty snobbery and everyday markers of status and gradual changes in mores. We can smell, see, hear Ceylon / Sri Lanka with a vividness and immediacy that very few writers are capable of summoning. In short, to read this powerful novel is to live in another reality.

Silly Footnote: I am bemused that Michelle de Kretser named one of her minor characters Conrad Nagel. Surely she was aware that this was the name of a movie heart-throb in the late silent and early talkie era?

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First published in 2007, Michelle de Kretser’s next novel The Lost Dog begins with an epigraph from the notebooks of Henry James: “The whole of anything can never be told.” The Lost Dog is in large part a novel about a quest to uncover the whole of a number of mysteries. The leading character is constantly trying to fathom why certain things that have happened are discussed only in a cryptic or mystifying way. But in doing so, he has to interrogate all the things that have shaped his own life, from early childhood to the present. There are elements of suspense in this novel as we wait for answers to be given; but in the end, the “mystery” story is really a thread on which to hang the analysis of a person.

Tom Loxley is an academic in Melbourne, currently researching and writing a book about Henry James and his interest in ghosts or the uncanny. The novel is told in the third-person limited style, so we get only Tom’s perspective on things. Tom’s beloved dog has gone missing. Over ten days, Tom goes looking for the dog in the bush and wilderness outside Melbourne. Each chapter takes us through a new day in his search. But the narrative isn’t linear. In every chapter there are flashbacks, memories, and other things that happen during Tom’s dogged search. In a way, with its separate episodes in different time-frames, the novel is a sort of bricolage. Tom is searching as much for himself as he is searching for the dog – trying to work out how he has come to be the sort of person he now is. This means many thoughts about time and memory and how our recall of the past can be distorted. These are very Jamesian concerns, and the novel is peppered with allusions to Henry James. At one point Tom muses “It was the selective vision of hindsight, he reasoned, that set a figure in the carpet” (p.35) [all page references are to the 2009 Back Bay Press paperback edition of the novel] Elsewhere, he gives somebody a copy of The Turn of the Screw to read, and inevitably there are discussions on the novelist. Sometimes Tom reflects that we are burdened with memory and a sense of the past. Perhaps animals are luckier because they do not have the same sort of memory as we do: “Animals do not suffer as we do. They do not live in time, they are not nostalgic for the past, they do not imagine a better future, and so they lack an awareness of mortality. They might fear death when it is imminent, but they do not dread it as we do.” (p.68) While the lost dog in this novel is a physical reality, the dog is also a metaphor for the many things in our lives that are lost to the past.

And what of the past that Tom Loxley can recall? He is the son of ethnically-mixed parents. His father was a drunken ne’er-do-well Englishman who stayed in India after it gained its independence. His mother Iris is Indian, Catholic, and with some Portuguese ancestors. Tom and his family migrated to Australia in 1972 when he was fourteen. Tom is dark-skinned and recognisably Indian, which means he’s sometimes subject to abuse at school in Australia.  (Michelle de Kretser can credibly reconstruct the child Tom’s reactions to Australia as she had a similar background; she was the daughter of ethnically-mixed parents – Sinhalese and some Dutch ancestors – and he family migrated from Sri Lanka to Australia in 1972 when she was fourteen.) Tom’s mother Iris is still alive. He regularly visits her but she is old, feeble, forgetful and incontinent (there are grisly details of her physical decline and bowel problems). Tom can vaguely recall that she was once a fashionable belle. Tom is divorced, but his ex-wife Karen is still very much on his mind. Here are more accounts of what time has carried away. Then there is Tom’s self-doubt about being an academic and dealing with intellectual matters. His lack of confidence is most marked in the sequence where he is part of a committee deciding which candidate to hire as junior lecturer (see pp. 220-221). How has everything made him this man?

But the greatest mystery in his life surrounds the artist Nelly Zhang, who plays up her Chinese ethnicity even though she has more European than Chinese forebears. Tom, in his broken and unhappy way, is very much attracted to Nelly. At certain points she actually joins him in his search for the missing dog. But there are problems and mysteries surrounding Nelly. What happened, some years back, to her late husband Felix Atwell who disappeared without trace? Did he commit suicide or was he murdered? And what exactly is Nelly’s relationship to the (apparently very manipulative) art-dealer Posner, complicated by their treatment of Nelly’s son Rory. De Kretser does eventually give us (and Tom) a sort of resolution to these mysteries, but in a very Jamesian way, reminding us of that epigraph “The whole of anything can never be told.”   I will give no spoilers here, but I do note that, as in The Hamilton Case, much of the novel considers the repercussions of a crime, showing us the power of the past.

Many of de Kretser’s strengths as a writer are here. Her powers of description are outstanding, conjuring up the precise nature of the family’s earlier life and habitation in India or the bohemian milieu in which Nelly Zhang creates her art.  She is excellent in reading social trends and change in her close descriptions of physical things. Here she is showing how part of a city has become gentrified: “It was a neighbourhood on the way up. The butcher had taken to stocking free-range eggs. The doctors no longer bulk-billed. Wooden plantation blinds were replacing cutwork nylon in windows. Tibetan prayer flags fluttered across verandahs; neighbours fell out over parking for their four-wheel drives. Pubs that had featured topless waitresses now offered trivia nights and wood-fired pizza. It was easier to buy a latte than a litre of milk. The roomy weatherboard places on the big corner lots were coming down; town houses were going up. There were fewer lemon trees and more roof gardens….” (p.83)

De Kretser is concerned with the fact that, apart from Aborigines, all Australians are really immigrants, and there is an underlying guilt among European-Australians which they find difficult to acknowledge, especially as so many European-Australians resent more recent immigrants from Asian countries: “Buried deep in Australian memories was the knowledge that strangers had once sailed to these shores and destroyed what they found. How could that nightmare be remembered? How could it be unselfishly forgotten? A trauma that had never been laid to rest, it went on disturbing a nation’s dreams. In the rejection of the latest newcomers, Tom glimpsed the past convulsing like a faulty film. It was a confession coded as a denial. It was as if a fiend had paused in its ravaging to cover its face and howl.” (p.234)

Interestingly, though, de Kretser saves most of her ire not for out-and-out racists, but for liberals who only play at being tolerant or positive about non-European immigrants and their culture. Such people are usually patronising. Here are Tom’s thoughts on his ex-wife Karen: “Karen was the product of the usual liberal, middle-class upbringing that tolerated Asian Immigration while not expecting to encounter it at the altar. The prospect of union with Tom had satisfied both her need to rebel and her social conscience, the same erotic fusion she sought, years later, in adultery….” (p.102) In other words, marrying and bedding an Asian man is her way of showing the world that she is a good liberal… without really liking her husband. Elsewhere Tom ridicules his ex-wife’s approach to Hinduism: “Karen informed Tom that India was spiritual. From the great shrines at Madurai and Kanyakumari, she returned marigold-hung and exalted. At dinner parties in Australia she would speak of the extraordinary atmosphere of India’s sacred precincts. Tom desisted from comparisons with Lourdes, where the identical spectacle of ardent belief and flagrant commercialism had worked on his wife’s Protestant sensibilities as fingernails on a blackboard. The glaze of exoticism transformed superstitious nonsense into luminous grace. Karen’s good faith was manifest. Yet her insistence on the spirituality of India struck Tom as self-serving. It wafted her effortlessly over the misery of degraded lives, for the poorest Indian possessed such spiritual riches, after all.” (p.160) Claiming to admire a foreign religion is another marker of liberal chic. But there is a big – and I am sure deliberate – ambiguity about Tom’s comments on Karen. After all, he is hurt by losing Karen as a wife. Thinking of her in these negative terms may be his way of consoling himself. Unreliable narrator? Possibly.

Like most of de Krester’s novels, The Lost Dog requires close attention of the reader, especially in terms of shifting time frames in the narrative and in keeping track of which character is related to whom. In this respect, however, it is not as challenging as her later novel The Life to Come.

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If one were to judge by on-line comments, Questions of Travel (first published in 2012) is either Michelle de Kretser’s most esteemed novel or her most reviled novel. It is a very long novel and – to rush to judgement – I admit that I began reading it with delight only to gradually lose interest as it seemed to reiterate again and again points it had already made. Many of de Kretser’s works are built on flashbacks, flash-forwards and reminiscences and are anything but linear. Questions of Travel breaks the mould by being very linear. The narrative marches from the 1960s, when the two main characters are children, to 2012, when they are in middle-age. Alternative chapters deal with the one and then with the other.

Ravi is Sri Lankan. For him life is a struggle. Civil war is raging between Sinhalese and Tamils. There is much violence in the street. Ravi marries and has a child. Ravi has a degree in maths and learns about computer science. He daydreams about being recruited by Silicon Valley; but the best he gets is a university position as an assistant lecturer. He is bound by his family’s traditions, though he chafes at much that he is expected to do – and as in some of her other novels , Michelle de Kretser gives us very detailed accounts and descriptions of Sri Lankan customs and modes of living. There is the possibility that Ravi will get a scholarship that will take him overseas, but it never happens. He feels trapped. Then disaster strikes. Ravi’s wife Malini is an outspoken activist who makes public speeches condemning the violence of both Sinhalese and Tamil. She and her little son are murdered and hacked up into little pieces by persons unknown. It could be Sinhalese or Tamil terrorists. It could even be the police, who are known to condone and sometimes participate in terrorism. Ravi has to flee to somewhere safer, as he himself could be a target for murder. In a long and complex fashion (I won’t go into the details) Ravi gets a visa allowing him to stay in Australia for three months. He heads for Australia in the hope of declaring himself a refugee and seeking permanent asylum. If you think I have given away too much plot here, please note that this takes us only halfway through Ravi’s saga.

Meanwhile, alternate chapter by alternate chapter, we get the very different story of a very different person. Laura is Australian. For some reason, the author emphasises that Laura is plain – indeed ugly. Unsure what she will do with her life, Laura gets a windfall in the form of a legacy. So she does what all young people with uncertain prospects want to do. She goes travelling. She tours all over Europe and when funds run low she settles in England and takes up such jobs as waitressing. She also tries to consort with intellectuals – or at least with people who present themselves as intellectuals. But she wants to make a better living, so bit by bit she is able to insert herself as a freelancer for a travel magazine called The Wayfarer (Michelle de Kretser is obviously drawing here on her own years of writing travel articles for Lonely Planet). Gradually she becomes a regular staffer, which means more junkets to foreign countries to write slushy PR travel articles. For some years she settles in Naples and takes to idolising the Neapolitan way of live, no matter how impoverished the lives of common people are. But time is moving on and she begins, in her mid-thirties, to feel nostalgic for the country of her birth. She returns to Sydney.

The dichotomy built into this is clear. Ravi comes to Australia out of need – to save his life. Laura comes back to Australia because of nostalgia. One is a real traveller. The other is a tourist, and much of this novel is a critique of the whole phenomenon of tourism, hence the title (actually a quotation from a poem) Questions of Travel. So many tourists believe what is in the travel magazines and in glossy brochures. As a result they often, with their superficial gaze, ignore what a foreign country really is like.

The second half of the novel is set in Oz – the prolonged and uncertain attempts of Ravi and sympathisers to get him Australian citizenship as a refugee; Laura’s insertion into a publishing company; Ravi looking for work and sometimes having to lodge with unsympathetic people; Laura looking for love (but in the end finding only sex). And while Laura is on the writing side of things; and Ravi is on the IT side of things; the two of them happen to end up working for the same corporation. Don’t expect a neat “happy ending” – that is not de Kretser’s style. This novel is soaked in irony, and de Kretser hits some of her favourite targets – misogyny in the workplace (casual harassment of women); patronising people who claim to support refugees and people of other ethnicities – but only so they can score brownie points as good liberals; tourists who claim to be in search of “authentic” cultures, but who really still want the mod coms and Western comforts in all their travels; and of course the xenophobia that is apparently built into much Australian life. Some of the novel takes place during the “Tampa” incident and the whole raucous debate in Australia about welcoming or rejecting refugees.

Oddly enough, it is some of the minor characters who stay longest in the mind. There is Theo Newman, a German-Jewish “intellectual”, covertly gay, whom Laura befriends in London, claiming to be at work on a thesis but never finishing it and eventually succumbing to drink. He could be written off as a pseudo-intellectual until we are made aware of his traumatic backstory. There is the old Italian Carlo, whom Laura regularly visits, partly to keep alive her connection with Italian culture, even if the old guy punctures many of her romantic assumptions about Italy. There is a twittery and self-promoting woman with the outrageous name Tracy Lacey – it is almost as if de Kretser has plucked this character out of an early Evelyn Waugh novel. There is the Ethiopian woman Hana desperately trying to turn herself into an Australian. And there are the various men who pass through Laura’s life, none of them committing themselves to her. Is her superficial sex life an analogue for her superficial tourist view of the world?

To her great credit, de Kretser does not present Ravi as a mere “victim”. Despite his tragic situation, he is a complex character with a negative side – certainly he is an opportunist, and even before the horror that is visited on him, we hear him lamenting the fact that he has married and has a child, which he sees as a burden holding back his career. He is very critical of some of the people who are seeking to help him in Australia – but then we are made aware of the great, and sometimes unreasonable, hurdles that the Australian legal system sets up to thwart his hope of gaining refugee status.

And yet, to return to my original judgement, for all the novel’s astute observation, satire and tragedy, it does drag along in its later pages. We got all the points the author had to make long before she wrote Finis.

[PART TWO OF MICHELLE DE KRETSER’S FICTION WILL APPEAR IN THE NEXT POSTING]

 

Something Thoughtful

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

                   DO NOT GO FAKING INTO THAT LONG NIGHT

A few weeks ago I saw an editorial that gave me great heart. It confirmed something I have long believed, to wit, never use dishonest euphemisms when you can say, without offence, the honest and simple truth.  The editorial was a commonsensical “Up Front” piece published in the NZ Listener, 14 January this year. It was written by a woman who has worked in hospices and who knows about the stages of dying. Her argument was that it is much better, for the health of the bereaved, to say that somebody has died rather than to use sugared words. The bereaved will adjust more easily to their loss if they are able to confront as early as possible the fact of death.

There have always been poetic or sweetened ways if saying that someone has died. “Shuffled off this mortal coil”. “Gone west”. “Gone to a better place”. People who used such phrases often did so with the best of intentions and were doubtlessly attempting to give the bereaved comfort. But euphemism has, in recent years, got out of hand. The phrase “passed away” has long been used. But in just the last few years, it has been abridged to “passed”; and as often as the broadcast news tells us that some eminent has died, so often are we told that the same person has merely “passed”. Passed by what? Passed my front door? Passed the shop down the street? Passed water? Passed wind? It is a ludicrous way of referring to death. Eminent person XYZ has not “passed”. Eminent person XYZ has died.

None of this is a counsel of rudeness. There have always been as many crass and comical way of referring to death as there have been euphemisms. “Kicked the bucket”. “Pushing up daisies” etc. Most such jocular talk has a bravado tone to it, as if the speaker wants to prove that he-or-she is not afraid of death. To ask for avoidance of euphemisms is not an invitation to refer to bereavement in a crass and hurtful way. There may be some delicate people who require the soft euphemisms before they can accept the reality of death.

All this holds true whether you are a religious person or an agnostic or an atheist – whether you believe in an afterlife or whether you believe that death is complete finality for any human being. Get used to saying she died, he died, they died. It is the reality, whatever outlook you have.

FOOTNOTE: After writing and then posting this very brief reflection, I noticed in the following issue of the Listener that a number of letters-to-the-editor fully endorsed the "Up Front" editorial. Very good to see sanity being expressed.

 

Something New

 NOTICE TO READERS - AS ALWAYS, "REID'S READER" TAKES A SUMMER BREAK OVER DECEMBER AND JANUARY.  "REID'S READER" WILL RESUME IN FEBRUARY.

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

“RODERICK FINLAYSON – a Man from Another World” by Roger Hickin (Cold Hub Press, $NZ43); “TINY UNCERTAIN MIRACLES” by Michelle Johnston (Harper-Collins, $NZ38)

            Whenever I think of Roderick Finlayson (1904 -1992) , I think of that cynical aphorism “No good deed goes unpunished.” As I noted when reviewing Roger Hickin’s selection of Finlayson’s writings A Roderick Finlayson Reader, from the 1930s to the 1950s, Finlayson was virtually the only Pakeha who wrote sympathetically about Maori, shared the Maori way of life, did not caricature Maori, and protested regularly about the expropriation of Maori land. But as the years passed, and as Maori writers emerged, Finlayson began to be condemned as a Pakeha who shouldn’t write about Maori matters and who reported Maori speech inaccurately.

In his preface to this biography Roderick Finlayson – a Man from Another World, Roger Hickin addresses these matters directly: “While nowadays some may look upon Finlayson’s Maori stories as a form of cultural appropriation – a Pakeha presuming to write about colonised Maori as simply another manifestation of colonialism – the fact remains that most were written out of his own experience of rural Maori life several decades before Maori took up fiction-writing, and without them we (Maori included) would have a less complete and less vivid picture of Maoridom between the two world wars..” He continues: “As this is not a critical biography, still less a post-colonial assessment, I leave it to others to judge him according to post-colonial prescription. My aim has been to present Finlayson ‘in his time’. ”

            Roderick Finlayson – a Man from Another World draws very heavily on Finlayson’s own unpublished autobiographies and letters from friends and fellow writers such as Frank Sargeson, D’Arcy Cresswell, O. E. Middleton, R. A. K. Mason and others -  though as often has not Finlayson’s half of each correspondence was lost or destroyed by the recipient. Roger Hickin also quotes generously from Finlayson’s essays and fictions.

            Young Finlayson was raised in (then) working-class Ponsonby in a house of women – his mother, his grandmother and an aunt. When Roderick was a tot, his father had scarpered off to America and never returned. His mother got a divorce. The boy went first to a bad elementary school, then to Seddon Tech where, surprisingly, he liked military drill but mentally sided with the Irish in their wars of independence against England. This was at a time when virtually no Maori lived in cities. But when Finlayson was a teenager, his uncle and aunt introduced him to the Bay of Plenty, and very soon he was informally “adopted” into the family of Honi Ngawhika, of the Arawa people, and lived at Pukehina. His visits were frequent and often long. Honi Ngawhika told him “Roddy, I don’t know how it is, but I know you are not a Pakeha, Roddy. You are a Maori.” (p.29) The Depression fortified Finlayson’s respect for Maori ways of life. He began to write newspaper articles on Maori life, and in an unpublished thesis wrote “I saw a generation of the Pakeha devoured by the monster of his own making. In country and in cities hundreds, thousands, suffered defeat, ruin, abject poverty in ‘the great slump’. The Maori people, already used to poverty, lived off their communal lands and the coastal seas as they always had. Their world proved to be more enduring. As the Pakeha’s superiority waned the vitality of the Maori began to spring.” (p.31)

Was this a simplistic view? Hickin doesn’t argue the case, but it is clear that Finlayson’s long sojourns with Maori shaped his writing for the rest of his life. It is also possible that, in his twenties, Finlayson fell in love with a young Maori woman and probably hoped to marry her; but such a marriage never happened, either because the woman in question was promised elsewhere or because Finlayson’s mother would have disapproved of a “mixed” marriage. He seems to have suffered from regret over this for years.

After dropping his plans to become an architect, and after visiting Rarotonga a couple of times, Finlayson married Ruth Taylor in 1936. They were to stay married until Finlayson’s death in 1992, and were to have six children, but not without some ruptures in their relationship. And in 1937, they moved to a humble house in Weymouth, on the north side of Manukau Harbour, and lived a semi-rural life, often (at least in their early years) feeding themselves on fish and shellfish gathered from the as-yet-unpolluted harbour. And Finlayson set about writing in earnest. He also connected more frequently with Auckland’s small literary fraternity, particularly taking advice from Sargeson and Cresswell, whose criticism he took seriously as he was weened away from writing in the abstract and pointed in the direction of material reality in his stories.

Roger Hickin accounts for all Finlayson’s work, charting the genesis of each of his short-story collections and his novels (which were mainly loose and episodic in structure and could easily be read as short-stories connected). These included his first two short-story collections Brown Man’s Burden (1938), Sweet Beulah Land (1942) and the “novel” The Schooner Came to Atia (1952) – all published by Ron and Kay Holloway’s Griffin Press -  as well as the “novel” Tidal Creek, published in Australia in 1948. Finlayson was aware that some of his writing might have had succes d’estime with discerning critics, but it was not widely known. “At times Rod felt his isolation at Weymouth aggravated his lack of readership”. (p.108). He had had a nervous breakdown in 1946 when his mother died and by the mid-1950s he had a full family to provide for. For some years he made a modest income writing for the school bulletins and by the later 1950s, to make ends meet, he took a job at a municipal government printing press in central Auckland. Later he made a modest amount by writing a commissioned book about D’Arcy Cresswell for the Twayne author series.

One of the most puzzling chapters in this biography is Chapter 8, which gives an account of Finlayson’s conversion to Catholicism. The family into which he was born was (more-or-less) Presbyterian, as befits one whose ancestors were mostly Scots. The person he most consulted about taking this step was the more performative, and less modest, convert James K. Baxter, 22 years Finlayson’s junior. The puzzle is that Baxter eventually disposed of the letters Finlayson had written to him, so we have only the letters that Baxter wrote back, filled with angels and visions. Finlayson’s own thoughts about converting remain obscure. This reader also wonders how much Finlayson might have been encouraged by Ron and Kay Holloway, so often his publishers, who were also converts to Catholicism. There is another matter that Hickin broaches. He says that Finlayson, like Baxter, had “some difficulty separating agape and eros when binding the wounds of young female travellers” (p.144). Baxter’s sexual affairs are now well known. There is no evidence that Finlayson ever transgressed his marriage vows, but he appears to have been strongly attracted to one younger woman to the point of enraging his wife Ruth. She remained upset about this for many years. Connected with all this, as Roger Hickin points out, is the fact that in some of his later writings – and especially in his short-story collection Other Lovers (1976) – Finlayson dwelt on the erotic attraction of men to women.

Finlayson continued to the last to be an advocate for Maori. He supported the protests against the New Zealand Rugby Union for inviting an apartheid South African team to New Zealand in 1982. Frequently, and especially in the Catholic press, he chastised priests who did not embrace fully the papal encyclicals that advocated social justice. He and his wife did also often take in waifs and stays who seem to have lost their way or were in straitened circumstances.  But criticism of his work grew. In the late 1950s, the critic E. H. McCormack suggested that Finlayson’s accounts of Maori life “at times betrayed the author into a condescending attitude that was far removed from his intentions” (p.190). By the 1970s, Maori writers like Patricia Grace were levelling the same sort of criticism, focussing especially on what they saw as a distorted version of rural Maori speech as reported in Finlayson’ stories.

Yet, to the end, nobody criticised Finlayson as a man. His sincerity, dedication to his vision and charity were well-known. [Not referenced by Roger Hickin, it’s interesting to note that Kevin Ireland, in his 2022 poetry collection Just Like That, has a poem about attending Finlayson’s funeral in 1992 and declaring that nobody deserved more to be in heaven than Roderick.]

If I had one small criticism, it would be that this biography is very sparing in talking about Finlayson’s family. (For the record, only one of his six children followed him into Catholicism.) Any negative feelings I have about Finlayson have to do with Finlayson himself, and not with this book. Like many charitable and idealistic people, he could be naïve – as when he refused to believe that his good friend Frank Sargeson was also a procurer of [then illegal] abortions. While D’Arcy Cresswell helped him to get going as a writer, many of Cresswell’s ideas and theories were so poorly conceived that it is odd Finlayson took them so seriously. And, when it came to his own polemics, Finlayson could too easily preach a vague and untenable Utopianism. This is especially true of his 1940 pamphlet Our Life in This Land. But all this is just me nit-picking at Finlayson’s weaknesses.

Hickin has produced an admirable biography that brings us to the heart of what Finlayson was about. Well-illustrated and well-proportioned, it does the man proud. An essential New Zealand text.

  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *. *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *. 

 In essence, the Australian author Michelle Johnston’s novel Tiny Uncertain Miracles is a book about hope in the face of despair.

Marick is divorced from his wife Diane and separated from his daughter Claudia as his ex-wife has custody of the girl. When his marriage broke up, he had a sort of crisis of faith. He left his job to take a degree in theology, desperately trying to find meaning in his life. But he remains a broken man, still uncertain of his faith and doubting God. “When he attempted prayer in the inked hours, his words were little more than argument.” (p.15) Worse, he is depressed and lonely. “His phone book was empty. His meals were eaten alone. It had taken the divorce to admit he had no friends of his own.” (p.22) Largely because nobody else will take the job, Marick accepts the post of chaplain in a large hospital. His job is to comfort the sick, the dying and the bereaved, even though his heart is not fully in the job. Officially Anglican, yet really half-way towards being agnostic, Marick is not ordained, but patients still assume he is a priest and routinely call him “Father”.

All this may seem bleak, yet Michelle Johnston injects a certain buoyancy in her prose. Despite everything, Marick is a perceptive man and the balance of faith and scepticism makes him very observant as he questions everything. His humour may be sour, but it is humour nevertheless. And there is much for him to question – for down in the basement of the hospital works Hugo, a microbiologist who is secretly conducting experiments on bacteria. He believes the bacteria he is treating are generating gold. Pure metallic gold. When he invites Marick to look through his microscope, Marick is sure he sees gold too. So do some eminent academics in the institution where Hugo once worked. Is this charlatanry and bogus alchemy? Or is this a miracle?

Like me, you might at once think that this conjuration of gold is one of the “tiny uncertain miracles” of the title, and certainly Marick’s involvement with Hugo’s experiment is one of the main threads of plot. But Michelle Johnston is much more subtle than that. We may eventually get an explanation of Hugo’s work (I don’t give any spoilers here), but as the story progresses, we understand that the real “tiny uncertain miracles” are Marick’s interactions with other people that bring him back to life. Friendship, understanding , the need he has for others and the need others have for him bring him bit my bit back to a qualified happiness. It might be his casual joking relationship with the hospital’s cheery front-of-house woman Dolly. It may be his insight into other people’s flawed marriage when he befriends and dines with Hugo and his wife Vivian – and sees the strife that often occurs between them. It may be his search for renewed love. It may even be his awareness that, despite his doubts, his prayers with the sick, dying and bereaved are actually doing them some good. His life is neither useless nor pointless.

Does this sound simplistic and Pollyanna-ish? I hope not. It takes a long time for Marick to reach his reawakening. Michelle Johnston structures her novel in alternating chapters, where we get Marick’s “present” life in one chapter and flashbacks to Marick’s disintegrating marriage in the next. Marick’s problems with his wife Diane are both credible and wrenching and the novel’s final optimism is earned only after much real strife. While the novel’s denouement is positive, it is hard-won.

The blurb tells me that Michelle Johnston, as well as being a novelist, is an emergency physician and a Staff Specialist at the Royal Perth Hospital Emergency Department. Her vivid account of how a hospital works, the daily crises the emergency staff have to face, the trauma that has to be dealt with, the unexpected and extreme cases, the black humour doctors sometimes adopt to buoy themselves up - all this can only have been gleaned from the author’s own experience. It’s very believable.

Something Old

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

“THE LEOPARD” by Giuseppe di Lampedusa (Il Gattopardo first published in 1958; Archibald Colquhoun’s English translation first published in 1960; translation revised in 1961) 

Some authors are known for a single renowned book and the renown comes only after the author is dead. Think Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes. Think John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacyof Dunces. (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights are also one-hit wonders, but both those two authors produced much more than a single novel.) One of the most extraordinary examples of the single novel that makes the author posthumously famous is Il Gattopardo – The Leopard. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957) was a minor Sicilian aristocrat, officially Prince of Lampedusa, who turned out to be the last of his line as he had no heirs. He had a very eventful life, but he was always influenced by tales of his family’s ancestral past. He was aware that his ancestors once had power and high status, but he was also aware that the family had, over the generations, lost much of that power and status as regional aristocracy became less important in a unified (and ultimately republican) Italy. Prince Fabrizio Corbera, the main character of The Leopard, is clearly based on di Lampedusa’s great-grandfather. Di Lampedusa spent many years conceiving and planning this novel before he wrote it. Only after his death was it accepted by a publisher. 

Is the novel written as an elegy for a lost way of life? Or is it proving that change is inevitable? Readers have to make up their own minds as it can be interpreted either way. However it is read, The Leopard is definitely neither sentimental not nostalgic. The period it covers is presented with minutely observed realism.

The Leopard is structured in eight long chapters. The bulk of the narrative takes place in the years from 1860 to 1862. The Risorgimento is in progress - the unification of Italy as the Savoy House in Piedmont (officially the “Kingdom of Sardinia” ) and its king Victor Emmanuel proceed to take over other kingdoms and duchies by force. This means war on the Bourbon kings who rule Naples and Sicily (officially the “Kingdom of the Two Sicilies”). But the Risorgimento also involves Garibaldi, who ultimately wants Italy to be a republic but, for the time being, is willing to support unification under a Piedmontese monarchy.

Prince Fabrizio Corbera owns a large estate in Sicily, with many towns and many tenants under his control. Early in the novel, his character is set out clearly. He has “an authoritarian temperament, a certain rigidity of morals, and a propensity for abstract ideas; these, in the relaxing atmosphere of Palermo society, had changed respectively into capricious arrogance, recurring moral scruples and contempt for his own relatives and friends, all of whom seemed to him mere driftwood in the languid meandering stream of Sicilian pragmatism.”… “poor Prince Fabrizio lived in perpetual discontent under his Jove-like frown, watching the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance without ever making, still less wanting to make, any move towards saving it.”  (Chapter 1)

Essentially he is a paternal landlord, looking after his tenants in the traditional way, but often escaping from work by dabbling in astronomy, which takes him far from the madding crowd and also gives him a sense of eternity and the rightful order of things. Of course he observes diligently Catholic rites, leading the family in the Rosary every day, regularly attending mass and keeping a Jesuit priest, Father Perrone, as the family’s chaplain. Not that this stops him from visiting the local brothel, which he does in the opening chapter to the wails of his wife Stella. He remembers fondly many affairs, but, now in his mid-fifties, he’s getting a bit too old for dalliances… and anyway, he knows Father Perrone will give him absolution for his sins. If this leads readers to think that Prince Fabrizio’s religious beliefs are a charade, they would be wrong. His religion is an essential part of who he is. It’s also worth understanding that while the priest Father Perrone is a sort of domestic servant, he is no fool and is capable of making pungent comments on the way Sicily is changing.

As well as having three young and almost marriageable daughters, the eldest being Concetta, Prince Fabrizio also has a son and presumptive heir, Francesco Paolo. But the Prince regards his son as a ninny and a booby, neither tactful nor capable of running an estate. He much prefers his swashbuckling, lively and witty nephew Tancredi. Tancredi joins the Garibaldini, even wearing their red shirt and proclaiming republican views. But once the fighting is over, and once the Bourbons have been driven from Sicily, Tancredi deftly changes colours, joins the Piedmontese army, and advises Prince Fabrizio on how the aristocracy will be able to hang on to their privileges under a new regime. His pragmatic advice to the Prince is “Unless we ourselves take a hand now, they’ll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” (Chapter 1) [The latter sentence is apparently the most widely-quoted phrase from the novel).

But how can things change?

Tancredi knows, and Prince Fabrizio knows, that to survive with some status they will have to collaborate with the bourgeoisie. The aristocracy may own much land, but they are not making as much money as the more successful middle-classes. How can Fabrizio repair his fortune? The answer is – get a member of the family to marry the daughter and heir of a wealthy middle-class entrepreneur. At first Tancredi appears to be in love with Fabrizio’s daughter Concetta. But his roving eye soon settles on the wondrously beautiful Angelina, daughter of the plutocrat Don Calogero. Tancredi, like most aristocrats, has no money. Angelina’s father is rolling in money. It’s a match made in heaven… so the central “plot” of The Leopard concerns the manoeuvres of the decaying aristocrat to get a relative married into immense wealth.

Thus it is settled even if, in his pride, Fabrizio still resents having to collaborate with a lower class. As he seals the deal with Don Calogero, and it is arranged that Angelina will enrich Tancredi with a huge dowry, Prince Fabrizio has to shake Don Calogero’s hand. We are told how he really thinks about it: “Don Fabrizio was overcome with sincere emotion; the toad had been swallowed; the chewed head and gizzards were going down his throat; he still had to crunch up the claws, but that was nothing compared to the rest; the worst was over.” (Chapter 3) It is only much later in the novel (Chapter Six) that Fabrizio becomes fully reconciled to the deal when an elaborate ball is staged to honour Tancredi and Angelina and, for the first time, Fabrizio begins to reflect that he is ageing, his time is passing, and the world has moved on… even if he is still capable of dancing gracefully with Angelina to the admiration of a watching crowd.

This deal, this melding of the social classes in the new order of things, may be the core of the novel, but The Leopard has many other things to say. Regarding the Risorgimento, Giuseppe di Lampedusa is well enough versed in history to know how contradictory the process of unification was. The promise of liberty and democracy came with conditions. It is clear that the plebiscite, in which Sicilians were asked if they accepted the new (Piedmontese) monarchy, was a rigged plebiscite. There is a scene (Chapter Three) where Don Fabrizio goes on a hunting ramble with the church organist Don Ciccio, who is angry that his “No” vote hasn’t even been recorded. The local polling stations have declared that the “Yes” vote was unanimous. Later (Chapter Six) Fabrizio converses with an army officer who joined the new Piedmontese forces, and fought against Garibaldi in his ill-timed attempt to invade the Papal States. The officer admires Garibaldi, but sees Garibaldi’s followers as a fanatical rabble. So much for the universal brotherly love that supposedly inspired the Risorgimento in the first place. There are clearly contending factions.

Under-riding Fabrizio’s thought is an awareness that, though it may now be part of a united Italy, Sicily has a unique culture and history. He often thinks of the many civilizations (Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Normans etc.) that have at different times ruled Sicily. He also thinks of the island’s unique climate. In reading the novel, we are always aware of both the squalor and the heat of Sicily. This is sounded very early and emphasised often. Consider the sheer heat of Sicily, as in “The sun, still far from the blazing zenith on that morning… was showing itself the true ruler of Sicily; the crude, brash sun, the drugging sun, which annulled every will, kept all things in servile immobility, cradled in violence and arbitrary dreams.” (Chapter One)

It is Father Pirrone who expresses the view that history simply repeats itself, a bit like the ancient invasions that the Prince considers. When speaking to the poor peasant herbalist Don Pietrino, Father Pirrone remarks shrewdly on the existing ruling class, and notes “…if, as has often happened before, this class were to vanish, an equivalent one would be formed straight away with the same qualities and the same defects; it might not be based on blood [ i.e. inherited privilege] any more, but possibly on, say, length of time in a place, or pretended knowledge of some text presumed sacred.” (Chapter Five) These are the words of a priest who knows something about human nature and behaviour.

As for Prince Fabrizio’s own status, he knows that, even if he has sworn loyalty to the new regime, he is not wholeheartedly part of it. When rejecting an offer to become a senator in the new parliament of the united Italy, held far away in northern Turin, the Prince says “I cannot accept. I am a member of the old ruling class, inevitably compromised with the Bourbon regime, and bound to it by chains of decency if not of affection. I belong to an unlucky generation, swung between the old world and the new, and I find myself ill at ease in both. And what is more, as you must have realised by now, I am without illusions; what would the Senate do with me, an inexperienced legislator who lacks the faculty of self-deception, essential requisite for anyone wanting to guide others? We of our generation must draw aside and watch the capers and somersaults of the young around this ornate catafalque.”   (Chapter Four)

It is in the last two chapters that the novel leaps forward from the 1860s and the era of Risorgimento. In Chapter Seven, set in 1883, the Prince dies at the age of 73, knowing that the world has changed, a little regretful but aware that, where the welfare of his family was concerned, he did the best he could. To emphasise how the aristocracy has fallen on harder times, Chapter Eight, set in 1910, is appropriately called “Relics”. Prince Fabrizio’s three daughters, now in their sixties, are all still unmarried. The eldest of the three, Concetta, still, after all these years, holds a grudge because Tancredi passed her over for Angelica… and yet Concetta welcomes into her home the aged Angelica, now hobbling with varicose veins. The three sisters are devout and have a chapel in their home, filled with relics. But even the church has moved on and is now more wary of the manufacture of fake relics. A church archivist comes to inspect the sisters’ relics, and quickly concludes they are mostly fakes. The fake relics are thrown out with the rubbish… perhaps like the old aristocracy. And the novel ends.

So does history move on? (More-or-less Fabrizio’s eventual – if guarded - view.) Or is history un eternal retour? (More-or-less Father Pirrone’s view.) You can take it either way. My battered old Fontana paperback of the novel carries as blurb the declarations of a number of British writers that The Leopard is a masterpiece – E. M.  Forster, L.P. Hartley, Evelyn Waugh, William Golding. Surprisingly, too, the French Marxist Louis Aragon calls The Leopard “one of the greatest novels of all time”. Could it be that the Marxist saw di Lampedusa’s novel solely in terms of class struggle as the bourgeoisie usurps the role of the aristocracy? If so, then Monsieur Aragon missed much of what the novel is about. The Leopard is just as much concerned with the sensuality of people and things. There are so many memorable vignettes – Prince Fabrizio’s remembered visit to the shabby and decaying court of the Bourbon king in Naples (Chapter One); the long rambles that the betrothed Tancredi and Angelina take in the decaying and abandoned rooms of one of Prince Fabrizio’s mansions, as if the lovers are seeking in their discoveries their own bodies (Chapter Four); the elaborate description of the ball that is staged for Tancredi and Angelina (Chapter Six); the feel of the run-down town which the Prince visits so often. We absorb a whole culture, and di Lampedusa’s detailed descriptions are never padding.

Di Lampedusa also shows an awareness that he is addressing a modern (mid-20^th century) readership. He frequently inserts “flash-forwards”. Halfway through novel he forewarns us that the marriage of Tancredi and Angelica will not always be calm: “Those days were the preparation for a marriage which even erotically, was no success; a preparation, however, in the way sufficient to itself, exquisite and brief; like those overtures which outlive the forgotten operas they belong to and hint in delicate and veiled gaiety at all the arias which later in the opera are to be developed undeftly, and fail.” (Chapter 4) He nudges the modern reader, at one point describing a neat social manoeuvre of Angelina’s as “a highly successful line, comparable in its perfect timing to Eisenstein’s business with the pram” (Chapter 4). In describing a chamber of a stately home he writes, “From the ceiling the gods, reclining on gilded couches, gazed down smiling and inexorable as the summer day. They thought themselves eternal; but a bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh, Penn., was to prove the contrary in 1943.” (Chapter Six) The horrors of history.

One crowning achievement. Giuseppe di Lampedusa writes what amounts to a family saga, but, elaborate descriptions and all, he is not tempted to produce a fat, multi-page doorstopper, as other chroniclers of family fortunes have done. The Leopard says so much, but clocks in at a modest 220 pages. Bravissimo.

Pedantic footnote: In case you were wondering, the novel’s title Il Gattopardo – The Leopard -  refers to the crest of Don Fabrizio’s family. However all sources point out that the Italian word gattopardo does not really mean leopard. It refers to a much smaller African wild cat, the serval, which is something like a lynx.

Damned Silly Footnote: I first read The Leopard when I was a teenager, clearly missing much of what the book was about. For some reason, years later (and before I recently re-read the novel) all I remembered was a scene in which the Prince receives a letter from young Tancredi. The Prince admires the cunning way Tancredi presents it in such a form that one upsetting part can be witheld from the rest of the Prince’s family. The upsetting part of the letter “was written out exactly on one sheet of paper so that if he [the Prince] wanted he could let others read the letter while subtracting this revolutionary chapter” (Chapter 3). Now why on Earth should this little detail have stuck in my mind? Funny what one does or does not remember from a book years later.

Inevitable Film Footnote: Yes, Luchino Visconti (the same director who made Death in Venice) did make a stately and beautiful film version of The Leopard in 1963. Visconti was himself of aristocratic stock and he was aware of the declining status of aristocracy. For this reason, as he once explained, he preferred to make films about things that were coming to an end. Thus his The Leopard (decline of aristocracy), The Damned (destruction of German industrialist family as Nazis take over), Death in Venice (bye-bye Aschenbach) and Ludwig (decline of obsessed and somewhat mad Bavarian king). Wisely, the film had only a few Risorgimento battle scenes (they are, after all, mainly “noises off” in the novel) but it also missed out the coda of the family in later years. The film ends with the Prince walking away wistfully from the ball that is honouring young Tancredi and Angelica. There is no death scene. 

The film was very long (over three-and-a-half hours) and was originally released in English-speaking countries in a dubbed and severely cut-down version, which rendered much of it incomprehensible. Mercifully, a restored version of the whole film, with original soundtrack, was released in the 1980s, where at last I got to see it in a film festival. I balked somewhat at having Burt Lancaster cast as the Prince (dubbed into Italian) and I thought French heart-throb Alain Delon wasn’t really my idea of resourceful Italian Tancredi. But of course I was completely smitten by the film’s Angelina because she was played by Claudia Cardinale, for whom I have had a severe crush since I was a teenager. (She’s the epitome of Italian beauty, dammit.)

One trivial anecdote. I took to the screening of the restored film an elderly woman who was a devoted Italophile. At one point in the film, the audience (including me) burst out laughing in a serious scene. “Why?”, the elderly woman asked me. I had to explain, after the show, that the audience were laughing at the sudden appearance, in a bit part, of the blue-eyed, curly-fair-headed Italian actor Mario Girotti, who was better known under the adopted name “Terence Hill” and who appeared in a series of knockabout farcical westerns along with his buddy Carlo Pedesole, who called himself “Bud Spencer”. When I was a film reviewer in the 1970s and 1980s, a “Terence Hill” movie would turn up on the film circuit just about every school holidays. It was just the complete incongruity of his popping up in a film like The Leopard that set the audience off.