Landfall Review Online

Late and Early

September 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Peter Entwisle

Mary Kisler, Angels & Aristocrats Early European Art in New Zealand Public Collections, (Random House, 2010), 399 pp., $74.99.

Angels & Aristocrats is a landmark, a useful reference, and one can simply enjoy its fine illustrations – though it has limitations and flaws. There has been very little published about the old European art in New Zealand public collections, so it was good to hear of Mary Kisler’s project when it was in preparation.

Peter Tomory and Robert Gaston’s Summary Catalogue European Paintings Before 1800 in Australian and New Zealand Public Collections, which came out in 1989, is the only other book-length study to cover the ground, or much of it, because unlike Kisler, the authors restricted themselves to paintings. Moreover, within its narrower compass, Tomory and Gaston’s review was not comprehensive. For example it didn’t include the Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s Madonna and Child by Zanobi Machiavelli (1418–79), a fairly glaring omission considering the significance of the work. And Tomory and Gaston scarcely discuss questions of attribution or identity, which are numerous in this field and often contentious. By contrast, Ms Kisler does venture into those matters, so her scope is potentially more useful.

There are a few other sources people can use to background Ms Kisler’s efforts. There is my Treasures of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, which came out in 1990, and Beloved: Works from the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, with thirty contributors, which was published in 2009. Each of these covers some of the DPAG’s European old master works, and from them it is possible to see that some attributions have changed, as well as the identifications of some subjects. Similarly, there is the Auckland Art Gallery’s summary catalogue of its holdings, which included a number of its European old masters.

For the purposes of her study, Ms Kisler looked at the collections of the public galleries in Auckland, Whanganui, Christchurch and Dunedin, and at the collection held in the national museum, Te Papa in Wellington. Such a survey covers the great majority of European old master paintings in public ownership in New Zealand, as well as the many prints and other works on paper, and the rather scant holdings we have of related sculpture. Some things have escaped her net, such as the Flemish statuette and the Della Robbia Madonna in the Otago Museum. But the demands of making a study like Ms Kisler’s are considerable, and searching around institutions not wholly or overtly devoted to art may have seemed too laborious for the likely returns.

One significant resource of publicly owned old European art she has not reviewed is this country’s holdings of illuminated medieval manuscripts, concentrated in a few public libraries — mostly in Auckland and Dunedin. This too may be forgiven because it was covered well, at least descriptively, in a catalogue published by Vera Vines, Margaret Mannion and Chris de Hamel in 1989. More regrettably, she hasn’t attempted to review the Classical holdings, mostly figured ceramics, in the Fels and Logie collections of the Otago and Canterbury museums, the latter sadly damaged in the September earthquake last year.

We also need to keep in mind that Ms Kisler’s book is not really so widely encompassing as its subtitle suggests. Perhaps its ‘early’ is the New Zealand vernacular for ‘old’? However that may be, her horizon is actually late. European art has been around since at least the days of Mycenae and Knossos, which were flourishing in the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries BC, respectively, both represented in the Otago Museum’s Fels collection. The oldest work Ms Kisler reviews is from the twelfth century AD.

Angels and Aristocrats is not aimed solely at an academic audience. It is intended for the general reader, and Ms Kisler means to locate New Zealand-owned works in the larger context of their time and place of making, which she does very well. What does give cause for concern is the number of mistakes, some minor, others less so. I’ve mentioned these before when I discussed the book in my column in the Otago Daily Times. It would be unkind to needlessly list them all again. A few will do as examples.

On page 26, William Mathew Hodgkins is said to have died in 1895, while his death actually occurred in 1898. At page 27, Ms Kisler says the Dunedin Public Art Gallery moved to its building in the Octagon in 1990, whereas that happened in 1996. She has also, at page 26, misidentified the Lady McLean who successfully raised funds for a new building for the Dunedin gallery in 1907 with the wife of the Honourable John McLean, and, with a certain disregard for actual geography, has her living ‘in Lumsden near Oamaru’.

Producing a long text requires particular attention to detail to avoid small errors, and occasional slips are to be expected, perhaps; but there seem rather too many of these little ones for an authoritative text. And there are others which suggest a more worrying cloud of confusion. On page 28, we are told about the de Beer siblings’ generosity to Dunedin, and of Esmond de Beer in particular that ‘a number of very fine purchases for Dunedin’s collection came about through his administrations on the gallery’s behalf in London.’

I take it Ms Kisler is referring to services Dr de Beer performed on the gallery’s behalf. He did know London dealers and museum people, and sometimes acted as the gallery’s ears and eyes, for instance in the case of the Salvator Rosa Rocky Landscape which Ms Kisler discusses, although she doesn’t mention the role he played in its acquisition. This was in addition to buying works with his and his sisters’ money, and presenting them to the gallery in all of their names. Ms Kisler notes such acts of generosity, but appears to have overlooked Dr de Beer’s considerable connoisseurship which was of significant value to the gallery.

Her treatment of some attributions and identifications is also a matter of concern. In Beloved I attributed the Dunedin gallery’s Birth of the Saviour to the studio of Bartholomaus Bruyn, following an overseas authority. At page 77 Ms Kisler gives it to the artist himself, a not inconsiderable change. She may have her reasons, but she doesn’t give any. Indeed she doesn’t even note there has been a change.

Similarly, at page 356, the Dunedin painting of Saint John, which was formerly attributed to Bartolomeo Schedoni, she gives to the circle of Francesco Cozza without mentioning this is a change. Again, while Beloved changed the identification of the sitter in Dunedin’s portrait by Cornelius Johnson, which Ms Kisler followed at her page 267, neither Beloved nor Angels and Aristocrats mentions the argument, present in the gallery’s records, for supposing the sitter is King Charles I’s Queen, Henrietta Maria.

Historians generally, and art historians more particularly, are not always very good at giving the reasons for their judgements, even when these are markedly different from earlier ones. They are sometimes careless about mentioning opposing views at all, let alone bothering to tell us why they differ. A recent case was Martin Kemp’s book making a case for a new proposed Leonardo.

Such claims are bound to attract attention. Kemp’s one became controversial, not only because other Leonardo specialists emphatically disagreed, but because some people said the contention was proved by the presence of a fingerprint on the work matching one on a known Leonardo. But the match and its maker were soon shown to lack credibility. Kemp’s book marshalls other evidence for his attribution, and other specialists support him. But his book has been described as advocacy, rather than art history. The man who said this, Richard Dorment, complained that Kemp, and his co-author Nicholas Turner: ‘at no point … acknowledge any of the strong counter-arguments that have been voiced by the many scholars and curators specialising in fifteenth-century Italian art.’

The trouble is this is not infrequently the case, I have found, in things written by distinguished art historians and which are taken as serious scholarly texts. I certainly wouldn’t describe Angels & Aristocrats as advocacy. There is no sign Ms Kisler has any axes to grind. But she has not been as careful as good scholarship really demands to point to changes and opposing views.

Despite the flaws the book has much to recommend it. Ms Kisler is not trying to establish an order of merit. This permits hers to talk about works of minor, or even negligible, aesthetic distinction in order to illuminate the things their artists were trying to achieve – the conventions, artistic as well as social, which lay behind their making. She uses the works to illustrate not only European art history but, to some extent, European cultural history from the late middle ages to the nineteenth century. She is well-informed. Her prose is clear and her text has some nice, light touches.

At page 55, she tells us of the significance of the goldfinch in images of the Virgin and Child, which represents the flight of the human soul at the moment of death. She mentions that portraits too ‘also showed children clutching goldfinches, any escape being thwarted by a fine string tethered above their claws. Pity the poor goldfinch.’

The numerous colour plates are a very useful record, and the book puts together information and images you can’t find anywhere else in a single volume. At present it represents the broadest cover we have of its subject. It would be good to have a supplementary volume covering our older European material. Perhaps one day we will.

–

PETER ENTWISLE is a Dunedin-based writer, art historian and curator. He writes a regular column about the arts for the Otago Daily Times.

Helter-skelter

September 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Jamie Hanton

The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader, edited by Stella Brennan and Su Ballard, (Aotearoa Digital Arts and Clouds, 2008) 240 pp., $60.00.

The Landfall Online Review seems like an appropriate place to review The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader; an opportunity to consider the digital lay of the land from within. It is also a chance to touch on the critical realm of art online – and the factors that affect the discussion and dialogue that surround current commentary. Now readers have a chance to disseminate this review, and respond to it if they choose, on Facebook, Twitter, email, or on their blog. Yet, Landfall still exists in its printed format. And it has valid reasons to, just as there are valid reasons for the Digital Arts Reader to exist in print form. Published nearly two years ago, the book is now inevitably showing its age, but despite this it remains an extremely valuable publication in the national discourse. It is this messy crossover between media and formats that characterises the time and place that we occupy and it is these tensions that are played out frequently in The Reader.

Aotearoa Digital Arts Network is New Zealand’s only digital arts network and has its origins in the website/message board of the organisation where members discuss projects, opportunities and issues. Members herald the site as a crucial point of connection between New Zealand artists practising in digital media within the country and outside of it. The Reader is representative of the diverse membership of practitioners and is comprehensive, inclusive and reflects the multifaceted, interdisciplinary nature of digital arts in Aotearoa.

The Reader contains a variety of theoretical analyses, case studies, and broader views of practice. At times some of the articles read like timelines — listing name after name and work after work — this is especially true of some of the accounts of residencies which seem to be exercises in documentation for its own sake. Those pieces that strive to provide historical surveys do so admirably: Andrew Clifford’s ‘Interdisciplinary Moments: A History in Glimpses’, and Su Ballard’s piece on sound and noise art, both cover the necessary areas of practice, but also touch on lesser-known moments. Clifford and Ballard’s wide coverage and historical contextualisation of a number of themes that run throughout The Reader means that these pieces would serve better towards the beginning of the book where they would be able to establish a chronology.

Instead, and arguably just as usefully, the reader begins with an exploration of questions of definition: Caroline McCaw examines how relevant the terms ‘new media’ and ‘digital media’ are currently and will be in the near future – her point, lucidly made, is that the modes of production, reception and consumption are still shifting and that flux is innately part of the media in question. While McCaw focuses on dynamism, Douglas Bagnall’s concise history of the concepts and moments that define digital in relation to analogue is satisfyingly concrete. It is an article that should be required reading for art students of all disciplines.

In the final article of the book, ‘Internet; Environment’, Julian Priest poetically captures the tangle — or tango — between the material world and the digital realm. By viscerally illustrating the obvious connections between our physical actions and the creation and maintenance of the World Wide Web, the standardised dualist conception is broken down to the unavoidable reality that it is all part of our physical environment — and that, crucially, they cannot be separated. It is a well-chosen article to end the book as it completes the circle established by Sally Jane Norman’s Foreword that begins by looking at the digital arts in a local, culturally specific context. Norman outlines the desire of artists in Aotearoa to express a rootedness in whenua — so that politics of place never disappear — and while increasing digitisation builds cyber-bridges so as to conquer the tyranny of distance, there is no escaping the here-ness of here. A number of authors develop this point further, exploring the connection between Maori culture and tradition, and the digital world.

Maree Mills’ piece ‘Contemporary Maori Women’s New Media Art Practice’ draws links between oral culture and digital media, citing their phenomenological similarities. Janine Randerson and Danny Butt also note corresponding patterns of information transmission across digital technology, Randerson drawing particular attention to the dislocated intermediary site of Rachel Rakena’s Rerehiko.

While many of the writers bask in the fact that digital is a transient, often ephemeral medium, Lissa Mitchell grapples with the very real issues that work of this kind raises for museums and other arts institutions in terms of conservation and maintenance. Artists are now more involved than ever in the ongoing updating and archiving of their digital work. Stella Brennan and Steven Cleland further this conversation in their article ‘Onsite and Online’, which details the roles contemporary galleries have played in producing internet-based work.

These articles highlight the role of the audience and provide a reminder that digital work, while stimulated locally, has the potential to reach an international and diasporic audience and that this audience can network and be collaborative. In ‘Open Interactions’ Karl D.D. Willis analyses the concept of interactivity and presents a quasi-manifesto for those wishing to create or display work that relies on audience interaction. He references MIT’s definition of interaction which states that it should be in the form of a conversation rather than be a lecture, and notes that quality interactions produce highly participatory creative experiences. The article is a tonic to the last two decades, where ‘interactivity’ became a buzzword for institutions that looked for an easy way to increase audience numbers. Mitchell, Brennan and Cleland and Willis all contribute to the value of The Reader as an excellent point of departure for good practice in the digital field.

The sheer amount of work and range of practices covered is extremely impressive: the publication certainly lives up to its ‘Reader’ tag. Su Ballard and Stella Brennan have been thorough with their selections, covering all the nuances of digital visual art, as well as theatre and performance art; we are given personal glimpses into the practices of Nathan Pohio, Julian Oliver and Helen Varley Jamieson, to name just a few. There is also a great array of colour images that illustrate the articles, as well as featuring on artists’ pageworks.

However it does seem to me that the large amount of miscellaneous information in The Reader — which contains 34 articles in total — could benefit from a restructuring, possibly using thematised chapters. At present its trove of knowledge resembles the helter-skelter form of the World Wide Web. It would be wonderful to see a second edition of The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader that builds on the very high quality of the first, and provides updates of the work that members of ADA have been doing over the last three years.

JAMIE HANTON is a visual arts writer and curator. He is currently the Director of The Blue Oyster Art Project Space in Dunedin.

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.

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.