fiction – Page 45

Dancing Flames

November 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Azure Rissetto

The Trouble with Fire by Fiona Kidman (Random House, 2011) 302 pp. $36.99.

‘That’s the trouble with fire, you never know which way it will turn.’ So says Alice Scott, a young visitor to the 1860s Canterbury farm of Annie and Frederick Broome in the title story of Fiona Kidman’s latest collection, The Trouble With Fire. The random, haphazard energies of fire noticed by Alice might stand for the nature of storytelling itself, the way stories flicker from person to person.

In Kidman’s hands fire becomes a potent and magical symbol threading through her narratives as she sets about illuminating the domestic lives of ordinary New Zealanders. Kidman spins skeins that cross from the colonial to the postcolonial, the provincial to the metropolitan, from mother to daughter, and then criss-cross back again. Just as fire sparks, spreads, and simpers, so too she displays an ability to seize on aspects of her scenarios and enlarge upon them to suit her larger purpose again and again in this collection.

The eleven stories are divided into three sequences. Part I is made up of six distinct episodes, featuring characters we can recognise as present-day city-dwellers, grappling with issues from the past; Part II centres more closely on a single event which may or may not have occurred on a Waikato farm during the Great Depression; and Part III fictionally recreates scenes from the lives of two ‘real-life’ historical figures. The ‘Fire’ of the title moves from the literal to the figurative, offering fires in the bush, and underground, and in the distance; but it also becomes an index of extreme emotion: adolescent lust, homicidal anger, malicious envy.

The fiery power of ‘storytelling’ is evident everywhere, starting with the opening story, ‘The Italian Boy’. The make-believe gossip that surrounds the Italian boy of the title and Hilary, a young girl in small-town New Zealand in the mid-twentieth century, acts to shroud like smokescreen the real incestuous passion between the brother and sister bullies of her childhood. Only years later, following a visit from her school-friend Meryl, does Hilary confirm that the ‘pregnancy’ which preceded her departure from the town was merely the spiteful fancy of a fifteen-year old girl.

Storytelling is a hot and molten art form, with the volatile capacity to flare and die away, to generate different intensities of emotion according to ever-shifting contexts. The breakdown in communication between a husband and wife pair is the first sign that all is not right for these New Zealand visitors to Vietnam in ‘Silks’. As soon as the husband is quarantined in a local hospital this absence of understanding transmutes into a nightmare of cross-cultural (mis)translation where, in the absence of a shared oral language, every mute gesture becomes imbued with impossible significance. The land itself tells of other stories.

If the intense power of storytelling to carry us through hard times is not renewed by a fresh spark of some kind, it must inevitably fail and be extinguished. Trouble brews for the lovers in ‘The History of It’ when they squabble over the number of children they are supposed to have between them, at least as far as they construct their (false) story for others. Eventually, the actual loss of another child signals their passion for one another is over.

Sometimes trouble arises from what we choose to read into something. For Simon in ‘Heaven Freezes’, a single moment in the car-park of his local supermarket precipitates the end of his second marriage, but it’s also an epiphany — it allows him to finally acknowledge the truth regarding the end of his first marriage.

At other times, trouble lies in wait when we refuse to acknowledge something that is right in front of us. When the fire-spotter husband in ‘Extremes’ fails to recognise the key signs of his wife’s adultery, the child she unexpectedly delivers registers their different kinds of infidelity — the husband’s failure of observation, the wife’s literal unfaithfulness — in her appearance. The nickname he bestows upon the child, ‘firebug’, registers the threat of illicit sexual combustibility in a long-term, seemingly stable marriage.

For Rachel, the other expectant mother in ‘Extremes’, the story of the termination of her love child – a ‘lump of tissue’ which has resulted from a quick ‘office shag’ – is marginalised and eclipsed by the birth announcement which declares the safe arrival of a son to her one-time lover and his wife. Just as she imagines her lost child would have carried the revealing fire-orange hair of its father, Mark, so Rachel soon discovers that the stain of illicit passion is impossible to erase from the genealogy of her life story.

The disfigured appearance of an unwanted child also informs the truncated narrative of a vanished mother in Part II of the collection. When the adoptive parents of an illegitimate newborn return her because of an unsightly birthmark on her face and neck, the act of rejection reverberates through the generations, and for readers as well. As we move from ‘The Man From Tooley Street’ on to ‘Some Other Man’ and finally ‘Under Water’, readers witness family members rhythmically re-write and re-erase the story of the woman’s disappearance, much like the fires which sporadically reignite and recede underneath the farm where the family resides. Yet since a missing body forestalls closure of any kind, the end of the third story in Part II paradoxically directs us back to the beginning.

The final section, Part III, is the most explicit in acknowledging the self-renewing fire of storytelling as it ‘fictionalises’ episodes from the lives of both Gordon Coates — Prime Minister of New Zealand from 1925–1928 — and Lady Barker, the famous colonial writer. In the last, eponymous, story, Kidman rephrases scenes from Barker’s memoir Station Life in New Zealand (1870). Arguably, the dual third-person/first-person narration here illustrates the impossibility of any final narrative authority when it comes to the telling of New Zealand tales.

The stories in this collection are written with unrushed clarity, unforced compassion, and unmannered economy. Fiona Kidman is a veteran storyteller whose intuitive brilliance is undeniably in evidence throughout The Trouble With Fire.

AZURE RISSETTO is currently pursuing her PhD in English Literature at the University of Auckland.

Generation Xperimental

October 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Jodie Dalgleish

Zebulon: A Cautionary Tale, by Richard Meros, (Lawrence and Gibson, 2011) 169 pp. $24.00; Getting under Sail, by Brannavan Gnanalingam, (Lawrence and Gibson, 2011) 236 pp., $24.00; The Constant Losers, by Alex Wild, (Titus Books, 2010), 189 pp., $30.00.

The ridiculous is skilfully made both funny and thought-provoking in Richard Meros’ Zebulon: A Cautionary Tale, recently published by the writers’ co-operative Lawrence and Gibson. Not only does the book present a writer’s hilariously sadomasochistic efforts to dominate a few fledging writers in order to spark his own creativity, but the head of long-dead Che Guevera is made to thaw on a shelf of the FBI and head south, levitating and directing itself with a new-found power. What’s more, these two unlikely threads of storyline are brought together and intertwined to form a novel that playfully and pointedly explores the potential of experimental fiction and the act of writing itself.

As the book began, I suspected that the writer was going to do little more than indulge in the pursuit of smartass-edly writing about himself. But by the end of the second chapter he had begun to reveal his particular ability to throw reality around since ‘no mere story, especially one posing as auto-biography, can approximate reality’. Meros convinces the reader that the book’s main character is also its author, slyly establishing a chronological link to his previous book, On the Conditions and Possibilities of Helen Clark Taking Me as Her Young Lover. At the same time, he is the book’s main character: a writer typing words that ‘flopped off [his] computer, onto their pages, and onto the floor.’

At the hands of Sally and Leo the main character and author, Richard, is unexpectedly smeared in a number of condiments and subjected to an erotic encounter with a book on tattooed nudes. Somehow inspired, he devises a plan to dominate would-be writers, and reels in three recruits like trout that each require ‘a different type of tickling.’ In master and servant sessions they are slapped, pinched and caressed into writing, without drifting from their narrative flow. But by the end of the fifth chapter, Richard has inevitably and unsatisfactorily slept with one of his recruits, fired another and been overcome by the normalising demands of Riley, the third.

In the sixth chapter Meros goes further, throwing the reader into a narrative that is almost surreal. Taking the ridiculous to a new extreme, Che Guevera’s defrosted head is able to move as if controlled by the joystick of his new life force. Levitating without friction, Che traverses America at his own discretion, creating hysterical rumours and headlines along the way. At the end of the chapter, however, the author presents ‘Richard’s comments’ on that chapter’s text, making it that of Riley, his only productive recruit. And so follows a to-ing and fro-ing of chapters that alternate between the story of Richard and Che.

Over a lengthy nine chapters, Che Guevera achieves a second coming and eventually recognises the impotence, capitalisation and stylisation of his so-called revolution. Co-incidentally, Richard finds a new recruit, Karl, that turns the tables on him, more fully discovers his own impotence as he begins to write again, is suddenly engaged to be married and tries to quit the Lawrence and Gibson Group. This gives substance and movement to Meros’ novel, but if the author did wish to draw parallels between the idea of failed or eventually impotent revolution and writing, he could have made more of the play between these chapters.

Part way through his novel’s nine chapter interplay, Meros infuriates the reader. He takes the story of Che — which is supposedly that of Riley — into his own clutches, sneaking in bits of language he used in his first few chapters. The reader — who is also likely to be a writer, given the experimental nature of Meros’ novel — is likely to ‘tut tut’ and shake a finger. Fully aware of his flaunting of ‘the rules’, however, Meros deliberately plays a trick on the reader and rescues the reputation of experimental fiction in the last chapters of his book.

As it turns out, the members of Lawrence and Gibson (which include Riley and Karl) decide to declare their insolvency. But on the insistence of their accountant, the uncooperative cooperative’s James Marr claims the incomplete manuscripts of its last active members and tries to compile a book that will make enough money to cover their debts. He ‘[cobbles] the confiscated texts into something half-coherent, whittling it all down to two plotlines,’ sends it to Richard to both finish and edit, and calls it ‘Zebulon: A Cautionary Tale.’ In one fell swoop Meros finishes by throwing questions about the authorship of his novel up in the air, and causes the reader to rethink his entire novel as those questions fall.

***

Lawrence and Gibson’s other recently released book, Getting Under Sail by Brannavan Gnanalingam, is less successful. Gnanalingam recounts his extraordinary road trip from Morocco to Ghana with two guys previously his high school friends. It is, as advertised, part-travelogue, part-picaresque and part-confessional. This is what makes it interesting and worthy of attention. However, the language, while at times surprisingly refreshing, is often overburdened by grammar and diluted by unnecessary ‘factual’ or autobiographical information. In addition, the dialogue between Gnanalingam and his travel companions is often banal and the laddish dialogue that includes frequent mention of girlfriends as ‘good bitches’ will, I suspect, sound unreal to most readers.

With some direction and a good edit, Gnanalingam’s book could have been polished into a gem. For the author can conjure a place with a stellar phrase. Of Cairo he writes: ‘the pollution snarled at my eyes, stuck its tongue down my throat like an over-enthusiastic first kiss.’ In the medina of Marrakech: ‘music filled every spare corner … Moroccans [were] taking on the blues, or waltzes with traditional instruments that convinced the sky dust and night air to dance a dervish around the open space.’ In Mauritania, the aroma of fried fish ‘stood out in the blanket of dust.’ In Senegal, a van ‘was a stutterer under stress’, and ‘a sharp, cool, palliative beer’ washed away heat. ‘Tamale was a city lurking in wait.’ And in Busua, fishing boats ‘flopped onto land like a swimmer too tired to get out of a pool.’

Perhaps the most interesting, and yet underdeveloped, thing about Gnalanalingam’s account is his exploration of his own identity as a ‘darkie’ from a ‘white’ country travelling as a tourist in Africa. Throughout the book, the author gives little snippets of his Sri-Lankan heritage and muses on the nature of ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’. Poignantly, Gnanalingam calls himself ‘the black man who is white’. On the back of this is a load of guilt, contradiction and conflict that works its way to the book’s end. Gnanalingam does fully understand and explore the strange experience that is travelling, however. He mentions the need to explore the world for the sake of it, the practice of ticking off attractions, the way a traveller remains dislocated from people and their so-called monuments, the fact that ‘tourists’ and ‘locals’ inevitably act out their respective roles, and the supposed superiority of the well-travelled.

***

Like Zebulon, The Constant Losers by Alex Wild is a surprising and successful work of experimental fiction. Written as a series of zines that combine text-speak, doodles and photocopied notes, it offers funny and appealing musings on music, relationships, books and sexuality, among other things. Of particular note is its ability to be fully Generation Y (‘OMGWTF’) while it draws on plenty of music and other stuff dear and recognisable to a Generation Xer, such as the practice of making and exchanging audio cassette tapes.

It might seem unlikely that any writer could maintain a zine format with its truncated manner of speech and keep the reader engaged, but Wild pulls it off with ease. She lets her zine-like format structure her novel’s text under snappy headings and uses her doodles as visual cues. At the same time, she offers a recognisable narrative flow. She has a deft touch and a way of making her story live through her own kind of content. In particular, the tone of her central characters, Frankie and Amy, skilfully carries the smile, wink and nudge of the author. And the battle-of-the-zines that develops between them and ultimately brings them together is nothing less than a sweet read.

JODIE DALGLEISH is a curator, critic and author currently living in Wellington. She is a regular contributor to the online art journal EyeContact, and has a Masters degree in Creative Writing from the Auckland University of Technology.

A Father’s Rights

October 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Brett Lupton

Settlers’ Creek, by Carl Nixon  (Random House, 2010), 330 pp. $29.99.

I have been an admirer of Carl Nixon ever since, some years ago, I read his short story ‘My Father Running with a Dead Boy’. Settler’s Creek is Nixon’s second novel and, having read this, I want very much to seek out his first, Rocking Horse Road, written in 2007.

The story in Settler’s Creek is told through the third-person perspective of Box Saxton, a man devastated by the sudden death of his stepson. Worse, the boy’s biological father, a Maori elder, takes the body without consent to be buried in ancestral land. Through his shock and grief, and memories of his own unfortunate family life, Box is compelled to set out to recover the son he has lost.

Nixon obviously recognises that much of the emotional power is already in the material and through tasteful changes of tense, from past to present, he adds additional focus as needed. All of which culminates in a simple but evocative style of prose that subtly reinforces themes and provides insight into the lives of the characters and how they may later react.

Box looked at the tools left hanging on the walls of the shed. A lot of them were missing now …. When he was very young Box hadn’t understood that his grandfather had drawn around each tool in here with a heavy marker and then painted in the outline in black on the wall. Back then, Box, the boy, had believed … that the tool had left behind its shadow … He looked at the black marks now, faded but still visible. Surrounded by the smells of linseed and earth, he stood for a long time and stared at the wall of lost shadows.

Yet despite the relative simplicity of plot and style, the issues Settler’s Creek addresses are certainly not so simple. In fact its cluster of thematic concerns are so snarly and gnarly, it took some thought to decide what this novel is really about. An ambivalent book for an ambivalent time: because it hugs the centre of a road that traces the nation’s bicultural faultline, as if testing territoriality, I am sure this book will mean different things to different people.

Initially the main concern appears to be the obvious clash of opposing world-views. And Nixon devotes much of the novel to developing this dynamic: the European equivalent of tangata whenua symbolised by a family bible; the dual cultural background of his stepson Stephen/Tipene; several examples of the inability of both sides to communicate effectively. He clearly wants a balanced view of both cultures.

But this is also where the novel occasionally wavers. Exactly because both sides of the argument have validity, and there are no readily apparent solutions, Nixon must act as a kind of facilitator — an explainer and ameliorator. As a result, there is sometimes the palpable sense of being led by a firm and insistent (‘fatherly’) hand through the issues. I feel the intentions of the story, and the storyteller, would be better served by allowing the reader the same space to think about the events as that which they’re allowed for emotional reaction — otherwise, paradoxically, the novel, wanting to maintain an even keel (overly concerned with everyone getting ‘a fair hearing’), is in danger of tipping into melodrama, bathos, or worse.

Balancing the cultural issues also distracts from what I feel is the novel’s true thematic focus: not the larger issue of social politics, but the ostensibly smaller – but no less important – question of what constitutes true fatherhood? This is where the novel derives its true power and purpose, and this is primarily why, I think, the author elects to tell the story through the suddenly bereft protagonist. Nixon is at his best when writing directly about Box and his experiences.

And when at his best, all concerns for the political issues that tend to divide us as a nation are swept away by what really matters, the immediacy of personal experience:

Now, looking at the damage, Box couldn’t help imagining latex hands cracking open his son’s chest. He felt a surge of anger. What the hell were they looking for anyway? Wasn’t it obvious that it was hanging from his neck that had killed the kid? Box imagined them reaching into the excavated chest and lifting out the boy’s heart. They would have held it up, turned it towards the light and slowly rolled it over for closer inspection. How much had it weighed? he wondered.

Notwithstanding the odd stumble, Settler’s Creek, with its exploration of contemporary moral complexities, and with its evocation of a particular time and place, lingers in the mind as a fine novel. And, despite my not having read his Rocking Horse Road (a situation soon to be rectified), this novel, in my estimation, is a necessary and successful step forward for this award-winning short-story exponent in getting to grips with the technical complexities of the larger form. It seems obvious to me that, from the luminous and careful crafting of this novel, and his dedication to building on that craft, Carl Nixon is destined to become one of New Zealand’s leading writers.

BRETT LUPTON is a writer and musician who lives in Dunedin. He is currently completing a PG (dip) Arts in English at the University of Otago.

The Unsuspecting Huia

September 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Tim Jones

Mr Allbones’ Ferrets: An historical pastoral satirical scientifical romance, with mustelids, by Fiona Farrell (Vintage, 2007), 217 pp., $27.99.

Growing up in rural Southland, I was aware of a powerful and supposedly benevolent body called the Acclimatisation Society, which – so I gathered – had the job of ensuring that river, stream and field were stocked with the fish and game best suited to delight the nation’s anglers and hunters. As I grew older, I learned that these benevolent overlords of the natural world were not, in fact, so benevolent after all, and that the story of ‘acclimatisation’ was a story of disaster after disaster, as wave after wave of English fauna was imported and let loose on native ecosystems ill suited to receive the aggressive intruders.

First the accidental releases of rats, mice, cats — then the deliberate; surely the rabbit, so charming on an English sward, would prove no less charming hopping about on a New Zealand meadow? When the rabbit proved to be an all too successful immigrant, threatening the pasture on which the colonists depended, then an even more fateful decision was made: to import their natural predators, the weasels, stoats and ferrets, to control them.

The Acclimatisation Societies are all Fish and Game Councils now, and wiser with it, but the consequences of their past diligence are all around us, in silent forests and empty nests. Therefore, it was a bit of a stretch for me to take on the task of reviewing a novel, set in the 1880s, in which the protagonist is a man whose job it is to catch ferrets and transport them safely to New Zealand to control the rabbit problem. But I have read and enjoyed books about unpleasant professions before — Gene Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer, for one — and I enjoyed Mr Allbones’ Ferrets too.

The novel does pretty much what it says on the tin: it’s historical, it’s pastoral (at least initially), there is science afoot, there is a romance, and, by George, there are mustelids aplenty. I didn’t really notice the satire, but there are strong doses of dramatic irony. To fit all that in 217 pages is a challenging assignment for any author, but Fiona Farrell’s assured command of literary technique means that Mr Allbones’ Ferrets rises to the challenge, though not always without strain.

It’s not a criticism of this novel to say that the most memorable characters are the ferrets. The novel opens with a marvellous set-piece in which we see Walter Allbones going about his business, and his favourite ferret going about hers, in a happy if risky concord. For Walter Allbones is a poacher; he poaches rabbits, and Pinky the ferret is his chosen implement. In a scene so vivid it will stay with me long after the plot of the novel has grown hazy in my memory, we learn how poacher and ferret work together to lay pink, juicy rabbit on the table. By the end of this scene, I was on the side — for the duration of the novel — of Allbones and his ferrets, and also confident that I was in very good authorial hands.

Then, on his way home with his spoils, Allbones runs into trouble, and that trouble leads him, all spit and polish, to the door of the big house at two o’clock on a sunny afternoon. Mr Pitford, a gentleman, has need of a man who knows his way around a mustelid, for Mr Pitford is in the business of acclimatisation, and the colonists in distant New Zealand are crying out for help with their rabbit problem.

And Mr Pitford has a granddaughter called Eugenia — a young, beautiful, granddaughter, with whom Allbones is smitten, and who in turn does not seem entirely immune to his rustic charms.

And this is where I went ‘uh-oh’, for in a thousand novels and films Ken Shabby, the tramp/poacher/gamekeeper, has lusted after Rosemary, the virginal daughter of the manor; and in a good proportion of those, Rosemary has raised his station or lowered hers. How could Fiona Farrell bring anything new to this well-worn trope? To make life even tougher for Eugenia, she is also Exposition Girl, tasked with bringing Allbones up to speed on the Theory of Evolution and the inevitable extinction of weaker species, and in general to show Allbones and we, the readers, how the Victorians rebranded Darwin’s work as a moral justification for their own rapacious colonialism.

So, after the vividness of the opening scenes, I found this section of a novel something of a let-down. Of all the major characters — Allbones the poacher, his rival/tormentor/reluctant ally Metcalf, Pitford the paterfamilias — it was Eugenia I found the least convincing. Nevertheless, developments late in the novel do provide a retrospective explanation for much of her behaviour and her character. Her given name is surely no accident.

But then the chief dramatis personae and their horde of ferrets take ship for New Zealand, and we get the second of the great set pieces — set pieces which, though it is high praise indeed, reminded me in their intensity and vividness of the great mowing scene in Anna Karenina. Fiona Farrell gives us a panorama of the colonists boarding the Adam and Eve, 999 tons and bound for Wellington direct, with the rich well-housed, the poor crammed into narrow berths, and the ferrets, securely caged, standing between them.

The terrors and pleasures of the journey to New Zealand are well described, but what stuck with me most vividly was the sense that, on such a voyage, the social order was being overturned as well as the seasons. In a new land, the poor may rise, but so too the rich may fall. Chance, circumstance, and old sins brought to light can lead to new dispositions.

In all the human drama of the voyage and its aftermath, I feared that the ferrets would be forgotten, but the novel ends as it should. Walter Allbones and his new bride are riding upcountry from Wellington in the gig that will take them to their new home carved out from the bush. Caged in the wagon behind them rides Pinky the ferret, pregnant with her next litter, and eager for release:

Her pink nose whiffles as she smells the sweet deep soil of her new home. She smells feathers and flesh and warm blood. She hears thousands upon thousands of birds singing songs new to her: korimako and tui. Piopio, miromiro, matata, hihi, kakariki, kaka and unsuspecting huia. (213)

Walter Allbones and his kin have faded into archival records, old photos, and genealogy, while Pinky’s descendants are very much with us. Well done, that man!

In Australia, I once stayed in a house run by ferret breeders. A ferret tried to get into my sleeping bag. I had to leap in the air and shriek before it saw reason. I don’t like ferrets very much. I did like this novel.

TIM JONES is a Wellington-based poet, writer and editor. His second collection of short stories, Transported (Random House, Auckland, 2008), was longlisted for the 2008 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He blogs at: http://timjonesbooks.blogspot.com/

Two Women in Berlin

September 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Dieter Riemenschneider

I Am Always With You, by Philip Temple (Random House, 2006), 447 pp., $36.99; Hand Me Down World, by Lloyd Jones (Penguin NZ, 2010), 313 pp., $40.00.

The title of this review might very well have been ‘Two Men in Berlin’, since the writing of both novels was obviously closely connected to their authors’ stay in the city as guests of Creative New Zealand’s Berlin Writers Residency, respectively in 2003–04 and 2007–08. Yet if their choice of Berlin as the stage of action was almost inevitable, they must have decided on good reasons for placing women at the centre of their stories.

Philip Temple’s sculptor Hermann Blumenthal in his last letter from the war in August 1942 to his wife Maria in Berlin reassuringly closes with ‘I am always with you’. These words gradually begin haunting his widow in her dreams and finally, in the postwar years, she begins to hallucinate her husband’s actual physical presence. Maria, only just forty years old, gentle, sensitive, once a budding writer and the mother of two very young boys, loses her grasp on reality and finally gives way. This is Temple’s first theme.

Though Sarah Quigley in her Listener review of 2006 complained with good reason about Temple’s failure to merge the documentary and the fictional, it seems feasible to me to judge his achievement from a less literary-critical angle, especially because I belong to the author’s own age group. The psychological, economic and financial problems experienced by a young widow with children during and after the war years are not at all unfamiliar to me. The novel succeeds in narrating the fate of this small family, and in the unfolding process of Maria’s inability to bear her burden – in spite of the support extended to her by her husband’s artist colleagues and her women friends, and in spite of her sense of responsibility to her sons.

In the end, the many losses she is made to suffer – of her husband, of her three siblings and of her mother, as well as of her childhood home, the deprivations of the war and postwar years in Berlin – combined with her resignation of never having the time and strength to fulfil her deepest wish to become a writer – prove too much. It is a fate Maria shared with so many of her female contemporaries.

In the course of narrating her story, Temple moves away from the perspective of an observer, and instead lets an inner voice speak to the reader – and here I disagree with Quigley’s comment. On the contrary, interior monologue and stream of consciousness do not replace the narrator, but rather in Maria’s last years they relate more and more closely to the tone and content of her letters to a female friend and in this way almost take over her story.

Temple’s second major concern is his wish to reconsider his own (and also that of many of his non-German readers) deeply ingrained conviction about the evil nature of all Germans lumped together, a view the author’s generation had adopted – and was made to adopt as the accepted wisdom – during and after World War II. Counterpointing Maria’s more or less fictionalised life story, Temple the historian retells the story of the group of artists to which Blumenthal belonged, the Ateliergemeinschaft Klosterstrasse, who worked and lived in Berlin between 1933 and 1945 — and whose story, unfortunately, is not at all well known in Germany. Wishing to reassess their views and convictions vis-à-vis the Nazi regime, and possibly their roles as the proverbial monkeys who did not see, hear or speak evil — and perhaps even their active collaboration in criminal deeds — Temple brings to the fore the problematic of a group of people as averse to racism as to Nazi rule. Their failure, if any, lies in realising too late where the country had been taken by a dictatorial regime that gradually unfolded its true totalitarian and anti-Semitic nature, and in their guilt at having been unable to live other than by withdrawing into inner emigration. They weighed the alternative of open resistance against their need to survive, and decided on the latter, not least, as one of the artists put it, to enable them to spread the ideas of freedom, equality and peace to future generations.

As one who belongs to Temple’s generation, I have reproached my elders for their lack of foresight and reason as much as for their cowardice, but I gradually learned of people who had behaved in a similar way to most of the Ateliergemeinschaft artists; and yet, with others of my generation we hardly dared refer to them (and to those who had helped Jews to survive) lest this sounded like an easy excuse, to be interpreted as relativising or even minimising our guilt and the atrocities committed by so many of our countrymen. Only in recent years, and with a generation historically removed from the past, has a more differentiating approach been developed. It is to Temple’s credit as a non-German fiction writer and historian that he has confronted a dilemma deeply disturbing to so many of our generation and reached ‘the end of [his] journey of understanding, acceptance and reconciliation’ (443).

By contrast, Jones’s woman in Berlin is an illegal migrant from North Africa who has found her way to the city to search for her son that her lover – an African-American-German – had abducted more than three years before from a hotel where she had worked and met him. Having been helped to find out his address, she makes arrangements with him to see her boy, though only irregularly and for just one hour each time. Moreover, she is made to pay for this ‘favour’, which forces her to borrow money from, and pawn the belongings of, the blind man she works for as a domestic aide and carer.

The reader first comes to know Ines — a pseudonym that she has adopted — through the eyes of people who had met her when she lived in Africa, during her journey through Italy, and in Berlin. Thereafter she talks about her experiences from a prison cell in Italy, and here we face a very different person from the one described by others. To them she had appeared a woman difficult to place, a taciturn person who often did not, or did not want to, understand their language, or who was plainly unwilling to share her thoughts and feelings with them – as long as they had not found out more about her. Yet through her own story we come to know an extremely articulate speaker who is intelligent, who has much foresight and, depending on the occasion, is adaptable and capable, and a schemer in her near-obsessive desire to be reunited with her child. Who should the reader believe? And who should the Police Inspector believe, while re-tracing her trail?

My own response to Jones’s novel is one of perplexity about many aspects. The multi-voiced narrative rarely draws me in mentally or emotionally, which is due mainly to the disconcerting medley of stories told by various characters whose importance to the main plot seems at times too slight — e.g. Ralph’s, the Inspector’s or Abebi’s — and at others too weighty — especially Defoe’s — whose narrative takes up a fifth of the novel.

I also can’t cope with a plot filled with so many improbabilities: Ines, hardly a swimmer, dog-paddles from a buoy to a beach in Sicily for more than a day and a night. She encounters only trusting, selfless and helpful people, while never for a moment facing the danger of being discovered, let alone arrested, as a highly visible illegal migrant in Italy with its overflow of newcomers from Africa. Also hardly believable is the sequence of lucky circumstances that enable her to easily shoulder the physically strenuous journey of several hundred kilometres from Sicily to the Italian mainland, and on foot across the Alps into Austria. Finally, there’s Berlin, which is presented as a city of trains, stations, bridges and a zoo. Ines’s world is crowded with beggars and alcoholics hanging out at the suburban stations, and with homeless people, the down-and-outs, some of whom have found a temporary abode in an empty warehouse. Almost all of them prove harmless, many are kind and helpful. There is just the odd bad person, especially Jermayne, the boy’s father who stole her away from him, whose relentless badness sticks out like a sore thumb.

Certainly, all these people including Ines, are meant to be presented to us as living in a ‘hand-me-down world’, but Jones’s tale, in spite of its stylistic breadth and deliberate structural composition, fails to invoke my empathy for its people’s fate as presented in its pages. Instead I read it as a melodramatic mélange of characters, events and locations that does not really grasp the dramatic, even tragic, destiny of North African migrants risking their lives to escape to Southern Europe.

DIETER RIEMENSCHNEIDER was formerly Professor of English Language Literatures at the University of Frankfurt (1972–99); he has written widely on Indian, African, Maori and Australian-Aboriginal-literatures-in-English. More recent books include The Indian Novel in English: Its Critical Discourse 1934–2004 (2005), and Wildes Licht (a bilingual anthology of Aotearoa New Zealand poetry) (2010).

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.