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50books_poc2010-01-05 10:34 pm
cyphomandra.livejournal.com) wrote in 50books_poc2010-01-05 10:34 pm
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11-13/50; Ihimaera, Hong, George
I am horribly behind on all my posts. I read these three - all New Zealand authors - during NZ Book Month. In October.
Witi Ihimaera (ed), Where's Waari? 28 stories about Maori, in order of author’s date of birth, from a short from a dubiously titled 1901 collection (“Tales of a Dying Race”) to the late 1990s (Ihimaera has just edited another collection of 2000-onwards Maori fiction, Get on the Waka). Anyway, digressions aside, I'm skipping all the non-Maori authors, which in this is not really a hardship unless I also wanted to discuss the “problem” short story or the young man has sexual awakening in lyrical prose subgroup.
The first story in the collection by Maori is JC Sturm’s “For all the Saints” (she died just last week, actually, and I wish she'd written more or been published earlier - there was a huge gap in her literary career, due largely to ending up the ex-wife of James K Baxter), which is one of those stories - about a nurse, and the illiterate Maori assistant she interacts with - that has stuck with me afterwards. Of the others, I liked Ngahuia Te Awekotuku’s The basketball girls and Keri Hulme’s He Tauware Kawa, He Kawa Tauware, but both of them felt as if they needed to be part of something larger to work as more than a brief flash of insight. But Patricia Grace’s Ngati Kangaru has that something larger, and was the one story in the collection that I really liked and thought moved beyond Ihimaera’s thematic argument. It’s a carefully pointed piece of satire that doesn’t lose its characters along the way; the reverse colonisation of New Zealand, with one Maori family organising the take-over of Pakeha holiday homes (“reclaiming and cultivating a moral wilderness”) by Maori keen to return home from Australia, inspired by the story – and underhand – methods) of the early Pakeha settlers. I haven’t thought of Grace as a particularly funny writer before, but this was great.
Mo Zhi Hong, The year of the Shanghai Shark. Hai Long is a teenager living in Dalian, China; he’s an orphan, raised by Uncle (relationship murky), who has a mysterious job and firm opinions about moral behaviour. It’s described as a novel (and won the Commonwealth writers’ prize for best first novel), but it’s really more episodic - more like a linked collection of anecdotes/short stories about Hai Long and his friends and his broader community. Each chunk keeps coming back to the year of the title, although it may start earlier. The Shanghai Shark(s) is a basketball team, and the year the book circles around was when Yao Ming became the first Chinese basketballer to be picked up by the NBA; it’s also the year of SARS, and the year in which Hai Long and his uncle will leave China (presumably, like Yao Ming, for America, but it’s not confirmed).
I really like the city-life aspects of this, and the day-to-day stuff – maintenance workers in Hai Long’s crumbling apartment building, hanging out with friends, learning English from cheerfully useless teachers, gambling, hints of local political corruption, the general street life… The story about Hai Long’s cousin, trying again and again to pass IELTS (the English language exam), and complaining bitterly after his first failure because the oral was conducted by an Australian woman whom he couldn’t understand, was the one I hit when initially flipping through the book, and tipped me over into picking it up; firstly, because it was funny, and secondly because I’ve sat IELTS (English is my first language; complicated story to do with overseas employment offers) and felt a twinge of recognition.
There’s a lot of naivety on behalf of the narrator (& his peers), partly because of age, partly because of opportunities. Sometimes it works - I loved the bit where, when a character is protesting against Americans, one of the boys is completely surprised to discover that McDonalds fries are American - and at others it feels a little forced, as if the reader is expected to be too smug at their superior knowledge. The whole set-up with Uncle feels almost too Dickensian to fit the more specific contemporary nature of the writing, and it doesn't help when Hai Long is also so passive in the final chapter, where what is presumably meant to be a key event takes place. Here, I think, I’m also having structural problems, in that just returning to one particular year over and over (from a narrator presumably in the future, but who only talks about that year and those before it) is not enough for me to make this into a novel, or at least not without a better pay-off. Neither SARS nor basketball seem strong enough to hang the story on, either, which is a shame because I enjoyed a lot of the rest of it.
James George, Hummingbird. Three people are brought together north of Auckland, on Ninety Mile Beach: Kataraina, back from Australia with a hard, painful past; Jordan, out of prison after being loyal to the wrong people for too long; and Kingi Heremia, an ex-RAF fighter pilot, who crashes his Tiger Moth there. They’re joined by Leonie, who is tracking her birth mother and has her own small daughter with her. All are Maori, which is central to their experiences and characters without taking over the story, and it’s all very nicely done. The dialogue is particularly strong, as well as the sense of all the characters, and the place itself.
It’s a bit lacking in action, tho’, if you just have five people sitting around on a beach, but running through the middle, is Kingi’s past in WWII; first as a fighter pilot, and then, after injury forced him to the ground and a passing Maori battalion, as a fighter in Crete, lost behind enemy lines. This is fascinating and I could have read a lot more of it, actually, because although I like all the other characters it becomes all too apparent that it’s going to end like so many other NZ novels/short stories, with a character dying in a way that feels like a TV safety campaign (previous candidates too many to list, but most notable – the movie/book Rain, where holidays near the beach have only one possible ending involving the absence of life-jackets, and a truly appalling winner of the Listener short story contest where a small child at a socioeconomically deprived school gets fatally electrocuted by faulty Christmas lights). At least George doesn't kill one of the children, but it's still annoying because there are other ways to end things than death - in some ways, this is the point of Kingi's narrative. Fortunately, that has a more satisfactory conclusion.
Witi Ihimaera (ed), Where's Waari? 28 stories about Maori, in order of author’s date of birth, from a short from a dubiously titled 1901 collection (“Tales of a Dying Race”) to the late 1990s (Ihimaera has just edited another collection of 2000-onwards Maori fiction, Get on the Waka). Anyway, digressions aside, I'm skipping all the non-Maori authors, which in this is not really a hardship unless I also wanted to discuss the “problem” short story or the young man has sexual awakening in lyrical prose subgroup.
The first story in the collection by Maori is JC Sturm’s “For all the Saints” (she died just last week, actually, and I wish she'd written more or been published earlier - there was a huge gap in her literary career, due largely to ending up the ex-wife of James K Baxter), which is one of those stories - about a nurse, and the illiterate Maori assistant she interacts with - that has stuck with me afterwards. Of the others, I liked Ngahuia Te Awekotuku’s The basketball girls and Keri Hulme’s He Tauware Kawa, He Kawa Tauware, but both of them felt as if they needed to be part of something larger to work as more than a brief flash of insight. But Patricia Grace’s Ngati Kangaru has that something larger, and was the one story in the collection that I really liked and thought moved beyond Ihimaera’s thematic argument. It’s a carefully pointed piece of satire that doesn’t lose its characters along the way; the reverse colonisation of New Zealand, with one Maori family organising the take-over of Pakeha holiday homes (“reclaiming and cultivating a moral wilderness”) by Maori keen to return home from Australia, inspired by the story – and underhand – methods) of the early Pakeha settlers. I haven’t thought of Grace as a particularly funny writer before, but this was great.
Mo Zhi Hong, The year of the Shanghai Shark. Hai Long is a teenager living in Dalian, China; he’s an orphan, raised by Uncle (relationship murky), who has a mysterious job and firm opinions about moral behaviour. It’s described as a novel (and won the Commonwealth writers’ prize for best first novel), but it’s really more episodic - more like a linked collection of anecdotes/short stories about Hai Long and his friends and his broader community. Each chunk keeps coming back to the year of the title, although it may start earlier. The Shanghai Shark(s) is a basketball team, and the year the book circles around was when Yao Ming became the first Chinese basketballer to be picked up by the NBA; it’s also the year of SARS, and the year in which Hai Long and his uncle will leave China (presumably, like Yao Ming, for America, but it’s not confirmed).
I really like the city-life aspects of this, and the day-to-day stuff – maintenance workers in Hai Long’s crumbling apartment building, hanging out with friends, learning English from cheerfully useless teachers, gambling, hints of local political corruption, the general street life… The story about Hai Long’s cousin, trying again and again to pass IELTS (the English language exam), and complaining bitterly after his first failure because the oral was conducted by an Australian woman whom he couldn’t understand, was the one I hit when initially flipping through the book, and tipped me over into picking it up; firstly, because it was funny, and secondly because I’ve sat IELTS (English is my first language; complicated story to do with overseas employment offers) and felt a twinge of recognition.
There’s a lot of naivety on behalf of the narrator (& his peers), partly because of age, partly because of opportunities. Sometimes it works - I loved the bit where, when a character is protesting against Americans, one of the boys is completely surprised to discover that McDonalds fries are American - and at others it feels a little forced, as if the reader is expected to be too smug at their superior knowledge. The whole set-up with Uncle feels almost too Dickensian to fit the more specific contemporary nature of the writing, and it doesn't help when Hai Long is also so passive in the final chapter, where what is presumably meant to be a key event takes place. Here, I think, I’m also having structural problems, in that just returning to one particular year over and over (from a narrator presumably in the future, but who only talks about that year and those before it) is not enough for me to make this into a novel, or at least not without a better pay-off. Neither SARS nor basketball seem strong enough to hang the story on, either, which is a shame because I enjoyed a lot of the rest of it.
James George, Hummingbird. Three people are brought together north of Auckland, on Ninety Mile Beach: Kataraina, back from Australia with a hard, painful past; Jordan, out of prison after being loyal to the wrong people for too long; and Kingi Heremia, an ex-RAF fighter pilot, who crashes his Tiger Moth there. They’re joined by Leonie, who is tracking her birth mother and has her own small daughter with her. All are Maori, which is central to their experiences and characters without taking over the story, and it’s all very nicely done. The dialogue is particularly strong, as well as the sense of all the characters, and the place itself.
It’s a bit lacking in action, tho’, if you just have five people sitting around on a beach, but running through the middle, is Kingi’s past in WWII; first as a fighter pilot, and then, after injury forced him to the ground and a passing Maori battalion, as a fighter in Crete, lost behind enemy lines. This is fascinating and I could have read a lot more of it, actually, because although I like all the other characters it becomes all too apparent that it’s going to end like so many other NZ novels/short stories, with a character dying in a way that feels like a TV safety campaign (previous candidates too many to list, but most notable – the movie/book Rain, where holidays near the beach have only one possible ending involving the absence of life-jackets, and a truly appalling winner of the Listener short story contest where a small child at a socioeconomically deprived school gets fatally electrocuted by faulty Christmas lights). At least George doesn't kill one of the children, but it's still annoying because there are other ways to end things than death - in some ways, this is the point of Kingi's narrative. Fortunately, that has a more satisfactory conclusion.