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 NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL” by G.K.Chesterton (first published 1904) and “THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY” by G.K.Chesterton (first published 1908)

Here is the proof that you can read some books as a child without the faintest inkling of what they’re really about.

I must have been thirteen or fourteen years old when I first read G.K.Chesterton’s two fantasies The Napoleon of Notting Hill and The Man Who Was Thursday, both of them written in the first decade of the twentieth century. As a child, I understood the basic plot of each well enough. But I completely missed the tone in which they were written. Hence, when I re-read them both about three years ago, I realized that I had completely missed the point of each.

Consider the first one. The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) is set eighty years in the future – that is, in 1984. England now has an elective and bureaucratic monarchy, and war has been abolished. The population is dull, colourless and apathetic. If bright colours are seen on the street they cause a stir.

The paradoxical humourist Auberon Quin is made king. He is a dwarf of a man physically, but he has grandiose dreams and longs for colour and pageantry. He decrees that all the boroughs and suburbs of London must become independent city-states, with their own city walls, livery etc. Medieval pageantry and display will be revived. Most of the affected bureaucrats do not take this seriously and see it as mere mummery. But the idea is adopted enthusiastically by Adam Wayne, the Provost of Notting Hill, who, strutting about with sword and shield, takes local patriotism very seriously indeed. When a street in Notting Hill is threatened with commercial development, Wayne goes to war with the neighbouring borough – and wins! He does this through such strategies as obtaining a cavalry by commandeering all the hansom-cab horses; switching off all the gas-mains so that their enemies are left floundering about in the darkness when all the street lamps go out; and finally by threatening to drown the invading army by opening the valves on the water tank that overlooks the borough.

Notting Hill acquires its own little urban empire.

But twenty years later, Wayne’s Notting Hill empire is overthrown. The novel ends with a conversation between Auberon Quin and Adam Wayne. It was a joke by Auberon Quin that triggered the revival of little city-states within London in the first place. It was the fanatic romantic Adam Wayne who put the joke into practice. The moral of the story, such as it is, appears to be that a romantic imagination is necessary for anything creative to happen; but that romanticism needs to be tempered by humour if it isn’t to become fanaticism. Wayne saw the pageantry and romance of old warfare. Quin saw the joke. They represent two complementary types of humanity, or two necessary sides of the healthy psyche.

When I read this as a child, inasmuch as I understood it at all, I read it as a straight adventure story. I was seriously worried at how inaccurate Chesterton’s 1904 vision of the future was (hansom cabs? gas lighting?). My puzzlement was increased by the woodcut illustrations in the early hardback edition I was reading, which showed people in a mixture of Victorian costumes (top hats etc.) and medieval robes. What sort of world was this author seriously envisaging?

Now I can read it only as a series of jokes – a long whimsy on favourite Chestertonian themes. Chesterton is essentially reminding us that the old city-states (of Greece or Renaissance Italy) were about the same size as a modern city borough. He is imagining how “local patriotism” could be revived in a world in which people are alienated by the sheer size of cities. I thought of Chesterton’s concept recently while reading and reviewing Danyl McLauchlan’s Wellington fantasy novel Unspeakable Secrets of the Aro Valley – in which a small locality becomes a whole world [look it up on the index at right].

Again, Chesterton is telling us that mundane cityscapes can be transformed by imagination. There are scenes where Adam Wayne walks into a grocer’s shop and senses all the exotic commerce that has produced humble and mundane household articles. There is another where he enters a chemist’s shop and feels all the dreams that the drugs kept there can produce. But untrammelled imagination can be dangerous. From the perspective of a century later, there is something vaguely repugnant in the novel’s implicit glorification of chivalrous warfare: it seems more an evasion of the realities of modern warfare (even as they existed in 1904) than anything else. The characters are walking personifications of Chesterton’s ideas, and therefore rather bloodless. But The Napoleon of Notting Hill is a fine urbane joke if read as such.

There is, incidentally, a well-attested story about this novel, which features in all the biographies of Chesterton. The Napoleon of Notting Hill was his first novel. He wrote it when he was newly married, about thirty, and broke. He went to a publisher’s and promised them the novel if they would give him an advance. Off the top of his head, he improvised the story – having been inspired by the sight of a water-tower on top of a suburban hill, which led him to think of how it could be misused to flood the locality. They gave him the twenty-pound advance and he and his wife were able to live off it for a number of months.

When I read it as a kid, The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) puzzled me far more than Chesterton’s first novel did. Again it is proof that 13- or 14-year olds can follow a plot but completely miss the tone.

The Man Who Was Thursday is a frolic, a lark, an intellectual game, a theological thriller – but the subtitle gets it best. It is “A Nightmare”. Things happen with the furious logic of a dream, and a brief coda suggests it is literally a dream. As a child, I thought it was meant to be a straightforward adventure, so its nightmarish-ness made me furious. As an adult, I’m a little more receptive.

The flamingly red-haired poet Lucian Gregory is an anarchist. The more sober poet Gabriel Syme is a police detective, who has been mysteriously recruited. But, though on opposite sides of the law, the two poets swear not to unmask each other.

Gabriel Syme manages to infiltrate the anarchist group and be elected onto the central anarchist committee, presided over by the enigmatic Sunday. Every member of the committee is named after a day of the week, so Gabriel Syme becomes Thursday. Apparently the anarchists are planning an assassination, which must be thwarted. But as the infiltrated detective goes about his business, he discovers that in fact every single member of the committee is really a police detective like himself.

This is the mechanism of the romping plot, which eventually leaves the six detectives to confront and unmask Sunday himself. In a pageant-like finale, all the days of the week confront Sunday - who turns out to be the Peace of God, testing the souls of those who seek him by trial and adventure. And the red-haired Lucian Gregory, who reappears in the novel only at this point, is the true anarchist, the spirit that would deny and destroy. Lucian is Lucifer just as Gabriel is the angel of domestic order. Again, there is the Chestertonian paradox. What appears to be order is chaos. What appears to be chaos is order.

I think I am right in saying that this has always been Chesterton’s most popular and most-often-reprinted novel. Certainly it is more robust and jolly than The Napoleon of Notting Hill. It has the advantage of the thriller format, chase and eventual confrontation, and colourful scenes like the unmasking of a policeman at the anarchists’ meeting; Syme being chased across London by anarchists whom he does not yet know are fellow policemen; a frenzied duel and chase in France where the whole world seems to have gone anarchist (though in truth they are only honest French peasants trying to thwart anarchists); and the wonderful, cartoonish, nightmarish chase of Sunday himself, who rides a stolen elephant from the zoo and then a hot-air balloon.

But does it hold together as a story?

Not really.

There is a sudden change of tone when we get to that solemn, explicitly-allegorical concluding pageant (all six detectives are the six days of creation and therefore represent all of creation). The gears crunch. The Christian message of redemption through suffering is hammered home in Sunday’s final self-revelation. I have read angry comments from readers who expected a conventional spy novel and were confronted instead with a metaphysical argument. And yet there are some neat insights en route. Chesterton is right to see anarchism as an intellectual game for the well-to-do who do not think through its consequences. Also (like Poe in “The Purloined Letter”) his plot often invokes the idea that the best way to hide is to stay in plain sight where everyone can see you.

As I reconsider both these novels now, I inevitably think of the whole reputation of Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), the gigantic, witty purveyor of paradox, Catholic convert, Christian apologist and inventor of Father Brown, whose books once filled the shelves of every Catholic school library and seminary. Seen in these terms, he is a back number. Yet it is surprising how much resonance these two pieces of whimsy, which I have been discussing, really have.

As I have noted before on this blog [check out my review of Donald Rumbelow’s The Houndsditch Murders and the Siege of Sidney Street on the index at right], Chesterton’s exorcism of anarchism was something that other writers of his era were trying to do seriously. Look up any Chesterton website on line and you will be told of the diverse and eminent people who were impressed by these two books - George Orwell, Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock among them. They were said to be the favourite novels of the Irish rebel leader Michael Collins (first commander of the IRA) who took some tips from The Napoleon of Notting Hill on how to wage urban guerrilla warfare and who, strutting undisguised through Dublin when British security were hunting him, took to heart the message of The Man Who Was Thursday that the best way to hide was not to hide. It amazes me that such whimsies were taken so literally, but there it is.

I certainly didn’t read any of this serious intent into The Napoleon of Notting Hill or The Man Who Was Thursday that when I was a kid. I was puzzled, and thought how odd it was that adventure stories could be written in this way.

Interesting but almost totally irrelevant footnote: G.K.Chesterton wrote a book of detective stories, which was published in 1922 under the title The Man Who Knew Too Much. Alfred Hitchcock got the rights to the book and was going to make a film from one of the stories. But it didn’t work out. Nothing daunted, in 1934 Hitchcock took the title to which he had the rights and made a film called The Man Who Knew Too Much anyway (he re-made it in 1956). Its plot had nothing to do with any of Chesterton’s stories. Nevertheless, as an admirer of Chesterton, Hitchcock was really intrigued by the essential conceit of The Man Who Was Thursday, in which all members of an anarchist group prove to be other than they seem. Disguise, usually with malign intent, is one of the keys not only to Hitchcock’s films, but to the whole spy-thriller genre. All those movies you’ve seen in which an agent turns out to be a counter-agent or vice versa owe at least something to The Man Who Was Thursday.

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.

SEAMUS HEANEY 1939-2013 R.I.P.

This morning, Saturday 31 August 2013, the radio news tells me that Seamus Heaney died in Dublin at the age of 74. In the brisk, superficial way of end-of-news obituaries, it tells me that Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1995) and was widely considered to be “the best Irish poet since Yeats”.

I bristle a little at this.

Seamus Heaney was the best Irish poet of the last one hundred years, period; and Patrick Kavanagh (1904-67) was the best Irish poet of the twentieth century before Heaney came along. William Butler Yeats, a very great poet whom I much esteem, was not Irish. He was Anglo-Irish, which is quite a different beast. I am not waving the Irish Republican flag in saying this, or invoking sectarian tribalisms of Catholic Heaney and Protestant Yeats. I am simply pointing to a sociological fact. Yeats belonged to quite a different nation from Kavanagh and Heaney (who, though born in “Northern Ireland”, chose to live in the republic and chose Irish, rather than British, citizenship) – a different nation in terms of loyalties, inherited mythologies, attitudes, values and even language, much as they all wrote in a version of English.

Once I have harrumphed at the radio obituary in this way, I turn to Wikipedia and discover a truly extraordinary fact about Heaney. Apparently, in the last twenty or so years, sales of his collections of poetry accounted for two thirds of all the sales of works by all living poets in Britain. I appreciate that popularity does not necessarily equate with quality, and I further appreciate that Heaney was a favourite with high-school English teachers and his (eminently accessible) poetry was often published in school editions, which may account for at least some of his sales. Even so, this is a truly extraordinary tribute to his reach.

I won’t attempt to summarise Heaney’s career, ideas etc. Let’s just say that, from his beginnings in rural Irish themes, he had a way of showing how politics and history impinge on private lives. He references the Famine, the Troubles, the pains of the Northern Irish state etc., but you would have to completely misread him to assume that his poetry could be appropriated by a nationalist or republican political cause. Any of his later volumes – like 2006’s District and Circle – would show how cosmopolitan his interests were in terms of literature and general culture, as would his lively 1999 translation of Beowulf. Let’s just say that the phrase “Irish poet” should not be taken to mean “parochial”. In his poetry, Heaney was simultaneously Irish and a citizen of the world.

I could at this point recount one Heaney-themed anecdote. It would concern the hilarity that ensued, over thirty years ago, when I was teaching at a girls’ school and chose to analyse with a senior class Heaney’s poem “The Outlaw” (from his early – 1969 – collection Door into the Dark). The poem concerns an unlicensed bull being used to inseminate cows in rural Ireland. Girlish blushes, giggles and knowing winks galore.

But I won’t finish on this. Instead, knowing how corny it is, I reproduce the famous poem that appeared in Heaney’s very first collection, Death of a Naturalist, in 1966. Some have taken “Digging” to be Heaney’s poetic manifesto, like the “Thought Fox” of Ted Hughes (with whom Heaney once collaborated on an anthology of poetry for children). “Digging” often appears first when selections of Heaney’s poems are anthologised. Manifesto or not, the collaboration of specifically Irish concrete imagery and poetic intent is a signpost to the way the poet’s career would develop over the next 47 years.

DIGGING

Between my finger and my thumb   

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound   

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   

My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds   

Bends low, comes up twenty years away   

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills   

Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft   

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.   

Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

Something New

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

 

THE NEW ZEALAND POST BOOK AWARDS FOR 2013

            This year, unlike the last two years, I was not present at the ceremony and dinner for the New Zealand Post Book Awards, so I view it from a little more distance than I have previously done. The awards were given last Wednesday (28 August). I will not discourse at length upon the value or purpose of book awards – I have done that previously on this blog, and merely come up with the obvious points that book awards recognize merit, point to the continuing importance of literature and are also, of course, supported by publishers in the interests of publicity. Book awards also regularly court controversy, as there are always critics and commentators who disagree with the judges’ decisions – and more occasionally there are public disagreements between judges. But beyond these platitudes, there is nothing I wish to say about the NZ Post Book Awards in general.

            This year, I found myself under-informed about the Illustrated Non-Fiction Category. The finalists were His Own Steam: The Work of Barry Brickell by David Craig and Gregory O’Brien (photos by Haruhilo Sameshima); Pat Hanly by Greg O’Brien and Gil Hanly; Selling the Dream: the art of early New Zealand tourism by Peter Alsop, Gary Stewart & Dave Bamford; and Stag Spooner: Wild man from the bush by Chris Maclean. Of these four, I have seen only the last, my review of which appeared on Landfall Review on line on 1 June this year. I judged it “work of pure adulation”, a book about a deer culler and amateur artist of the 1940s, including a reproduction of his illustrated diary of his life in the bush. In the event the category award went to Pat Hanly by Greg O’Brien and Gil Hanly.

            I should have been better informed about the Poetry Category. The finalists were A Man Runs Into a Woman by Sarah Jane Barnett; Snow White’s Coffin by Kate Camp; The Darling North by Anne Kennedy; and The Lifeguard: Poems 2008-2011 by Ian Wedde. Again I confess my near ignorance, as of these four I have read and reviewed only Ian Wedde’s impressive The Lifeguard [my review of which can be found on the listing at right]. The judges gave the category prize to The Darling North by Anne Kennedy.

I am less embarrassed about the two other major categories. The four finalists for the Fiction Category were In the Absence of Heroes by Anthony McCarten; The Big Music by Kirsty Gunn; The Intentions Book by Gigi Fenster; and The Forrests by Emily Perkins. In this case, The Forrests by Emily Perkins was the only one I had not read and reviewed.

When I reviewed Anthony McCarten’s In the Absence of Heroes in the Sunday Star-Times [5 February 2012], I judged its story of an unhappy and dysfunctional family to be lively and somewhat teen-oriented, especially as its teenaged character was the novel’s most sympathetic. I concluded my review thus: “I think there are too many side issues, some twists that send it perilously near to being a formula thriller, and a mother whose grief and breakdown verge on over-the-top caricature. But McCarten can write, can keep it moving, and I found it a breeze to rush through his nearly 400 pages.”

When I reviewed Kirsty Gunn’s The Big Music in the Sunday Star-Times [12 August 2012] I focused on the Scotland-based New Zealand author’s experimentalism. Among other things I noted that this novel about bagpipers is “a novel that aspires to the condition of music… it is not told in any conventional narrative form. The Big Music is organized as a series of separate documents, personal papers and appendices, complete with footnotes, held together by the fiction that the novelist is simply the “editor” of these found materials… Like James Joyce and others, Kirsty Gunn is interested in form, in wordplay and especially in the sounds of words.” However, I did caution that this “rewarding book… does require patience to read” because of its unconventional style; and that “while there are strong elements of hope in the story, the net effect is more a lamentation for a traditional art form whose hold in the modern world is tenuous.”

I have a particular soft spot for Gigi Fenster’s debut novel The Intentions Book. Again, I reviewed this one in the Sunday Star-Times [15 April 2012]. This story of a family awaiting possible bad news (a daughter has gone missing while tramping in the New Zealand bush) I judged to be “a penetrating psychological examination” of the family’s buttoned-down father and  “a character study in the best sense of the term.” I further noted that “there are so many things that work well here. The novel’s structure is necessarily complex (sometimes flashbacks within flashbacks) and assumes a grown-up readership. But it is never wilfully obscure. There is a dramatic logic to the way [the father’s] self-examination is revealed to us, and how one memory triggers off another… Gigi Fenster is a woman who produces a very convincing take on what makes men tick…There is also Fenster’s ability to convey, at one and the same time, the messiness of family life and the absolute necessity for family.” In short, I found this a very agreeable book.

The judges’ decision went to Kirsty Gunn’s The Big Music, and I congratulate them on their choice. There were fears that this year’s choices would be more populist than in previous years, but in the event they have chosen something that is stylistically challenging.

             I was similarly well-informed about the General Non-Fiction Category finalists. The four finalists were Steve Braunias’s Civilisation: Twenty Places on the Edge of the World ; Jarrod Gilbert’s Patched: The History of Gangs in New Zealand; Vincent O’Malley’s The Meeting Place: Maori and Pakeha Encounters 1642-1840; and Joanne Drayton’s The Search for Anne Perry. Of these four, Braunias’s book was the only one I had not read and reviewed.

            I reviewed Jarrod Gilbert’s Patched: The History of Gangs in New Zealand on this blog on 8 April this year [look up my detailed review on the index at right]. It is a complex and well-researched book, avoiding sensationalism but inevitably giving much hair-raising detail. I particularly commended the author for keeping his critical distance even though he was, in effect, “embedded” with gangs at the time he was doing his research.

            I am compelled to make clear my negative view of Joanne Drayton’s The Search for Anne Perry, which I reviewed on this blog on 20 August 2012 [look up my detailed review on the index at right].  I find it an evasive book on many elements of the Hulme-Parker case which it purports to be exploring, and judge that parts of it come perilously close to being sanitised publicity rather than true biography. I am sincerely surprised that it made the list of finalists, and wonder at the judges’ reasoning. I would have been spitting tacks if it had won, as it was (as a study of the Hulme-Parker case) much inferior to Peter Graham’s So Brilliantly Clever, which was a finalist last year in this category of these awards, but did not win.

            Vincent O’Malley’s The Meeting Place: Maori and Pakeha Encounters 1642-1840 is a well-organised account of the interaction between Maori and Pakeha, especially in the early years of European settlement. Making my own notes on it (not for review) I found it an impressive synthesis of much that is known about such interaction, drawn from both primary and secondary sources. I appreciate the way O’Malley showed how dynamic and changing Maori society was even before the arrival of Europeans, and how much social change was triggered by Maori “agency” as much as by progressive European settlement. I noted that “the beauty of this book is the way it puts this broad pre-Treaty cultural history all in one volume and makes it accessible to a wider audience.”

            In this General Non-Fiction Category, however, the judges’ nod went to Steve Braunias’s Civilisation: Twenty Places on the Edge of the World, which prevents me from saying anything of any value as I have not read it. I hope the judges got it right.

            While congratulating the winners, I draw no general conclusions from any of these results. I am sceptical of the processes whereby the “People’s Choice” is chosen, but I congratulate Jarrod Gilbert for winning this category with his well-researched Patched: The History of Gangs in New Zealand. Likewise, congratulations to Helen Heath for winning the Best First Book of Poetry awards with her Graft [a review of which you can find via the index at right].

Something Old

This week’s “Something Old” is written by a guest reviewer, the distinguished poet Siobhan Harvey, whose work has been published widely both in New Zealand and overseas. English-born, but long-time New Zealand resident, Siobhan Harvey teaches creative writing and her poetry reflects a keen interest in the topics of cultural identity, parenthood, and childrearing. Harvey has been Featured Poet in Poetry New Zealand and her major collection Lost Relatives was published in 2011. She also edited Words Chosen Carefully (Cape Catley, 2010), a book of author interviews. In this “Something Old” she reflects on a New Zealand novel with a strong socio-political theme.

“TRUE STARS” by Fiona Kidman (first published by Random Century, 1990) Review by guest reviewer Siobhan Harvey.

Writing in Landfall 175, reviewer Colleen Reilly said of Fiona Kidman’s 5^th novel,

“True Stars is a passionate novel about political corruption, New Zealand-style. The novel relies on the assumption that readers will feel as angry and depressed about the state of the nation as its author does.

Characters, situations, dialogue and chapter-structure exist primarily to illustrate New Zealand’s ‘fall from grace’, as it has been called by more than one commentator on the contemporary scene. For some that fall began decades ago. For Kidman and the generation she and her characters represent, it began with 1981.” (Colleen Reilly, ‘True Stars’ in Landfall 175, September 1990, page 384).   

Perhaps, written, like the novel, so close to the conclusion of the subject-matter, the Lange Government 1984-1990, this reviewer’s limp endorsement of Kidman’s True Stars isn’t surprising. After all Reilly’s off-centre summation of the book as “one writer’s consciously crafted plea for ‘the way things were’, or might have been, or should be” was arrived at without the benefits of time or distance, the review’s focus upon the book in relation to the contemporaneous (indeed perpetually contemporaneous) rosy view of the political past as a more scrupulous epoch thereby somewhat understandable (Colleen Reilly, ibid.). Moreover it was True Stars’ lot in life to follow its author’s 1988 New Zealand Book Award for Fiction winner, The Book of Secrets. Like a sibling arriving and forever playing ‘catch-up’ with a silver-spooned sister, True Stars appearance after The Book of Secrets (recently re-released to celebrate its 25^th anniversary) no doubt also helps explain the former’s continual overlooking as a novel of real skill and merit not just in the Kidman oeuvre, but in the more broader landscape of New Zealand fiction. Twenty-three years after the publication of True Stars, it is time to reassess its position in the opus of one of our most celebrated and famous of authors, and also to re-evaluate the novel’s place as rare, successful example of its genre, one which speaks less of its era per se and more of government, ideology and loyalty observed irrespective of party, time or place.

 

A synopsis of True Stars reads more like mystery than political and social critique of a landmark domestic and global epoch. Middle-aged Rose Kendall, once a fearless, forthright social campaigner, now an MP’s wife, is being secretly stalked. Her shadowy pursuant is doing all they can to scare her out of her community: endless abusive, late-night phone-calls; insidious attacks on personal, domestic possessions; even a break-and-enter into her home. Had she her family around her, a score of nearby acquaintances and/or a plethora of benevolent locals, her security might be assured. But her husband, Kit, too busy with the minor politics of Wellington, is absent from his constituency. Her fraught relationships with her children have driven them abroad. And Kit’s disloyalty and duplicity towards his district party workers and constituents means that Rose is not only shunned but actively derided by those she once called friends and neighbours.

Underpinning all this, of course, is the theme of community versus the individual. It’s the basic tenet of the transformative Lange years, a fault-line shift in thinking from the post war era of protectionism (of society and the economy). And so, it’s here, on distinctly subtle levels that the authorial analysis of dogma and of the 1980s battle between, for want of more specific terminology, socialism and conservatism occurs.  True Stars is a deconstruction of the role and affairs of state as well as the importance of culture and cooperation, but not so in the biting, melodramatic satire of similar international books of the times, like Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, but in a more moderate, personal, (dare I say it) female-minded manner.

Conflict, personal and political, that often unrecognized Kidman motif, sits at the heart of this novel. As the author’s first book, A Breed of Women reminds us, for Kidman often the private conflict is political. In True Stars this is certainly so too. Indeed, we open the novel with an exposition of just how entwined and multilayered conflicts are for this novel and this author:

“Imagine: picture this. Kit Kendall weeping, with his head down, in his parliamentary office.

Kit, who had listened to the Beatles, marched in protest against the Vietnam War, fallen in love once by moonlight, cried when Kennedy was shot, written poems in treetops and saved forests from destruction. Today, he could hear only the roar of the crowd, and it was not for him.” (Fiona Kidman, True Stars, Random Century, 1990, page 1).

Whereas A Breed of Women, over- and under-toned with the feminist creed ‘the personal is political’, focused upon a group of women’s lives besieged by the clashes between career, motherhood, children and freewill, the social and governmental fights, struggles and inconsistencies in True Stars influence and shape both genders. Kit Kendall, the financially over-rewarded politician from the mid-country constituency of Weyville, man and seat once symbolic of the sea change opposition to outmoded, culturally intolerant policies promulgated by the Muldoon government, has become a contradiction, conflict personified through his repeated decisions to put Party before electorate, Party before family.  In essence then the novel opens with Kendall’s private “mid-life crisis” and his public variance with the Weyville Labour apparatchiks and voters. If these tangled collisions were not significant enough – for character and the unfolding plot – the deeper the reader traverses into True Stars the clearer the realization that Kidman is using these twin entangled elements as a symbol for a higher purpose – the downfall of the Lange government and, written as this novel was in the white heat of that administration’s demise, the ruin of idealism, the collapse of political and existential purpose.

The other quality of this novel, one true of all its author’s books, is character portrayal. The 1980s turned communalists into capitalists. It takes a lot of skill and patience to successfully evoke a core caste which embody and convincingly “live” this incongruity. In Kit and Rose, Kidman comes up trumps. Late in the piece, the paradoxes of Labour rule, government versus personal allegiance and, more privately, marriage becoming increasingly apparent like a conjunction of major fault-lines, Kidman focuses upon the latter, the domestic strife to speak of and symbolize the civic, and in so doing expose the fractures of the period everywhere obvious to we contemporaries but blindly ignored by many who lived them:

“Rose dreamed as she lay sleeping in a cool room at Delphi while the midday sun blazed down outside. She dreamed that she was in Wellington, dancing on a marble table top in the foyer of Parliament Buildings.

When she woke, her pillow was wet as if she had been crying in her sleep for a long time. Not that this was immediately clear to her for at first she believed what she had dreamed was true, seeing it all with an absolute and terrifying clarity. She saw Kit standing beside her, and his face was dark with rage. ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ she whimpered. ‘Please Kit, I didn’t mean to make you angry.’

‘You made me look stupid, you promised that you wouldn’t ever do anything like that again.’

‘I was dancing. I felt so gay.’

‘Everyone looked.’

‘They were all having fun too.’

‘Funny, yes. They were laughing at you.’

‘They’ll have forgotten by tomorrow.

‘I won’t. I won’t ever.’

‘Here’s my ring. Take my ring. It’s all I’ve got.’” (Fiona Kidman, ibid., page 156).

Such complexly drawn figures and their encounters are matched by many others in True Stars, including Rose’s hardened, bitter sister Katrina, alienated friend Toni and snide government minister Rex Gamble. But, if this is an intricate study of characters present in the narrative, it’s also an examination in characters absent from the work. Lange and Douglas are never drawn; yet their beings and behaviours hang intangibly over everything in True Stars. A literary example, as it were, of attendance through absence.

All in all, True Stars is heady stuff, and moreover, a symbol of that rarest form of narrative written in New Zealand before or since, the political novel. Such rarity, particularly concerning such a radical era and its political leaders, continues to surprise this writer. To look back at the Fourth Labour Government, the purity of its dogma, the innate contradictions of its convictions, its near-mythical high command, and find that few of our writers have considered the social, governmental and financial melting pot that Lange and his offsiders created, wittingly or otherwise, a subject worthy of their work perplexes.  We need more books like True Stars written in New Zealand. Brave books by writers brave enough to deconstruct the social and political mores and dilemmas of their times and leaders. In this we need to value True Stars much more than we have hitherto done.

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.

            How much of what historical novels give readers is in any way related to history? Allowing for inevitable anachronisms and so forth, don’t historical novels really present the values and attitudes of the times in which they are written, rather than the values and attitudes of the times they purport to represent? And yet don’t historical novels have a greater influence on the way people see the past than sober history books do?

            These questions have interested me for years. For a preliminary discussion of some of my conclusions, I cordially invite you to the following presentation.