Something New

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

“BIRD CHILD & OTHER STORIES” by Patricia Grace (Penguin, $NZ37); “THE GREAT DIVIDE” by Cristina Henriquez (4^th Estate – Harper Collins, $NZ36.99); “MY HEAVENLY FAVOURITE” by Lucas Rijneveld – translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison (Faber & Faber, $NZ37)

Now 87 years old, and with many short stories and novels to her credit, Patricia Grace is very skilled in different genres. Re-workings of ancient mythology,  childhood memories, satirical anecdotes and hard realism – all can be found in her latest collection Bird Child & Other Stories. An introduction tells us that Bird Child & Other Stories is divided into three parts. Part One – reworkings of ancient Maori myths and legends. Part Two – stories about Mereana, a young girl and her life in wartime Wellington. Part Three – her most recent stories dealing with problems of the current era. Seeing as these are three quite different forms of narration, the only way one can read this book is to take each of the Three Parts as three quite different books.

Part One: Patricia Grace begins with the title story of the book “Bird Child”, a variation on ancient myth. It is set in some primeval time when gods are not fully formed and birds are wise, cunning and articulate. A child is born but the spirit is taken out of the child’s body and the spirit becomes part of the bird clan. The child’s bird mother is Kaa, presumably a kea. The bird child is both respected and feared by other birds, but he brings warmth into the world. In a way, Grace’s reworking of ancient beliefs is dominated by the richness of forests before human beings came along. There is a respect for a very verdant nature, so that “Bird Child” becomes an epic of forest. The three stories that follow are shorter, and one reviewer (Paula Morris) has already suggested that these stories are aimed primarily at school-children, enlightening them about Maori lore. I agree with this suggestion. The story “Mahuika et al.” is set in the world of gods, goddesses and spirits. The great mother Mahuika directs how things will benefit human beings when they finally wake up. Fire flashes from her fingertips and gives fire to the people… but Maui the trickster tricks Mahuika and steals the making of fire. “Sun’s Marbles” is the epic story of the gods who, tired of being embraced too tightly between Earth and Sky, are led by Maui to push Earth and Sky apart, to the advantage of the gods. “The Unremembered” takes the traditional story of Rona who cursed the Moon and was forced to be part of the Moon, but who eventually did much to preserve the literal health of the Earth. Grace uses this fable to consider the need for ecological health on Earth. The tone is admonitory, and certainly a tale readable for adolescents.

Part Two is very different in style and attitude. There are twelve anecdotes about Mereana, a young Maori girl living near Wellington in the 1940s when the Second World War is in progress. Given that this was the time and place of Patricia Grace’s childhood, it is hard not to see these stories as at least partly autobiographical. In one story, Mereana experiences wartime night-time black-outs. In another she waves her father goodbye as he goes off to war. She and other kids are excited when G.Is. give then chewing gum. Her uncle jokingly says he’s going to give his children a monkey when he’s back from his sailing... but in the end it proves to be a joke. Mereana learns how to fish in the company of her uncle and her cousins, and after much trying she does land a fish. Being a Catholic kid, she and her school-mates wonder if they’ve committed a mortal sin by blowing out the red candle that is supposed to stay alight always. When she hears that her father is coming home, she frets that she might have forgotten what he looks like; but she does join in the celebrations of her extended family when the soldiers return home… and this shows that the stories run across a number of years. Mereana is growing up. There is one very sober tale called “The Urupa” in which a child is taken to a cemetery  and learns about his whakapapa. There is also one very chastising story when Mereana was still very young – she is sent off to buy a loaf of bread, but she is accosted by two older Pakeha girls, who first throw away her purse and then physically wound her with a piece of broken glass. When her mother confronts the mother of these two girls, their mother curses her, says Mereana is lying and slams the door on her. This is the one story that raises the issue of racial prejudice in New Zealand. The final story in Part Two has Mereana now a grown-up young student attending a hop, and the problem when gate-crashers butt in. The earlier stories show the simplicity and sometimes purity of a child’s mind, but also carefully and persuasively depict the world she inhabits. 

Part Three, as it deals with the present age, tells us of both compassionate things and brutal things. All the major characters are Maori. Dare I say these are the most grown-up stories in the book? On the challenging side, there is “The Machine”, a sad realist tale of a woman working as a machinist while having to look after an invalid mother. The monotony of machine-work and tiring factory protocols drum through the story. “Green Dress” is about an unhappy domestic situation – a daughter is in conflict with her mother, especially when the daughter marries an unreliable man. The mother nags and can be very quarrelsome but in the end, her traditional scale of values proves to be more resiliant than the daughter’s ideas. “Hey Dude” (deliberately referring to the Beatles’ song “Hey Jude”) is a very short tale plunging into the very discursive thoughts of an elderly woman. One of the most positive and ultimately optimistic stories is “Matariki All-Stars”. A widower has seven daughters – just like the seven daughters of Matariki. He is a hard-working man, but he doesn’t quite earn enough to look after all his girls. Still he doesn’t want to have his family broken up. He often finds himself at odds with his [childless] sister, who is bossy and thinks it is for the best for her to take some of the girls into her care. But the father battles through and ultimately raises all his daughters well. They are his shining Matariki stars. Is this sentimental? No – because among other things Patricia Grace shows how hard single-parenthood is and how it takes a special sort of heroism to raise children well. Speaking of single parents, “Thunder” has a young boy having to look after his even younger siblings and then finding a lost kid who has wandered away from his home. Again the issue is how very difficult single-parenthood is, and how prejudice is often directed at single mothers. And after all these telling stories, there comes the one story which suggests real anger. This is “Seeing Red”. A Maori civil servant in a government department becomes more and more angry at the way his Pakeha colleagues either misunderstand or regard as unnecessary certain Maori norms. This is about the matter of education and how Maori teenagers should be taught – and one thing the author correctly hits on is the way many schools simply “tick boxes” by going through the motions of dealing with Maori concerns without really setting up appropriate programmes. This is where Patricia Grace is an activist.

From all the above you can see that Grace has produced a very varied collection of stories, using many different types of narration but all, in their very different styles, enlightening us about different phases Maori culture and mores.

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Cristina Henriquez’s The Great Divide covers a lot of issues and a lot of characters. Set mainly in the year 1906, it gathers together a cast of people who are somehow connected with the construction of the Panama Canal, when the U.S.A. has expropriated from the state of Panama a “canal zone” six miles wide, which is in effect ruled by the U.S.A..

To give you the general flavour of the novel, the best this I can do is to list some of the major characters. The old Panamainian Francisco Aguina is a fisherman who wants to stick with the traditional ways. But his son Omar never wanted to be a fisherman and he runs away to make money joining with labourers digging the Panama Canal. So there is a father’s loss of his son. The resourceful young woman Ida Bunting, of mixed race, runs away from her home in Barbados because she wants to raise money to pay a doctor who will cure her beloved sister Millicent’s damaged lungs. And in her story there is her formidable mother Lucille Bunting who has to deal with the plantation owner who impregnated her. So there is a mother missing her daughter and many domestic problems. In the “canal zone” there is the family of the American doctor John Oswald, who is trying to find a way of curing malaria now the Yellow Fever has abated. Ida Bunting, by good fortune, becomes the nurse for John Oswald’s wife. The Panamainian husband-and-wife team Joaquin and Valentina bring together a troop protesting against the Yanquis’ plan to destroy their village to made way for a dam as part of the great canal. And there is the sadistic foreman Miller who drives his labourers so harshly that there is a violent outcome for one character. For good measure, I must note that Cristina Henriquez drops in two fantastic characters who come close to the “magical realism” that once flourished in Central and South American literature. One is the soothsayer Dona Ruiz, who is presented almost as a witch. The other is the fisherman Francisco Aguina’s deceased wife Esme, who comes back to him in dreams and in apparitions.

There are many other characters I could mention, but this probably gives you the general idea. The Great Divide is a kind of saga, with many characters, many different problems, and always some new event happening. A page-turner certainly. For me, the tempo is somewhat stop-start. Whenever a new character is introduced, we have at length his or her back-story. This should not worry most readers, however.

The Great Divide is a novel intended for mass readership and so it has a happy ending for at least some of the most tried and mistreated characters. That’s as it should be, I suppose. But though Cristina Henriquez touches on the making of the canal, she does not really dig deeply into it. Another author might have focused even more on the harsh and dangerous conditions in which the labourers had to toil, the poor wages they were given, the authoritarian way the Americans overlorded them, the segregation of races that was practiced, the quelling of any discontent from the indigenous Panamanians  – in short, all the practices used by a new colonial power. In these matters it might be worth your while to look up on this blog my review of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo , in which I mention the Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s The Secret History of Costaguana, which really concerns the way the U.S.A. took over the “canal zone”.  In fairness Henriquez does make some reference to all these things and there are some brutal episodes. But The Great Divide is more focused on the adventures of her main characters and how they fare.

Clearly written and showing real research, I see no reason why this shouldn’t be a very popular novel for a large readership.

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            How very different is Lucas Rijneveld’s My Heavenly Favourite .

In Death in Venice, Aschenbach ogles a young boy but never lays a finger on him. In Lolita, Humbert Humbert drools over a pre-pubescent girl but barely gets to possess her. But when the Dutch novelist Lucas Rijneveld writes about a paedophile, he gives us all the explicit details of a 14-year-old girl being sexually groomed and exploited by a middle-aged man.

This is Rijneveld’s second novel. His first, The Discomfort of Evening, earned acclaim and won the International Booker Prize. It concerned in part a 12-year-old girl being introduced to sex games. Rijneveld identifies as non-binary, but he was born and raised a girl and was then subject to much teasing. The ultimate vulnerability of young girls concerns him, as does the abuse that can plague them. [NB Rijneveld by choice prefers to be called “he” when he is spoken about in the English language.]

Kurt is a veterinarian working in a rural farming area (the country Rijneveld comes from) with a wife and teenage sons. He is occasionally shocked, such as finding the corpse of a farmer who hanged himself when his herd of cattle was fatally diseased. But otherwise Kurt is generally happy doing his rounds, offering advice to farmers or thrusting his gloved hands up cows having difficulty giving birth.

Then he meets a farmer’s 14-year-old daughter. He is bewitched by her. He is fascinated by her odd talk about Hitler and Freud and the destruction of the Twin Towers. He plays along with her favoured pop music, everything from the Cranberries to Bowie, Kurt Cobain and multiple others. He takes her to movies. He buys her sweets. He calls her “my heavenly favourite”. He dreams about her and masturbates with her in mind. And bit by bit he fondles her a little, then a lot, then in an extreme way. This is where the explicit sex scenes come in, finally amounting to rape although Kurt doesn’t see it that way. He likes to see himself as avuncular.

There are some side issues. At one point, Kurt’s son is attracted to the girl – unaware of his father’s behaviour – so Kurt had to find ways of warning him off. Kurt has nightmares about his mother, suggesting that he has been warped by incest in his family. The Calvinist Reform Church seems to have done him no good when he was young.

But the skill of the novel is not in the situation. It is in the narration. My Heavenly Favourite is told throughout in the first-person by Kurt, who is addressing the girl in a sort of on-going confession. He speaks in sentences that scamper through page after page without a full-stop in sight. This is the narration of a man’s fevered mind. His brain is crowded with desire, fear, guilt, lust, grandiose schemes, a sense of victimhood, and of course some self-vindication. Most unnerving is the way he introduces animal penises to the girl before he introduces his own penis to her. His animal imagery has the tendency to equate the girl with just another animal. Yet in all this, he is aware of clear warnings that he will ultimately face trial and retribution. Which he does.

It is hard to categorise this novel. It could be read as the analysis of an unbalanced mind, even if the protagonist has sharp observation of the world he inhabits and is apparently quite sane. It could be an exercise in being – to use what is now a cliché – “transgressive” just for the hell of it. It could simply be condemning paedophiles. But here is the greatest problem. The prose often rises to brilliance with unexpected turns of phrase, startling metaphors and shrewdness. But you always have to ask yourself – what purpose is this virtuosity serving?

Something New

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

“FROM THE CENTRE – A Writer’s Life” by Patricia Grace (Penguin Books, $NZ40); “KATE EDGER – The Life of a Pioneering Feminist” by Diana Morrow (Otago University Press, $NZ40) 

 

 

            Since she first began writing for publication, Patricia Grace has produced seven novels, five collections of short stories (plus two omnibus editions of them), seven books for children and a work of non-fiction. She was the first Maori woman to have a collection of short stories published, and she has, for half a century now, been a major voice in Maori cultural and literary matters as well as winning many literary awards. But putting it that way is a little limiting. Patricia Grace is a major voice in New Zealand cultural and literary matters, read by a wide public.

            What is her appeal? Much of it has to do with her insistence on dealing with ordinary people in ordinary real-life situations – unpretentious people facing problems that a wide readership can recognise. She emphasises this a number of times in From the Centre – A Writer’s Life. Many of her plots for novels or short-stories have their origins in things that happened to her extended family, things she has heard talked about and things she has experienced. Then there is her style. Her novels are concise. She often describes landscapes and seascapes lyrically, but her prose is colloquial and matter-of-fact – no nonsense and always getting to the point of things.

            And of course, she has an important overriding theme – the lives of Maori in the present age.

            From the Centre – A Writer’s Life is as much about Patricia Grace’s formation as a person as it is about her career as a writer. The first fourteen chapters – nearly half the book – deal with her childhood and adolescent years. She begins by introducing her turangawaewae, a much-loved home at stony-shored Hongoeka Bay, some of which is owned by her iwi Ngati Toa, though it has often been threatened by plans for government takeover.

Patricia Grace’s father was Maori but her mother was Irish Catholic, and the family followed her mother’s religion. When she won scholarships she went to Catholic primary and secondary schools, where she was taught by nuns. When she met and was wooed by Kerehi Waiariki Grace (whom she affectionately calls Dick) they were married at St Mary of the Angels in Wellington. On the whole, the education she got served her well, even if some of the schools’ culture was daunting. She remarks:

            “Through our schooling, managed and controlled as it was by engendering fear of sin, hell, the Almighty and the strap, we were given as good and full an education as our teachers knew how. Repressive as it was, I wanted to be there, loved learning and having the textbooks in front of me. The nuns devoted themselves to our learning. No area of the curriculum was neglected.” (p.97)

Later, she speaks of the encouragement the nuns gave her about her writing.

Often it was awkward for her to be the only Maori in a classroom of Pakeha or in a sports team (as a schoolgirl she was very athletic). She tells anecdotes of a priest calling her “a bad influence” for no reason at all, and of a Pakeha man who, as she now understands, was trying to make sexual advances when she was a young teenager. These events threw her into deep depression. But at school, the prejudices she dealt with came from fellow schoolgirls, not from teachers. She was once attacked by two Pakeha girls while walking home from school. The nuns smartly sorted out a gang of catty girls who wouldn’t invite her to a birthday party.

Patricia Grace is aware of her Irish heritage and her Irish aunties, but she is Maori by culture, custom and inheritance. One disability she freely notes. When she went to teachers’ training college, she “began to feel the disadvantage of not speaking te reo” herself (p.154), unlike Maori students who came from more rural areas. Even if she has been a major advocate for the teaching of te reo, and has insisted that her books for children be published in Maori language editions, she admits that even at her present age “my ability in the Maori language is limited.” (p.287)

Outside school and formal education, the most influential things in her childhood were her love of reading, encouraged by her father even when he was away at war with the Maori Battalion, and the free and unsupervised games she enjoyed, cycling, swimming, fishing, sliding down mudslides and generally benefitting from the health of an outdoor life, even if the familiy were sometimes in straitened circumstances.

Oddly enough, the most joyful sections of From the Centre – A Writer’s Life are not about writing, but about her teaching experience when she and her husband taught in small schools up in far Northland. The schools were badly underfunded and lacking in resources, but there were fewer pupils in each class and it was possible to get to know each pupil well. Later she (and her children) were to find that larger urban schools were more impersonal and alienating.

Patricia Grace was to have seven children and they are obviously important in her story. With teaching and raising a family, it was not until her late 30s that she began to write in earnest.  Her attitude to readers and reviewers is a robust one. When she is asked who her intended audience is, she replies:

“I am the first audience. I write for me and I must be the sole judge and take full responsibility for what comes about. The second audience, the one unknown to me, is whoever will read. Once I’ve finished a book or a story, my job is done. Reviews, analyses, critiques, theses are not written for me. They come after the event. What follows – the reading, discussion, dissection, opinion – is part of the next life of the book, that is, if it is to have an afterlife. I should say, though, that if Maori readers did not relate to my writing, or if they rejected it, I would not do it.” (p.200)

From the Centre gives accounts of the genesis of each of her novels, but she does not discuss them in any laborious detail, being mainly interested in how her ideas first came to her.

However, dominating the later chapters are accounts of her activism and her promotion of Maori language and culture. She was instrumental in a project to establish a wharenui and marae complex at Hongoeka Bay and was delighted that it was the younger people, rather than the elders, who insisted that they be built in traditional Maori style. She took part in the Foreshore and Seabed controversy. More than once, she was among those who rebuffed attempts to have her turangewaewae either taken over by government or falling into the hands of property developers. She petitioned the Education Department about readers that perpetuated racial stereotypes. She was forthright in preventing Maori land from being swallowed by the new Kapiti Coast motorway. All this speaks of a vigorous and committed life. The sad part is where she ends, mourning the death, by brain tumor, of her husband of 55 years.

From the Centre is a readable, accessible and very sympathetic memoir by an author proud of her achievements but modest in her expression.

 

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Diana Morrow’s Kate Edger – The Life of a Pioneering Feminist is about a woman quite unlike the one depicted in Patricia Grace’s autobiography - a woman not only of a different temperament and upbringing, but most crucially of a different era.

Kate Milligan Edger (apparently the name is pronounced Edgar) was born in 1857 and died in 1935, so her world view was forged in the nineteenth century. She is chiefly remembered as the first woman in New Zealand to earn a university degree at a time when universities were largely the province of men only. She was awarded a BA in 1877.  It was once believed that she was the first woman in the British Empire to receive a university degree, but Diana Morrow notes that a woman in Canada was awarded a BSc in 1875. Kate Edger went on to be a strong advocate for women’s enfranchisement, to have a distinguished career in education and to support many worthy and progressive social causes. But at the same time, many of her values were of a different age, and some of the causes she supported would be anathema to later second- or third-wave feminists.

Her father was a nonconformist preacher (i.e. a Protestant who was not part of the Church of England) who wavered between being Baptist or Congregationalist but who was usually the latter. He came to New Zealand as part of an idealistic scheme for co-operative farming, but it came to nothing and he moved to Auckland to be a full-time preacher. In social matters he was radical but he also followed very strict (nonconformist) Christian principles, which included an abhorrence of liquor. Kate, the fourth of his five children, lifelong had the same outlook. As Diana Morrow remarks fairly: “More than any other issue, opposition to the ‘demon drink’ has shaped popular perceptions of nonconformists as joyless, repressive Puritans. Certainly, some were self-righteous and dauntingly strait-laced, but others, like the Edgers, fostered public entertainments and cultural pursuits, partly to prove they could be enjoyed without alcohol but also out of conviction that these activities enhanced the quality of both life and religion.” (pp.37-38)

As Morrow also notes, New Zealand was ahead of most countries in opening adavanced education to (Pakeha) women on an equal footing with men. Brought up in a culturally-advanced home, Kate excelled in music and in mathematics. She had no difficulty in getting a place at Auckland University College and there was no controversy about her being awarded a degree. Quite the contrary. She was applauded in the press and fellow feminists promoted her as public proof that women were not intellectually inferior to men (an idea which had been embraced even by the likes of Charles Darwin).

Between 1878 and 1920, over three-quarters of New Zealand women graduates went on to be school-teachers. Kate Edger followed this path, taking up a position at Christchurch Girls High School. She made such an impression that at the age of only 26 she applied successfully to become the first principal of Nelson Girls College. She established an advanced curriculum for her students, who would study the arts and sciences just as boys did and would compete for the same scholarships.

But here we come to a set of values that does not chime well with the values of the early 21^st century. Even though she believed in enfranchisement and advanced education for women, Kate Edger also believed in the domestic ideal of women most completely fulfilling their destiny as good wives and mothers. In Diana Morrow’s words: “Her graduates would be high-minded and earnest women, selflessly devoted to their husbands and children but also concerned to extend their elevating moral influence and values into wider society. Unlike frivolous middle-class women selfishly devoted to fashions and worldly materialism, her pupils would ideally become Christians with a social conscience, active on behalf of worthy causes and helping those in need. They would be self-disciplined and hard-working, able to fulfil their own potential while benefitting others.” (pp.83-84) Women were the best upholders of seemliness and morality in the home. Therefore “If women were well suited to guard the morality of their own children, it was only one step to further assert that their natural abilities as nurturers and protectors of the young could be used to serve other people’s children.” (p.81)

Kate Edger observed this ideal herself, so that when she married the Congregationalist minister William Albert Evans in 1890, she gave up her teaching profession, moved to Wellington with her husband, and set about raising a family, eventually having three sons. And of course she was henceforth known as Kate Evans. Yet there were years when, writing for the press and doing work for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) she actually earned more than her husband and was the family breadwinner.

Kate and William Evans were members of the Christian Socialist organisation which called itself the Foreward Movement. They lobbied for the Society for the Protection of Women and Children, directed against domestic violence, and for equality before the law in marriage, including women’s property rights. They campaigned for the criminalisation of incest. They wanted prison reform which would focus on rehabilitation and education of prisoners rather than punishment. In sexual matters they decried the “double standard” where prostitutes were convicted while their male customers faced no sanction. Few people would now disagree with these goals. But at the same time, they were strong advocates of “purity”, a moral cleansing and spiritual awakening of the individual. And this would include the abolition of alcoholic drinks.

The WCTU was the strongest lobby in New Zealand for women’s suffrage, but its underlying assumption was that women were naturally more “pure” and moral than men, and that therefore women would vote for candidates who opposed the liquor trade. This assumption would now be condemned by feminists as a species of “essentalism” – the idea that men and women are essentially different in mind and impulses. And Kate went further than the WCTU, which openly advocated only for restrictions on the sale of liquor. She joined the more extreme New Zealand Alliance for the Abolition of the Liquor Trade, which openly wanted complete prohibition. Says Diana Morrow: “Advocates like Kate firmly believed that this one reform would cure all of society’s economic, social and spiritual ills. For both the WCTU and the New Zealand Alliance, the goal was nothing less than prohibition of everything to do with alcohol, from making to selling to importing. It was a black and white matter to drink or not to drink. Individuals could choose good over evil by giving up drink or stand idly by and watch it exploit and degrade their fellow human beings.” (p.141)

As history shows, this assessment of how society’s ills could be cured was well wide of the mark.

In later life, some of Kate’s ideas fell behind the standards that were beginning to be adopted in New Zealand. Though she rejected Dr Frederic Truby King’s eugenic ideas about “improving the race”, she supported his new Plunket Society “for the promotion of health for women and children”. In an era when more and more young women were choosing to study commercial courses to qualify them for employment, she was still promoting so-called “Domestic Science” in schools to train girls to first be good wives and mothers. She was appalled by the lack of “purity” in Ettie Rout’s campaign, during the First World War, to defeat sexually-transmitted diseases by distributing prophylactic kits to serving New Zealand soldiers. She was even more appalled in the 1920s when Marie Stopes’ books about contraception were widely circulated. But she did embrace one cause that would still be applauded. After the First World War, she drew more closely to pacifism and became a great supporter of the League of Nations Society, believing that war could be abolished by negotiations in an international council.

Kate Evans remained a respected figure in her old age, noted for her personal charity, but she had some sorrows before she died at the age of 78. Her husband had died in 1921. In the years of the Depression she knew that women were the first to be thrown out of work and greater social hardships returned. Making matters worse, one of her sons turned out to be a gambler, frittering away most of the funds she thought he had invested for her. She died respected and honoured, but already seen as somebody from a past time.

How do I assess this biography? It is clearly written. It notices carefully where Kate Edger’s commitments lay and how she acted them out. It also considers how different her values were from those that are most widely accepted now. But often, the woman and her life become smothered in the author’s explanations of the many causes she supported. Kate Edger herself becomes peripheral to accounts of how first-wave feminists in general saw things, or what the purpose of the WCTU was. Perhaps this shows the difficulty of making dramatic a life that was calm, clear of purpose, and unruffled by personal crises.