Chris ElseLove and Money, by Greg McGee (Penguin, 2012), 352 pp., $29.99.
In early 1980 one of my first attempts at a stage play was selected for the workshop at the National Playwright’s Conference. A short time later I was drinking in Wellington’s Southern Cross Hotel with a group of people that included Mervyn Thompson, one of the workshop organisers. I doubt that Proc, to use Mervyn’s nickname, knew who I was at that point and when one of the group asked him about the plays being worked on he began to wax lyrical about one in particular, describing it as ‘the nearest thing to a work of genius to come out of New Zealand theatre’. He didn’t name the playwright and, of course, my spirits immediately soared with the fond hope that he was referring to my piece. Vanity of vanities. By the end of the workshop there was only one play anyone cared about, and its rehearsed reading was an extraordinary piece of theatre: a rapt audience, an emotionally charged cast, and a script that seemed at once poetic, powerful and profoundly challenging because it was so deeply rooted in the New Zealand psyche. Any envy I might have had was swept away in the experience. It seemed that Foreskin’s Lament had quite simply rewritten all the rules.
Through the early eighties I followed McGee’s career closely, hoping to recapture the magic of that workshop experience. Tooth and Claw and Out in the Cold had many of the right qualities but they felt more like echoes than new work. By 1987, it seemed as if McGee’s time as the wunderkind of New Zealand theatre was over and the next I heard of him he was writing scripts for movies and television and developing what seemed to become a highly successful career in the commercial side of drama.
The acknowledgements to Love and Money indicate that the story had its origins in an aborted 1987 screenplay and that McGee made several subsequent attempts to bring it to fruition. This, plus the banner on the cover, which makes specific reference to Foreskin’s Lament, invites comparison between the novel and the drama. In its way Love and Money is also a lament and one that revisits the theme of those early plays: a conflict of values between a generous-spirited and somewhat idealistic liberalism and narrow-minded egotism. For Foreskin this conflict plays out in the context of a sporting tradition of fair play that is threatened by an attitude of win at all costs. The novel has a broader canvas, taking in society, culture, and the political-economy and it differs, too, in its historical perspective. In 1980, the crisis in our values was real and pressing. The play was charged with a prescient sense of urgency that something needed and had to be done, an urgency that within fifteen months of that workshop had thousands of New Zealanders on the streets protesting against the Springbok Tour. The novel on the other hand looks back from a distance of 25 years and whatever relevance it has for today is muted by the considerations of hindsight. There is no zeal in Love and Money, none of the sharpness and youthful exuberance of Foreskin. Instead, the edges are blurred and the performance feels like that of a thoroughly experienced professional, aiming as much to entertain as to challenge his audience.
Nineteen eighty-seven was a year of big events. In May and June the first Rugby World Cup helped to rehabilitate the sport in the eyes of many of the fans who were disillusioned by 1981 and by the 1986 Cavaliers tour to South Africa. In August a general election ushered in the second Lange government and the now notorious strategy of selling state assets to pay off government debt. In October came Black Monday, and the stock market crash that wiped out the newly-gotten gains of a generation of speculators and created a global financial crisis. The parallels with 2012 are plain enough but, unfortunately, any comment on twenty-first century New Zealand remains muted because the story set against this historical backdrop is suffused with a mood of nostalgia for political battles past rather than with a forward-looking sense of the need for change.
The plot revolves around Mike, a middle-aged actor and serial monogamist, whose latest partner, Louise, is company secretary to a high-flying, money-grubbing corporation. When Louise throws him over for her bull-necked boss, Mike begins a downward slide in ironic reversal to the dizzying climb of the stock market. The production of Timon of Athens that he is starring in closes, and he gets fired by the director of the theatre. With nothing to his name but a clapped-out VW, he is thrown on the mercy of his extended family: the three women he has previously had children with and their respective partners. These couples, in their various ways, provide a compendium of the main features that defined the times.
Liz, who is pregnant, is a marriage councillor working for the Family Court. Her partner, Sean, Mike’s best friend, is speech writer for Prime Minister Lange and spends half his life commuting to and from Wellington. Faye, the mother of Mike’s youngest child, is a journalist for a feminist magazine on a clandestine assignment to expose the sexual exploitation in a supposedly liberated community which differs from Centrepoint in little more than name. Her partner, Roland, a Senior Lecturer in English, suffers threats from the same mysterious group who, in real life, accused Mervyn Thompson of rape, tied him to a tree and threatened to castrate him. The third household consists of Mike’s first partner, the earth-mother Sarina, a brood of children headed by Mike’s eldest child, Hendrix, and Jimmy, a drunken, violent Glaswegian artist.
The novel is divided into five parts, the middle three of which each focuses on one of the couples. As one would expect from a thoroughly professional dramatist, the plotting is excellent, and the story moves easily through its overall dramatic arc while at the same time presenting the requisite stages in the development of the individual protagonists. When it comes to characterisation, though, I was less impressed. The characters are all carefully distinguished one from another but they have little emotional depth. They feel like parts in a play that are waiting for actors to bring them to life.
Now and again, the writing hints at a more satisfying complexity. When Liz goes into labour with Sean stuck in Wellington, it is left to Mike to get her to hospital. Her frustration at his presence and his almost uxorious eagerness to be involved create an excruciating moment that begins to fill out the relationships and the individuals in it. Similarly, there are moments of poignancy in fourteen-year-old Hendrix’s petty thievery and financial scheming as he attempts to keep his family together, to pay the rent and to feed and clothe his siblings.
For the most part, though, despite their carefully differentiated personality traits, the characters seem based in stereotype. All the males, with the possible exceptions of Sean and Hendrix, seem to be bumbling clowns. The females, by contrast and with the possible exception of Sarina, are competent and in control. The contrast suggests the modern phenomenon of ‘manvertising’ and blunts the novel’s satirical intent. Sexual politics dominates the emotional landscape of the novel at the expense of other possible themes, such as corporate greed or right-wing economic agendas, and despite the many references to feminists and feminism the treatment here harks back to the sixties. There is perhaps one reference too many to magnificent breasts, while Mike, his incompetent downward slide notwithstanding, is cast in the role of the sexually passive but irresistible male. His homosexual banker is sufficiently (yet unrequitedly) in love with him to leave him $150,000 in his will and, throughout the book, Mike constantly finds himself having sex without initiating it. On two occasions he’s asleep when the woman in question jumps him. On another he’s is too drunk to remember what happened afterwards. On a fourth, he’s overwhelmed by his ex-partner’s eagerness, despite his earnest promises to himself not to get involved with her. If it were not for an underlying sense of decency – he gives away his inheritance to alleviate the poverty of Sarina and her family – this scapegrace might have wandered into this book straight out of a Donleavy novel.
In the closing scene, we find Mike sitting in his underwear on the steps of a boathouse playing a harmonica and contemplating a future that is a choice between useful employment as a painter and decorator and a long term acting job in the role of rooster in a series of TV commercials. He has reached rock bottom, it seems, but all self-serving desire is burned away and he has also reached a measure of peace and contentment. There could hardly be a greater contrast than with Foreskin’s last excoriating ‘Whaddarya?’
The acknowledgements to Love and Money indicate that the story had its origins in an aborted 1987 screenplay and that McGee made several subsequent attempts to bring it to fruition. This, plus the banner on the cover, which makes specific reference to Foreskin’s Lament, invites comparison between the novel and the drama. In its way Love and Money is also a lament and one that revisits the theme of those early plays: a conflict of values between a generous-spirited and somewhat idealistic liberalism and narrow-minded egotism. For Foreskin this conflict plays out in the context of a sporting tradition of fair play that is threatened by an attitude of win at all costs. The novel has a broader canvas, taking in society, culture, and the political-economy and it differs, too, in its historical perspective. In 1980, the crisis in our values was real and pressing. The play was charged with a prescient sense of urgency that something needed and had to be done, an urgency that within fifteen months of that workshop had thousands of New Zealanders on the streets protesting against the Springbok Tour. The novel on the other hand looks back from a distance of 25 years and whatever relevance it has for today is muted by the considerations of hindsight. There is no zeal in Love and Money, none of the sharpness and youthful exuberance of Foreskin. Instead, the edges are blurred and the performance feels like that of a thoroughly experienced professional, aiming as much to entertain as to challenge his audience.
Nineteen eighty-seven was a year of big events. In May and June the first Rugby World Cup helped to rehabilitate the sport in the eyes of many of the fans who were disillusioned by 1981 and by the 1986 Cavaliers tour to South Africa. In August a general election ushered in the second Lange government and the now notorious strategy of selling state assets to pay off government debt. In October came Black Monday, and the stock market crash that wiped out the newly-gotten gains of a generation of speculators and created a global financial crisis. The parallels with 2012 are plain enough but, unfortunately, any comment on twenty-first century New Zealand remains muted because the story set against this historical backdrop is suffused with a mood of nostalgia for political battles past rather than with a forward-looking sense of the need for change.
The plot revolves around Mike, a middle-aged actor and serial monogamist, whose latest partner, Louise, is company secretary to a high-flying, money-grubbing corporation. When Louise throws him over for her bull-necked boss, Mike begins a downward slide in ironic reversal to the dizzying climb of the stock market. The production of Timon of Athens that he is starring in closes, and he gets fired by the director of the theatre. With nothing to his name but a clapped-out VW, he is thrown on the mercy of his extended family: the three women he has previously had children with and their respective partners. These couples, in their various ways, provide a compendium of the main features that defined the times.
Liz, who is pregnant, is a marriage councillor working for the Family Court. Her partner, Sean, Mike’s best friend, is speech writer for Prime Minister Lange and spends half his life commuting to and from Wellington. Faye, the mother of Mike’s youngest child, is a journalist for a feminist magazine on a clandestine assignment to expose the sexual exploitation in a supposedly liberated community which differs from Centrepoint in little more than name. Her partner, Roland, a Senior Lecturer in English, suffers threats from the same mysterious group who, in real life, accused Mervyn Thompson of rape, tied him to a tree and threatened to castrate him. The third household consists of Mike’s first partner, the earth-mother Sarina, a brood of children headed by Mike’s eldest child, Hendrix, and Jimmy, a drunken, violent Glaswegian artist.
The novel is divided into five parts, the middle three of which each focuses on one of the couples. As one would expect from a thoroughly professional dramatist, the plotting is excellent, and the story moves easily through its overall dramatic arc while at the same time presenting the requisite stages in the development of the individual protagonists. When it comes to characterisation, though, I was less impressed. The characters are all carefully distinguished one from another but they have little emotional depth. They feel like parts in a play that are waiting for actors to bring them to life.
Now and again, the writing hints at a more satisfying complexity. When Liz goes into labour with Sean stuck in Wellington, it is left to Mike to get her to hospital. Her frustration at his presence and his almost uxorious eagerness to be involved create an excruciating moment that begins to fill out the relationships and the individuals in it. Similarly, there are moments of poignancy in fourteen-year-old Hendrix’s petty thievery and financial scheming as he attempts to keep his family together, to pay the rent and to feed and clothe his siblings.
For the most part, though, despite their carefully differentiated personality traits, the characters seem based in stereotype. All the males, with the possible exceptions of Sean and Hendrix, seem to be bumbling clowns. The females, by contrast and with the possible exception of Sarina, are competent and in control. The contrast suggests the modern phenomenon of ‘manvertising’ and blunts the novel’s satirical intent. Sexual politics dominates the emotional landscape of the novel at the expense of other possible themes, such as corporate greed or right-wing economic agendas, and despite the many references to feminists and feminism the treatment here harks back to the sixties. There is perhaps one reference too many to magnificent breasts, while Mike, his incompetent downward slide notwithstanding, is cast in the role of the sexually passive but irresistible male. His homosexual banker is sufficiently (yet unrequitedly) in love with him to leave him $150,000 in his will and, throughout the book, Mike constantly finds himself having sex without initiating it. On two occasions he’s asleep when the woman in question jumps him. On another he’s is too drunk to remember what happened afterwards. On a fourth, he’s overwhelmed by his ex-partner’s eagerness, despite his earnest promises to himself not to get involved with her. If it were not for an underlying sense of decency – he gives away his inheritance to alleviate the poverty of Sarina and her family – this scapegrace might have wandered into this book straight out of a Donleavy novel.
In the closing scene, we find Mike sitting in his underwear on the steps of a boathouse playing a harmonica and contemplating a future that is a choice between useful employment as a painter and decorator and a long term acting job in the role of rooster in a series of TV commercials. He has reached rock bottom, it seems, but all self-serving desire is burned away and he has also reached a measure of peace and contentment. There could hardly be a greater contrast than with Foreskin’s last excoriating ‘Whaddarya?’
CHRIS ELSE is a novelist and occasional poet. He lives in Wellington.
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