Michael O’Leary
The Spanish Garden by Cliff Taylor (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2023), 255pp, $37.50; Back Home in Derry by David McGill (Silver Owl Press, 2022), 312pp, $29.95
Subtitled ‘One day, one life, one hundred years’, The Spanish Garden is the story of Sidney King, who, as a young man, went off to fight in The Spanish Civil War on the Republican side against the fascists in the mid-1930s. The fascists, known as the Nationalists, were led to victory by General Franco, partly because they were supported in the air by Hitler’s Luftwaffe, who used it as a practice run for the coming World War II. However, the actual storyline in The Spanish Garden starts on the hundredth birthday of Sidney King in 2016, as people prepare to celebrate a milestone he doesn’t want to be involved with. His friends and neighbours around the small settlement on the Kaipara Harbour where he lives insist he must.
So the narration swings back and forth in place and time, from the immediate past in Kaipara to Spain in the turbulent 1930s, and from memories of people long ago to dealings with people very much in the now. The recollections and thoughts of an old man ebb and flow, as do the incoming and outgoing tides of the Kaipara Harbour. After growing up in the Kaipara area with a father he becomes more and more in conflict with as he becomes an idealistic young man, Sidney King moves to Auckland to attend university. There, he gets involved in left-wing politics and, in the modern parlance, becomes radicalised. The year is 1936. Sidney decides to go to Spain to join the alternative Olympics being held there as a foil to the Nazi’s showcase official Olympics in Berlin.
But not long after he arrives in Spain, Sidney is drawn into the Civil War as the fighting draws ever closer to the city he quickly grows to love: Barcelona. Meantime, a parallel love develops for one of the city’s freedom fighters, the beautiful and feisty young Elena. As they stroll together through the working-class barrio or district of Barcelona where she grew up, she explains why she hates the bourgeoise. The authorities want to destroy the narrow streets of Raval, the poorest area, and to push through roads and push out the poor people, an unfortunate fate for many cities around the world in the twentieth century. Sidney and Elena become more involved in the war and more involved with each other.
The Spanish Civil War starts going badly for the Republicans, who are losing ground as Franco’s Nationalist war machine rolls inexorably onward, and eventually, King must retreat. As well as losing the war that he and the International Brigade, an army mainly consisting of foreign fighters, sacrificed so much for, he also loses touch with Elena, who has been wounded and may well be dead. In some respects, Sidney King’s character resembles the English author George Orwell, one of the many thousands of European, American and Australasian intellectuals and workers setting out for Spain in the mid-1930s and volunteering for the International Brigade. They joined militias of untrained field labourers and factory hands and fought on every major front in this struggle against fascism. In his memoir Homage to Catalonia, Orwell describes the horrors and confusion of the battlefront in a similar way to Cliff Taylor.
When Sidney King is forced to leave his comrades, he has to head to the hills and mountains of the Pyrenees region, which forms the border between Spain and France. He’s left it too late to be repatriated, and all the last international trains have departed. In this hostile, dangerous and lonely environment, he learns to live like an animal, hiding, hunting, scavenging and defending himself against the cold and hunger and any enemies who cross his path. During this period, Sidney King is forced to acknowledge to himself that he has lost his humanity. The war has shown him what terrible things he and others are capable of, and he no longer wants to be part of the human race. What had started as an idealistic adventure has turned him into a nihilistic figure of self-hatred. Ironically, he is doomed to live a long life.
While The Spanish Garden is primarily set on a single day in 2016, in the garden overlooking the Kaipara Harbour where Sidney King is reluctantly acknowledging his centenary, it not only trawls through his memories of the past but also travels back beyond his own life to a Māori inter-tribal battle set in 1825. The battle involved the tangata whenua of Kaipara rohe, Ngāti Whātua, who were under attack from the northern iwi, Ngāpuhi. This distant incident marks the story’s true beginning, and it becomes fundamental to King’s understanding of his own place in the scheme of things. The battle is part of the forgotten and largely unknown history of the area he lives in and helps explain why the placement of his beloved Spanish garden is seen as an insult to his Māori neighbours, the people he went to school with and played with as a child.
The novel’s plot is cleverly woven through nineteen chapters that reflect the protagonist’s life story, alternating in time and place. The years 1931, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1946, 1981 and 2016 resonate through their connections with significant locations: Kaipara Harbour, Catalunya, Barcelona, Jarama, the Ebro. Towards the end of The Spanish Garden, a discovery unlocks a mystery that has haunted Sidney for eighty years. In Chapter Two, volunteers disinterring skeletons of Spanish Civil War victims unearth a locket that turns out to have a lock of hair, which technological advances in DNA detection suggest almost certainly belongs to his beloved Elana.
Again, he is confronted with phantoms of people past. As the day’s tides advance and recede and visitors, welcome and unwelcome, arrive and depart, the old man walks with his ghosts, reliving episodes from his long life. He is also forced to confront, for the first time, the secrets buried within the land upon which he has created his famous garden. In an era where deadly political divisions of the past are being reexamined, The Spanish Garden draws together thematic threads dealing with memory and loss, the generational impact of war, the fatal history shared between two families, one Pākehā the other Māori, and a man’s enduring obsession with love.
Cliff Taylor is a New Zealand author and reporter who has lived and worked in numerous places around the world. As a young journalist, he was advised to ‘choose the war you want to be involved in and write about it’. While he chose Uganda as his actual place of conflict involvement, the war he chose to write imaginatively about was the Spanish Civil War, in the form of this very intriguing and satisfying novel, his fourth. His previous three novels, The Freedom Junkies, Instant God and Swimming to Paris, are also explorations of idealism encountering the surreal dislocations of actuality.
The beginning of McGill’s latest Dan Delaney book has one of the most exhilarating or disturbing starts to a story a reader could imagine, depending on whose side you are on. The time is 1970, and the scene is the infamous Falls Road, Belfast, at the time of the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland—one of the many times of trouble in the history of the Emerald Isle. A young British soldier is out with his Irish girlfriend, Clare—a situation frowned upon by both sides. Having been at her family home to meet her Ma, Clare is walking him to his bus when they are suddenly ambushed by IRA people who know her: was she setting a trap, or was this ambush more personal? Everything goes black as he is made unconscious.
Forward to the late 1990s, and Dan Delaney is visiting Ireland to find his Irish roots, spurred on by his wife and their two daughters, who seem far more enthusiastic about the venture than the aging ex-SIS agent. Venture turns to adventure when news arrives that one of their daughters was nearly killed by a hand grenade thrown as she left the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Thus begins a rollicking tale through Irish history, politics and towns and cities. As is the case with such yarns, you don’t really know who are the goodies or baddies, who are the Catholics or the Protestants—or why Delaney’s old nemesis is involved in his life yet again, having appeared in previous incarnations, including the time Delaney was in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.
Sadly, as the author states on the impressively-designed and somewhat haunting front cover of Back Home in Derry, this is the last of David McGill’s Dan Delaney mysteries. One of the defining and endearing aspects of the series has been the involvement of Dan Delaney’s family. His wife, Jas (from Dubrovnik), and their daughters, Maria and Ali, play prominent roles, particularly in the present tome. This is unusual because most detective stories have ‘lone wolf’ protagonists who often involve a series of uncommitted lovers who change with each story, à la James Bond.
Back Home in Derry might also be the author’s most personal book, as he travelled through Ireland in the early 1970s and then found out later in his life that he has much more personal Irish whakapapa than he ever realised. The title Back Home in Derry comes from a poem by Irish poet, Bobby Sands, who died in 1981 while on hunger strike in the Maze Prison, southwest of Belfast. At that time, I was among those who took part in all-night vigils outside the British Consulate in Auckland. These were organised by artist Miriam Cameron, author Dean Parker and others to show solidarity as a New Zealand support group for Irish republican prisoners in British jails.
MICHAEL O’LEARY is a poet, novelist, publisher, performer and bookshop proprietor. He holds a PhD from the Victoria University of Wellington. His Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop imprint, which he founded in 1984, has published many New Zealand writers. The A-Z compilation, 25 Years of the Earl of Seacliff (ed. Mark Pirie, 2009), documents his own prolific oeuvre. He lives in Paekakariki.
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