Mia Watkins
Wulf, by Hamish Clayton (Penguin NZ, 2011), 240 pp., $30.00
Wulf, by Hamish Clayton (Penguin NZ, 2011), 240 pp., $30.00
Time escapes Wulf, leaps and bounds and bubbles and weaves between the words on the pages. This is no armchair narrative, you don’t get to cosy-up in a warm blanket sipping hot chocolate, a semi-conscious passive recipient of a predictable, orderly narrative. Thinking is compulsory. Even little knowledge of New Zealand history is a passport to thrive on Wulf and if you don’t know, here’s a fine way to enter the conversation. Wulf rewards the diligent reader. Dive into the ancient, imagine a time before time, the origin of time, words heavy-laden with ancestors treading deep into the infinite as you read.
Te Rauparaha — the ‘Great Wolf’, ‘Southern Napoleon’, monster-demon, warlord, magician, cannibal-poet, ruthless, cunning and mightiest of New Zealand chiefs — permeates the narrative like the underside of a long cloud foreshadowing history. Traversing the landscape barefoot he glances behind, spies blood on a stick broken underfoot; the land is bleeding (his foot is bleeding) but the land is bleeding; flesh is land, people are land. If you haven’t forayed very far into the Maori world, be prepared to turn everything you thought you knew upside down. New Zealand is, after all, geographically upside-down to England; a fitting image for a meeting of worlds. The Southern Cross is an anchor, gold is green, geographical drawings are portraits of faces staring back at you, trees root deep into a sky beneath sky and history is prophesied. Language doesn’t reside in ink on paper but lives on faces and dances in caves, riverbeds and markings in the sand; a vocabulary of the natural world in which Te Rauparaha is highly educated.
Cowell, trading master of the brig Elizabeth, bridges the impasse of mirror opposites. He’s been to New Zealand before, traded and spoken the native tongue. The crew ponder his true allegiance while listening awestruck to his tales of mighty chiefs, shrunken heads, giant eagles, alliances and betrayals, peace-time, slavery, infanticide and creation-myth and legend. Tribes fade in and out of existence like twinkling stars puncturing the black void of night, shifting in the kaleidoscope. Earthquakes shift land too, creating deep ravines, echoless pits and mountainous ranges. Details are bloody, gruesome and cruel; corpses adorn the landscape — draped from trees, littering waterways. A young boy is killed with a single snap of the neck, a young woman is ensnared to her death, tracked, butchered and cannibalised. The carnage is savage and not for the faint-hearted; and yet equally these constellations of circumstance are breathtaking, dizzying, wondrous.
Wulf is also deeply paranoid, and so it should be, it’s historical fiction. History is subjective and often as enigmatic as the Old English poem ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’ that inspires the novel. Who tells the story and how do you know who they are? History is a fanfare of voices heard and unheard, stories told and untold, morphed, altered and contentious, a cornucopia of image, sound and flesh. This is refracted throughout the novel. The crew aboard the Elizabeth politely eye-ball each other, pry into corners of privacy, discover themselves there and become more paranoid. True intentions and identities are suspect. For these illiterates in an alien land, the inability to decipher a layout of shells on a beach, a fire on Kapiti Island or sounds of breaking sticks is unnerving, as is the inevitable default to familiar frames of reference. Is a surreptitiously placed basket of fish a gift of food or a trap? Even alone in nature they feel watched, tracked, spied upon, entered by unseen spirits. All eye all askance. Te Rauparaha observes from land, Cowell and crew from sea, each astutely aware of each other’s presence, in dreams and in waking. Omens, visions and premonitions trip over themselves, watching, waiting nervously for their respective fates to collide.
In refusing to name his narrator, Hamish Clayton supersedes the perennial problem of pleasing history (without losing authenticity) and teases, taunts even his reader and critics by denying disembarkation. It’s your story too, you don’t get out that easily, not without a deep look in the mirror. Nameless narration causes you to recognise a little of yourself in the fabric of the story. As the novel unravels, Cowell’s charm fades as he is seen for what he really is; the bridge retreats and mirror opposites start to look the same. These tacticians begin to reflect the inconsolable truth of each skilfully playing the other at his own blood-soaked game, each a Trojan horse destroying the other from within, and yet much more like the other than they dare to think or even realise.
Authorship must be more than the clever arrangement of words on a page. Words breathe when they command attention, when complicity is mandatory; otherwise they fall away like dead cells. Clayton achieves this in Wulf, a haunting, powerful evocation of a book I loved and clung to, even as it sank me under an ocean of tears.
MIA WATKINS is a Dunedin-based writer most recently published in Landfall and The International Literary Quarterly. She is inspired by a simple love of reading and writing.
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