Elizabeth Smither
The Birds Began to Sing by Jeffrey Buchanan (Text Publishing, 2025), 338pp, $40
‘They’ve found some of Reggie Kingsley’s things,’ my mother said to Gladys. Mid-winter sunshine was slanting through the venetian blinds and across the sofa and the velvet cushion embroidered with VISIT FRIENDLY FIJI in sparkling sequins. My mother inhaled on a du Maurier. On exhaling, she added, ‘Yes, his bankbook in Pukekura Park, and his jacket with a letter in it at Ngamotu Beach. How can a young man just go missing?’
A few pages into Jeffrey Buchanan’s novel, The Birds Began to Sing, which is set in a repressive New Plymouth in 1968, I found myself drawing a little circumscribed map of the city in my head. Devon Street, Blagdon Road, Paritutu, the Kawaroa Baths, Marsland Hill, the Devonport Flats, New Plymouth Prison, the faded hotels of the time that might be the Imperial or the White Hart or the Criterion. Mount Egmont making a few bashful appearances. In this I felt I was copying the book’s narrator, fourteen-year-old Godfrey Barnham, whose head and body both fizz and seethe with colliding emotions and conflicting sources of advice from the grown-ups around him; so many he feels ‘that something inside me was being irrevocably decided’.
Godfrey’s overactive mind is a place of rich ferment, much like the brooding Taranaki swamplands before they were drained for farms. And the book he is narrating is richly allusive, too: it’s lurid-novel-soaked, school-soaked, Kawaroa Baths-soaked and demolished treehouse-soaked, priest-and-police-soaked—and that is without getting to the parents, the hotel staff and bar drinkers, the aunt advisors, and all the carryings-on of these boozing and tippling adults. Often, I sensed Buchanan writing under the influence of Hawera’s hard-drinking Ronald Hugh Morrieson, and perhaps even channelling a lavender pastiche of the Italian novelist Alberto Moravia’s romp of a novel, The Two of Us. Buchanan’s style, like that of Morrieson, is fast-paced, almost tumbling over itself, yet never losing sight of Gladys Harris’s gossipy identification of Reggie as one of ‘them’. ‘“But everybody knows about him,” Gladys said. “A boy like that isn’t normal.”’
Gladys was short, plump and powdered. She reminded me of the dwarf lady holding a sceptre and wearing a royal velveteen gown and tinsel crown at the New Plymouth Queen’s Hall when the Amazing Ambrozy Polish Circus had visited.
Reggie Kingsley—barman at the Balmoral, the hotel run by Godfrey’s parents—has disappeared and Godfrey is sure he has been murdered. ‘I knew Reggie after two years of his working at the Balmoral Hotel, from our chatting together, from absorbing what he was, and was not.’ What Reggie wants is a sex-change operation so he can become a woman, and he has a letter from a Swiss clinic accepting him as a patient. He has a drawer where he keeps women’s panties and a bra. Urged on by his poster of a handsome Frenchman, by Perry Mason, and by Inspector Eggleston—who regards New Plymouth as the big smoke—Godfrey can hardly fail to bumble around with such a posse offering advice. ‘Hiding in weeds and bushes, spying on New Plymouth, is now my life.’ There is an excruciatingly hilarious scene when, aided by his inner voices, he gatecrashes a Colourman’s session, claiming he needs treatment for non-existent pimples on his bum. When his aunt deflects his enquiry about the Holocaust, the librarian refuses to let him see a book with photographs from the Reserved Stack.
I saw the equation of what men were: Duke was all man, handsome in his rugged pig-farmer way; the French student was masculine and pretty at the same time, and skinny, pale girlie, scented Reggie was far at the other end of the spectrum. I wondered where I was on that line. What it meant to be girlie, masculine, in-between, how to hide both what I was and wasn’t.
Either Paris and London, the epitome of bohemian cosmopolitanism as they appeared to generations of New Zealand men, would be heaven: ‘I wished I had been born in such a city and had friends with whom I could rush about and throw cobblestones in protests, and drink coffee in smoky bars.’
When Godfrey is in his school classroom—there is also a fair bit of bunking off, bike riding, swimming and skulking behind bushes at a funeral—and Brother Petronius challenges him to translate ‘quick, quicker, quickest’ into Latin, he has the gumption to offer a substitute: Summi dictatores die a horrible death. ‘I thought about how many hours, days, weeks I’d sat in a classroom listening to supreme dictators bang on about osmosis and plasmolysis and Sir Walter Scott and Holy Transubstantiation, but we knew nothing about transitioning from man to woman or woman to man, how someone could do that, what it all meant.’ If Brother Petronius had dared challenge him about his ambitions it would be: ‘You will be chasing cock for the rest of your life, followed by, We must be queers if we do this. Or are we just playing?’ The misery of adolescence—and its potential—is all there: ‘My day began with a devastating moment by a ruined treehouse, had been followed by a stumble through Mass, and had progressed to vilification by English sailors and thoughts of blackmailing my own mother.’
New Plymouth Prison was closed in March 2013, but prior to that homosexuals caught in the act were sent there to work in the quarry, sometimes for decades. I felt like going to the top of the hill to the stone-walled prison and shouting to New Plymouth: Leave Reggie alone, just bring him back!
The novel’s language, like a bottle of shaken-up creaming soda, foams away, sometimes literally purple in its imagery: ‘I saw this creature in mauve stuffing her son’s mouth with a cucumber, simply suffocating him with a thick vegetable while the used-washing-machine-salesman husband held him down, saying Why do you wear makeup?’ There are times when Godfrey thinks poetry might be the element that can best incorporate the mystical cloud of unknowing that surrounds him as he attempts to make sense of the arbitrariness of existence. Hone Tuwhare has a walk-on role, and his implied benediction suggests Godfrey has prospects as a hopeful hero. The treehouse is miraculously restored and the friendship with Derek survives.
The final chapters feel as hyper as a James Bond car chase, as clinical as a Perry Mason closing argument. The reader may be barracking for Minnie Trueworthy to appear as the Good Fairy, but a ribald gathering of the furies seems in order, as Derek, soaking wet, lets himself in through Godfrey’s bedroom window and confesses he was responsible for the destruction of the treehouse in order to hide a dildo. The Balmoral Hotel is robbed and a naïve Sergeant Lawless solemnly intones: ‘terrible, crime increasing, armed robbery, small hotel, innocent boy.’
Godfrey, in his role as detective and an agent provocateur, will uncover layers of drug dealing, murder, blackmail, until eventually the truth is revealed in a cave with a compromised policeman at Back Beach. Reggie Kingsley has stowed away on the Birmingham Queen with a sailor and gone ashore at Melbourne.
In the end, Godfrey has to acknowledge he has done as much as he can unsupported by a team of detectives. ‘I promised myself I would not enter a life of crime, and certainly not its detection. It was too difficult, too scary. I would become a poet and live in an apartment in New York and meet people at soirees and chat suavely.’ (Somehow I don’t think Hone Tuwhare would believe this promise.) But there is one more startling revelation: as plain and salutary as his investigations have been in their labyrinthine way, so his parents’ relationship is ordinary, even dourly conventional. The missing element is a brother who died when he was four days old; his name was Daoud. One wonders if this abruptly revealed information is memoir or concealed autobiography. In writing, humanity allows you to connect anything with anything.
The title is perhaps a hopeful sign of better times, though not all birds, one learns, will sing in harmony. Minnie Trueworthy’s words, however, will resonate with a wider audience: ‘There, there, be careful with your imagination, Godfrey, it gets away on you.’ Her gift of a cottage and a legacy may be a turning point. There may be a lessening of such hectic Godfrey sentences as: ‘I was saying something to Jane and Georgios about reading Pearl Buck while at the same time seeing the enemy line up with their war shields and bows and arrows and their rallying cry of Get the diseased ones, get him, get the poofters.’ We do indeed owe a great debt of kindness and common sense to Fran Wilde, Helen Clark and Jacinda Ardern.
Occasionally the omnipresent sea gets a mention: ‘The tide was coming in, grey, green, dark blue, the sea’s colours all mixed up, with the froth rushing up towards us on the black sand.’ Today, the Devonport Flats are painted an icy soft grey and the windowsills are white. They look frigid in spring’s Pohutukawa-scented cold air but will be welcoming in summer. Perhaps the dubious Kenny Benny should be allowed a snobbish taunt? ‘What is it about small towns that can produce great figures from such a sea of mediocrity?’
In the end I decided The Birds Began to Sing was a smallish street-sample of the town I too grew up in, but lacking the trees and gardens, the bars on the flat, the music venues I remember as expansive and exuberant. One night recently on the way to India Today I spied a large crowd at the Liardet Street lights. (Liardet Street makes an appearance.) They had the purposeful look of people determined to find amusement, and for a moment their numbers, swaying at least six abreast, resembled Queen Street’s famous Barnes Dance crossing. And I have fond memories of driving the writer Eric McCormick back to the rundown boarding house he favoured, knowing I would stay only briefly, inventing a prior engagement.
The Birds Began to Sing, for its frenetic verbal energy and helter-skelter plot, thoroughly deserves its 2024 Michael Gifkins Prize and Text publication. If garrulous Godfrey were to offer a final piece of advice to the reader, it might be: go and rest your mind, think it all out, piece by piece, until it fits. Or, to quote his local parish priest Father Leo: ‘To look at anything, if you would know that thing, you must look at it long.’
ELIZABETH SMITHER’s collection of four novellas, Angel Train, has just been published by Quentin Wilson Publishing, and a new poetry collection The Interview Rose is due from Auckland University Press in 2026.
Leave a Reply