fiction – Page 43

School of Saint Augustine

August 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Chris Else
August, by Bernard Beckett (Text Publishing, 2011, $30.00)

A book that is billed as ‘a philosophical thriller’ poses unusual questions. We don’t judge science fiction by the accuracy of its science. Nor do we require historical novels to adhere strictly to the facts. In both cases, perhaps, we would want the writer to be aware of the accepted consensus and to take account of it but the whole point of fiction is that it involves an invented reality. Shadbolt’s Season of the Jew, for example, is a novel first and history second. How then should we approach a fiction that is centred round a philosophical problem? Does it really matter if the analysis of that problem is unsound or incomplete? Should one forget the philosophy and talk about the fiction or should one criticise the philosophy and the fiction? The answer, I suppose, is that it depends on the book.

In Tim Corballis’s Measurement the protagonist goes through a rite of passage that involves a confrontation with a philosophical text. To the initiated, the text described is a thinly disguised version of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. To the uninitiated this barely matters. The novel is not about whether Wittgenstein is right or wrong but about a particular character for whom the fictional text, with its pseudo-Wittgensteinian theses, is a reflection of a personal life view.

Beckett does not operate in quite this way. At the centre of his earlier novel, Genesis, is the question of whether or not computers could ever be considered conscious beings. Characters and plot are subservient to or aspects of the argument around this question, which involves the nature of mind and the relationship of mind and body. Beckett makes a fair fist of weighing up the standard theories as to whether or not the mind is anything other than the brain and he provides a clever twist towards the end that not only turns one of the reader’s key assumptions on its head but also nudges the argument towards a conclusion. Genesis was labelled as a young adult novel and it gave me the sense that Beckett, a secondary school teacher, was driven to write it by motives that were partly pedagogical. Such a book invites or even demands that its argument be a major focus of a critical response.

August takes a similar approach. This time the question is whether or not human beings have free will. Generally, philosophical questions resolve themselves into opposing positions. Cast them in fictional form, and this tendency results in some sort of contest or trial. In Genesis, the main protagonist is subject to examination by a tribunal. In August, there are two confrontations. In the narrative present, the hero, Tristan, is trapped in a wrecked car with Grace, a girl he is in love with despite having met her only once before. They recount their stories to one another: parallel and contrasting tales that offer reflections on the central argument. Grace has been brought up in a convent where strict conformity to a set of rules has governed her life, and from which she has been expelled because her feelings for her fellow human beings have led her into disobedience.

Tristan, whose story is more central to the book, has been cloistered in a school devoted to scholastic reasoning around the work of St Augustine. Here the second confrontation takes place, between Tristan and the Rector – the mentor and father figure who teaches, tempts and tests. Central to the discussion is a religious paradox. If God is omniscient then he knows the future. If he knows the future, a person’s actions are determined. But if behaviour is determined, people do not have free will and therefore God cannot hold them responsible for their actions.

In one sense, as Grace points out, this question has no bearing on a moral life. Whether or not actions are predetermined is irrelevant to the business of deciding what to do. Tristan and the Rector move beyond this point, however, and agree on a test: can the Rector predict what Tristan will do in a complex game that involves interaction with two other people and seems to offer a vast range of possible outcomes? Tristan, who believes that he has free will, bets that he cannot. The Rector believes otherwise. Tristan fails and discovers that, against all his expectations, prior to the contest, the Rector has written down a precise description of his actions.

The first observation that this scene suggests is that, if Tristan’s actions are predetermined so is the Rector’s prediction. To the extent that Tristan was not free, the Rector was not right. A second observation is that neither the Rector nor Tristan had any choice in what they did because they are the way Beckett wrote them. In a work of fiction the free will of all of the characters is, well, a fiction. This might suggest that a novel is a particularly unsuitable vehicle for exploring such philosophical terrain. Only real life is meaningful when it comes to questions of free will. If Beckett had taken the opposite course and written the scene so that the Rector failed, then the action, determined by the author, would have proved that Tristan had free will.

The question of free will versus determinism divides the world into two classes of people, the observers and the observed. From the point of view of the observer, the observed may or may not have free will. It is arguable that they don’t, at least to the extent that behaviour is initiated by neurological processes that can be observed in the brain before the person whose brain it is becomes conscious of them. From a scientific perspective, one that focuses on physical explanations, human behaviour is, in principle, reducible to processes that are either random or caused. If they are caused, then they are, again in principle, predictable. If they are random, they aren’t. Free will, on the other hand, operates within a point of view where thoughts are thought and decisions are made. Thus, no matter what conclusions we draw about the observed person, the observer always has free will. The behaviour of the characters is determined by the free will of the author. There are metafictional opportunities here that Beckett does not take up. Instead, he limits himself by continuing to work within the classical frame of the argument.

Tristan is crippled by the thought that he does not have free will and the cunning twist at the end turns on his last desperate attempt to prove his freedom. The relationship between the various layers of the plot is subtle and carefully worked. The various storylines are skilfully handled and offer a series of surprises as the reader gradually discovers that not only the characters themselves but also the whole world of the novel is not what it seems. In the end I felt disappointed that writing of this quality was devoted to such a limited exposition of the philosophical question. August, I felt, was a better novel than Genesis but poorer philosophy.

CHRIS ELSE is a novelist, and a partner in TFS Literary Agency and Assessment Service. He lives in Wellington.

Holding the Baby

August 1, 2011 1 Comment

Vaughan Rapatahana
Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa, by Tina Makereti (Huia Publishers, 2010)

Kia ora mo tenei pukapuka Tina. Ka nui te pai tau pakiwaitara kei konei.

I enjoyed this initial collection of tales by Tina Makereti. It’s refreshing, rarely boring, easy to read. The stories rebound and resound with echoes from one to the other, motifs recur as time and legend intertwine in a patterning of melded possibilities and possible meldings.

The quick stick label is ‘magic realism’: Makereti’s craft is in veneering extra-sensory perceptions and other-worldliness onto quotidian contingency. Her quotidian, in turn, is permeated with marginalisations of ethnicity and gender. There is a Borges-like quality to some tales – as in Eli’s massive polyglottism in the god child, which brings to mind Funes the Memorious. Eli also hears the sounds of thoughts. There is the synaesthesia of seeing colour in words in off-beat; while Rosie listens to the talk of inanimate objects in blink. The analogue of Kirlian photography – the suggestion of ghostly auras – segues everywhere in this collection; that is, there is an ambient aura around many of the main protagonists, while dream-like states also billow within narratives, flowing through, for example, top-knot and shapeshifter.

Maori mythology is ever-present, albeit in contemporaneous settings (in Maoritanga, past and present are all one anyway), as for example the way in which the mountains and rivers animate the kuia, her tipuna, her mokopuna in kaitiaki. Everything integrates ki te ao o nga iwi Maori; it’s only the one-dimensional Pakeha boyfriends sketched into these stories who are given to prate such lines as, ‘Perhaps there are things humanity is not aware of’, and ‘It’s just, the world’s so huge, you know? The universe is a freakin’ crazy place and I know nothing about it.’ Tina Makereti senses and depicts the Other as always here. Her magic realism is actually our true diurnal ethos. In effect, she is more a mirror to the Maori experience than she is a second-hand Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Carlos Fuentes. She is one who senses the atua as well as the kehua everywhere. Her stories transmogrify into purakau. The marginal becomes mainstream.

So Maui-Tikitiki-a-Taranga is always around the corner here: as in the tales top-knot, ahi, mokomoko – maybe also via the lizard king allusions in blink. Pania of the Reef scores her own anthropomorphic role in shapeshifter. And, of course, the lead-off piece is a clever reciting/re-siting of Tane Mahuta claymaking Hineahuone, after his schisms with Tumatauenga, in skin and bones. Tihei mauriora indeed: a heart-starter to get the collection pumping, eh.

So also, the whanau situations – growing up in broken homes, broken in more ways than one. Lack of pingers. Lack of love. Lack of food. Violence. Too much piss being drunk. Being a whangai. Being a solo Mum. Losing babies. Loser (Pakeha) boyfriends with grabby hands and grubby potential-to-impregnate. Lack of many male role-models. Multi-generational fluxes and flows. Dying with whanau me whanaunga around, and then the tangi. Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa is essentially about growing up Maori. Just bite into what men do. Savour kaitiaki. Taste the textures in the order of things. Chew on in the end – which, of course, just has to be the last tale in this book, detailing the tangential aspects of tangi.

And what after death but to begin again? After all: ‘There was a woman and a man/there was a man and a woman’ are the words, the thematic words, which not only fuse the cycle of the single story the order of things, but also iterate the cyclical nature of the entire collection.

Furthermore, this is a woman’s book, making it all the more powerful. By this I mean that the book is about female-centred experience: babies, birth, sex (frustrated or enjoyed), best friends (as in off-beat for example), best friends as (twin) sisters in mokomoko and tree, the rabbit and the moon – and the strong bonding thus involved. But even more crucial than all this is the blight and plight of male–female relationships – where the woman, all too often, is left – quite literally – holding the baby, though sometimes voluntarily. For, as Pania reflects: ‘Sometimes I think men just take what they want.’ Which is also why some stories meander, dribble into flaccidity; the relationship entailed was also going nowhere, and it is the woman left staunch or staunching.

All this combined thematic interplay is manifested most clearly in mokomoko, where the strands of Maori wahine in relation to Maui, of madness in relation to men (husband-fathers), of birth/death in relation to dreaming, all weave together. The underlying viewpoint of Makereti’s whole anthology is the one Hine-nui-te-po articulates: ‘There would always be this thing between men and women, both grappling with their fear, both loving and maiming and making a mess of it all. Even the gods made mistakes.’

One sister here learns how to exist again from her twin talking Hine’s story – just as Makereti talks tales, so as to reveal that their telling might indicate states of mind beyond just blather: ‘there was a way of understanding the world that went beyond words … the quiet place … was more real than all the words uttered in Babel.’ In the end, it is Makereti’s gift that her pakiwaitara convey the possibility of a transcendent silence.

Kia ora ano mo te taonga.

VAUGHAN RAPATAHANA is a poet and writer from Aotearoa New Zealand currently living and teaching in Hong Kong.

The Melon Cow Lick and the Coin Boy

August 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Christine Johnston
Hokitika Town, by Charlotte Randall (Penguin Books, 2011, $30)

It’s a long time since I read a novel where the narrative voice is the outstanding and most memorable feature, perhaps even the whole point of the literary enterprise. Charlotte Randall has created a likeable, though at times obtuse, first-person narrator, a Maori boy, making his way solo in the West Coast gold rush, like a child in a story by Charles Dickens. (Hokitika Town is subtitled ‘Life as a West Coast coin boy’. Who or what was a ‘coin boy’, I wondered – a child who dived for coins under a Rotorua bridge, perhaps? Wrong. Halfie, our narrator, doesn’t dive but can see the benefits of currency in the Pakeha world and goes after it in ways that are all his own.)

Charlotte Randall is an adventurous writer, not afraid to take on ambitious projects. Her second novel, The Curative (2000), featured William Lonsdale, as sane as the day is long, but incarcerated in London’s notorious Bedlam asylum in the early nineteenth century and undergoing horrendous cures for lunacy. It was an imaginative tour de force, winning considerable acclaim in New Zealand and overseas.

Subsequent novels have proved to be unpredictable in subject matter and scope: a retelling of the Faust story set in the world of professional tennis (Within the Kiss) and then a work that traced a present-day Petone family back to 1650s Oxford (What Happen Then, Mr Bones?). Hokitika Town, Randall’s sixth novel, starts as it means to go on:

I never seen nothing like this. Papa say whitey do things different from us, but he dint say how. Now I see it with my own eyes. Whitey’s ships is so big they choking up the river. Them ships got poles big as kauri trees and the poles got cloaks hanging off them. Mebee no one believe that back home, but I swear – whitey’s ships wear clothings.

The author uses Halfie’s narrative as expressed in his ever-improving ‘pidgin’ English to carry the story and to flesh out his personality. The words of other more articulate characters are written conventionally. Thus, while Ludovic says, ‘Sad? I’m not sad. I’m melancholic’, narrator Halfie writes ‘I melon cow lick.’

This use of language is inventive but presents its own challenges and irritations, especially when combined with a naive, often blundering, child-narrator, a big cast of characters (many endowed with given names and nicknames of Halfie’s invention), a frantic pace and an episodic structure. I didn’t always know what was going on and I felt uneasy at times. Was I laughing at Halfie or with him? Was Randall creating a kind of ‘Uncle Tom’ by attributing limited and idiosyncratic English to her protagonist? How would the Maori reader feel? (This reviewer was perhaps too squeamish.)

At first the writing style is an obstruction but the reader adapts and is soon powering through the streets of Hokitika and the cut-over bush with Halfie and the cast of eccentrics, as the pace of events quickens. There’s a lot going on, but it’s sometimes hard to see the wood for the trees.

The question that kept raising its head was ‘why’?

Halfie is always tearing off to earn a coin or avert a disaster, thereby creating several more, and we are with him one hundred-per-cent because he is a uniquely engaging protagonist. His broader motivation, however, remains mysterious. Why has he turned his back on his Maori ways and thrown in his lot with a bunch of such unattractive characters? Why does he stay with the alcoholic Ludovic, cleaning up vomit and keeping the hut tidy? Why does he care so much about the fate of Violet’s unborn child?

What distinguishes this novel also limits it. An articulate narrator might provide more hints for the reader. As it is, we are left to wonder. Even some ‘facts’ of this fiction remain blurry. Is Fortunatus a philanthropist or paedophile? It matters, surely?

While fragments of Halfie’s past emerge from time to time, they are not easy to grasp or put together in a coherent picture. His present tense is more compelling – the urge or the necessity to earn a few coins, to fill his belly and have a roof over his head in wet Westland, to be true to his friends and to outwit his enemies. Halfie is cunning enough to take matters into his own hands, often with unintended and calamitous results. He has our sympathy but he’s no angel: he tells lies, gets drunk on beer and high on painkillers. How old is he, I found myself wondering. Old enough to fall in love, apparently.

What drives the novel forwards? In some sense it’s Violet’s pregnancy that creates a time frame around which life surges. Whatever else happens, her belly is expanding and this is bound to cause trouble. Violet, a skivvy at the Bathsheba hotel, has befriended Halfie, helping him with his English and explaining the politics of Hokitika. She imagines herself to be more worldly-wise than her protégé, but is soon a girl in trouble with no one to lean on but Halfie. He can see what she can’t: that it will all end in tears. I found the episode of her giving birth less than plausible. Wouldn’t she seek out an older woman to assist her rather than a lad she already has grave doubts about?

The novel has drama that always threatens to boil over into melodrama in the Wild West tradition. There is One Eye and his gang versus the Gold Escort; parties, balls, and ‘bunfights’ at the Bathsheba pub; and Griffith’s messy demise. More rounded and satisfying characters include alcoholic Ludovic, the pious ‘philosopher’, and his nemesis – Kaspar Schmidt, atheist and free-thinker. Needless to say, their ideological disputes are largely lost on Halfie.

Some characters – the publican and his wife, for instance, who seem grotesquely unsympathetic in the first half of the novel – mellow into humanity as the story goes on. (Mr Flewelling used to confine his wife in a drugged state in her bedroom.) Towards the novel’s end there arises a ‘happy families’ atmosphere that is heart-warming but seems at odds with what has gone before.

Still, this is a novel with heart and the reader can only rejoice that Violet’s baby brings out the best in people. Halfie has turned things around. Randall has created a character who may baffle the reader, but there is no doubt that he engages our sympathy. In the end, wanting to be known by his Maori name Tiwakawaka, he embarks on a new adventure with a more purposeful and rejuvenated Ludovic:

Ludo take my shoulders and turn me to look at him. He put a palm on each of my cheeks. They rilly cold. Then he say I a boy that bring sunshine to his soul.

CHRISTINE JOHNSTON is a Dunedin writer. She has written novels, short stories and essays.

Siege Symphony

July 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Graeme Lay
The Conductor, by Sarah Quigley (Vintage, 2011), 303 pp., $39.99.

Sarah Quigley’s fourth novel opens with a small but ominous harbinger. In the spring of 1941, the renowned Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich is informed by his friend, music teacher Ivan Sollertinsky, that two German diplomats have cancelled suit orders with Leningrad’s most reputable tailor. The signal is significant – as the German diplomats are leaving the city and returning to Berlin, it seems that the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 is about to collapse. After it does, in mid-summer 1941, the Germans invade the Soviet Union and lay siege to Leningrad, bringing ghastly privations to the city’s civilian population.

Within this hideous environment Shostakovich (1906-1975) composes his Seventh Symphony, a personal magnum opus which will be broadcast by the Soviet authorities in order to sustain the morale of the population. Shostakovich has for some time had an uneasy relationship with Stalin’s regime, but is tolerated because of his popularity with the people. As Sollertinsky remarks to Shostakovich, after the composer has called him a ‘masterful dissembler’: ‘We both know that dissemblers live longer than dissidents’.

Karl Eliasberg, the unmarried conductor of the below-par Leningrad Radio Orchestra, lives in an apartment with his nagging, petulant mother. He worships Shostakovich, who is everything he is not. Eliasberg is an insecure loner whose own musicians barely tolerate him. Neurotic and a stammerer, he seems incapable of conducting even a Leningrad tramcar. Closer to Shostakovich is violinist Nikolai Nikolayev, a widower and father of a beloved nine-year-old, Sonya, a promising cellist. Another precious possession of the Nikolayev family is Sonya’s cello, a Storioni, which the girl plays during her birthday celebrations, drawing sincere praise from Shostakovich.

The siege intensifies. Leningrad is garrotted by the German Army and blitzed mercilessly by the Luftwaffe. Although most of the city’s leading musicians are evacuated to the Far East of the USSR, Shostakovich stays, digging ditches and fire-watching from the rooftops by day, then working through the night on his symphony. Barely tolerated by Nina, his long-suffering wife, he subsists on bread, vodka and cigarettes.

Dread sets in among Leningrad’s citizens, who know that the bitter winter is looming. The city’s children, including Sonya, are evacuated by train to the countryside. This causes anguish for Nikolai, whose grief becomes unbearable when he hears that the train his young daughter was on has been bombed and derailed by the Germans.

Under the most constrained of circumstances, Shostakovich labours on with his composition, shutting himself away in his room and cutting himself off from the demands of his family. Close to despair, the composer wonders, ‘When would life stop getting in the way of music?’ At the same time, poor Eliasberg tries to cope with his rebellious orchestra as well as the querulous demands of his mother.

While the siege, the bitter winter and starvation beset Leningrad’s inhabitants, the novel’s central characters – Shostakovich, Eliasberg and Nikolayev – confront their various demons. Shostakovich wonders if he can possibly finish his symphony. Even sheet paper on which to write his score is almost unobtainable. Nikolayev grieves for his lost daughter, painfully regretful that he ever sent her away. His sister, Tanya, threatens to barter Sonya’s priceless cello for food. Eliasberg struggles to cope with his disintegrating orchestra, whose oboeist, Alexander, is openly contemptuous of him.

The privations of the people of Leningrad have become so extreme that even the corpses of the dead are stripped for food. The horrors of the siege, the wrecking of innocent bodies and the desperation of people driven to live like foraging animals is vividly evoked. Eliasberg is close to despair: ‘In the long winter weeks that followed, he crawled through the days half-blinded by grief and rage. The frozen city splintered under the German shells, and bodies piled up at the sides of Nevsky Prospect. Stick-thin women stumbled to the Neva and drew water through holes drilled in the ice. Because Elias’s vision was failing, he tried to make sense of the disintegrating world by listening to it. What sounds did he hear? The grating of sled-runners loaded with corpses. Huge explosions as mass burial pits were created with dynamite. The howls of stray dogs and cats, slaughtered by Leningraders desperate for meat’.

When Eliasberg is able to provide a grateful Shostakovich with score paper, the conductor comes closer to his hero. The Soviet authorities then arrange for Shostakovich and his family to be evacuated, taking them far from the conflict so that Dimitri can finish his composition. Completed from afar, the score is flown over the German lines and back into Leningrad. Now it is over to Eliasberg and his pitiful orchestra to rehearse, and eventually perform Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony.

Unexpectedly but heroically, Eliasberg rises to this extreme challenge. Freed from the hungry clutches of his mother, supported by a lovely, wounded ballerina, Nina Bronnikova, he overcomes his self-pity, learns to love and be loved, and becomes resolute in his determination to do justice to the composer he so admires. Shostakovich now being off-stage, Eliasberg moves to the forefront of the narrative and justifies his role in capturing the novel’s title.

With its assured characterisation and trenchant dialogue, and informed by the author’s musical background (Quigley has played cello herself), The Conductor’s narrative begins slowly but gathers movement, momentum and intensity. The sometimes bitchy world of the professional musician provides a chorus to the story. Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky come in for some scathing comments, and even the master, Shostakovich himself, is accused by Eliasberg at one stage of ‘referencing other works’, in the Russian’s case, Ravel. The novel then builds to a tantalising crescendo in which the final movement – the broadcast of the symphony – is delectably anticipated. Eliasberg is on the podium.

‘When he cranes slightly forward, he can see a row of microphones pointed like guns towards the stage, ready to catch the Leningrad Symphony and broadcast it to the world. He takes a deep breath and steps into the blaze of electric light, far brighter than any sun. Sweat leaps on his back, the orchestra rises to its feet, and the audience also stands, a dark gleaming mass of military badges and medals, and pearls.’ Art is about to triumph over war, death and destruction.

There are a few jarring notes in The Conductor. Characters bite their lips, tongues, and roll their eyes, rather too frequently, while the use of the contemporary words ‘recycled’ and ‘inappropriate’ are out of register for scenes occurring in 1942. But these are relatively minor linguistic quibbles.

Originally from Christchurch, the recipient of a Buddle Findlay Sargeson fellowship in 1998 and the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers Residency in 2000, Quigley has lived in Berlin for the past eleven years. This European experience has been put to good use. The Conductor is by any standards a remarkable novel. Works of fiction depicting classical music and musicians are notoriously difficult to transfer to the pages of a novel, yet by credibly transforming Eliasberg from underdog to hero, Quigley succeeds in validating the conductor’s veneration of Shostakovich and at the same time provides the novel with a hearteningly upbeat conclusion. And to fill any imaginative musical vacuums from which the reader may suffer, the novel comes with a CD of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony. Ambitious in its conception and stunningly executed, The Conductor is a work of truly international stature.

GRAEME LAY is an Auckland-based reviewer, writer and editor. His recent books include the non-fiction work In Search of Paradise: Artists and Writers in the Colonial South Pacific and the novel Alice & Luigi.

World Turned Upside Down

June 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Mia Watkins
Wulf, by Hamish Clayton (Penguin NZ, 2011), 240 pp., $30.00

Time escapes Wulf, leaps and bounds and bubbles and weaves between the words on the pages. This is no armchair narrative, you don’t get to cosy-up in a warm blanket sipping hot chocolate, a semi-conscious passive recipient of a predictable, orderly narrative. Thinking is compulsory. Even little knowledge of New Zealand history is a passport to thrive on Wulf and if you don’t know, here’s a fine way to enter the conversation. Wulf rewards the diligent reader. Dive into the ancient, imagine a time before time, the origin of time, words heavy-laden with ancestors treading deep into the infinite as you read.

Te Rauparaha — the ‘Great Wolf’, ‘Southern Napoleon’, monster-demon, warlord, magician, cannibal-poet, ruthless, cunning and mightiest of New Zealand chiefs — permeates the narrative like the underside of a long cloud foreshadowing history. Traversing the landscape barefoot he glances behind, spies blood on a stick broken underfoot; the land is bleeding (his foot is bleeding) but the land is bleeding; flesh is land, people are land. If you haven’t forayed very far into the Maori world, be prepared to turn everything you thought you knew upside down. New Zealand is, after all, geographically upside-down to England; a fitting image for a meeting of worlds. The Southern Cross is an anchor, gold is green, geographical drawings are portraits of faces staring back at you, trees root deep into a sky beneath sky and history is prophesied. Language doesn’t reside in ink on paper but lives on faces and dances in caves, riverbeds and markings in the sand; a vocabulary of the natural world in which Te Rauparaha is highly educated.

Cowell, trading master of the brig Elizabeth, bridges the impasse of mirror opposites. He’s been to New Zealand before, traded and spoken the native tongue. The crew ponder his true allegiance while listening awestruck to his tales of mighty chiefs, shrunken heads, giant eagles, alliances and betrayals, peace-time, slavery, infanticide and creation-myth and legend. Tribes fade in and out of existence like twinkling stars puncturing the black void of night, shifting in the kaleidoscope. Earthquakes shift land too, creating deep ravines, echoless pits and mountainous ranges. Details are bloody, gruesome and cruel; corpses adorn the landscape — draped from trees, littering waterways. A young boy is killed with a single snap of the neck, a young woman is ensnared to her death, tracked, butchered and cannibalised. The carnage is savage and not for the faint-hearted; and yet equally these constellations of circumstance are breathtaking, dizzying, wondrous.

Wulf is also deeply paranoid, and so it should be, it’s historical fiction. History is subjective and often as enigmatic as the Old English poem ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’ that inspires the novel. Who tells the story and how do you know who they are? History is a fanfare of voices heard and unheard, stories told and untold, morphed, altered and contentious, a cornucopia of image, sound and flesh. This is refracted throughout the novel. The crew aboard the Elizabeth politely eye-ball each other, pry into corners of privacy, discover themselves there and become more paranoid. True intentions and identities are suspect. For these illiterates in an alien land, the inability to decipher a layout of shells on a beach, a fire on Kapiti Island or sounds of breaking sticks is unnerving, as is the inevitable default to familiar frames of reference. Is a surreptitiously placed basket of fish a gift of food or a trap? Even alone in nature they feel watched, tracked, spied upon, entered by unseen spirits. All eye all askance. Te Rauparaha observes from land, Cowell and crew from sea, each astutely aware of each other’s presence, in dreams and in waking. Omens, visions and premonitions trip over themselves, watching, waiting nervously for their respective fates to collide.

In refusing to name his narrator, Hamish Clayton supersedes the perennial problem of pleasing history (without losing authenticity) and teases, taunts even his reader and critics by denying disembarkation. It’s your story too, you don’t get out that easily, not without a deep look in the mirror. Nameless narration causes you to recognise a little of yourself in the fabric of the story. As the novel unravels, Cowell’s charm fades as he is seen for what he really is; the bridge retreats and mirror opposites start to look the same. These tacticians begin to reflect the inconsolable truth of each skilfully playing the other at his own blood-soaked game, each a Trojan horse destroying the other from within, and yet much more like the other than they dare to think or even realise.

Authorship must be more than the clever arrangement of words on a page. Words breathe when they command attention, when complicity is mandatory; otherwise they fall away like dead cells. Clayton achieves this in Wulf, a haunting, powerful evocation of a book I loved and clung to, even as it sank me under an ocean of tears.

MIA WATKINS is a Dunedin-based writer most recently published in Landfall and The International Literary Quarterly. She is inspired by a simple love of reading and writing.