I've been trying to get a little ahead on my term's reading, mostly for my NZ Lit class. So far this has meant Man Alone by John Mulgan and The Bone People by Keri Hulme. Now, Man Alone was apparently a landmark book that is supposed to have influenced subsequent New Zealand writers and it's bleak, and dour, and dark. In fact, a quote on the back by C K Stead agrees with me: "It's rare, dour, sober truthfulness enacts a phase in our national history and catches certain truths about our national identity." I found this a bit depressing actually, because I got to thinking and realised that most of the books by New Zealand writers that I'd read are very bleak: things like Robin Hyde's Nor The Years Condemn, Philip Mann's Pioneers and Wulf's Yarn, even children's books like the O series of Maurice Gee, Take The Long Path by Joan De Hamel and Margaret Mahy's young adult novels (her kids books are silly and fun, but for teenagers she expects more). In fact, the only NZ written books for which I can't pin the label 'bleak and dour' are Hugh Cook's sprawling fantasy novels.
Is New Zealand as a nation really that depressed? Our movies (The Piano, River Queen, The Navigators, Whale Rider) certainly seems to imply so. Our music, with a happy core of Split Enz, Crowded House, Dave Dobbyn and Stellar*, seems to imply not. What's with that? Is this all just an erroneous impression gained from too small a random sample? Anyway, I'm about half way through The Bone People and I'm enjoying it a lot. It's very bleak and dark (but of course) but has lost the dourness. There's a lot of interesting texture in various characters' obsession with food, or the sea, or the colours of semi-precious stones, and how can one not like a main character whose favourite obscenity is "Shit and apricocks". I'm liking it a lot, and wondering what the hell the ending is going to be. There will be more on my theory of whether or not New Zealanders are essentially depressed later, when I've had time to digest more of the books on the course.
I've also been watching three TV adaptions of Dorothy L. Sayers novels, Strong Poison, Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night, courtesy of the lovely Debbie Cowen, who lent them to me. I found watching the first, Strong Poison, to be a little bit jarring at first - I know all three books very well, and had formed my own mental images of what all the characters were like, which no actor/director/scriptwriter can ever match. Having said that, their performances were all true to the books, it's just the nature of interesting characters that they take life in people's heads, and everyone's take on them is different. By the second mini-series, Have His Carcase, the dissonance wasn't so bad, and it was easier to watch and enjoy on its own merits.
I found the entire series to be a fascinating lesson in scriptwriting and adaptation, just watching how story lines were compressed, clues were simplified, more scenes were added in order to Show not Tell, entertaining scenes and characters were sadly (although necessarily) jettisoned if their payload of clue or characterisation could be shifted elsewhere. While not being able to explore anything as deeply, the scriptwriters were all trying hard to retain the feel of the books, and it was interesting how some iconic lines got shifted onto different characters, and served slightly different purposes, yet still made the cut. While Strong Poison, which is a fairly simple book, survived this process of simplification quite well, the other two are much meatier works - both long and complicated, Have His Carcase for its detective puzzle, and Gaudy Night for its characterisation. Of these two, Have His Carcase was, in my opinion, more successful. The criminals made stupider mistakes, and the detectives got luckier, but the essential parts of the story still happened in more or less the right shape. Gaudy Night didn't cope so well, just because there was so much other stuff in there, intense character development, statements on the value of work, musings on women's education and in all, I don't think they quite managed to skip over the gaps of what had been taken out quite so well. This is not to say that I didn't like them, because I liked all three adaptations a lot, but I found it interesting to make the comparison.
(And my, but the actor playing Lord Peter, Edward Petherbridge, had such a lovely voice...) I also wish they'd dramatised The Nine Tailors as well. While it doesn't fit into the Harriet Vane story arc, the fens and the bells and the flood were fantastically memorable images that I think would have filmed very well.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
If you have time (and can take any more after reading "The Bone People"), check out Keri Hulme's first short story collection, "Te Kaihau/The Windeater." The feel as a whole is much less bleak and dark than "The Bone People," often just as intense but without the stark, violent imagery, and in many places with a joy and wonder in the natural world and the NZ landscape and way of life that "The Bone People" by its isolation tends to skip over. It's by no means Keri's Kavalcade of Komedy, but it has more moments of light than "The Bone People" without sacrificing the sense of unease and dislocation. Plus, of course, intensity tends to be more digestible in short story form, and the surreal, poetic, elliptical title story is one of my favourite short stories ever.
Anyway, for bleakness, Sir Janet of Frame outdoes the lot. Just remembering "The Carpathians" makes me want to go hide in a dark room. Brilliant, of course. But as miserable and dislocated as one could hope to imagine.
Is NZ as a nation really that depressed? As you suggest (and, frankly, as always) pop music has the answer: cue up Blam Blam Blam and "There Is No Depression In New Zealand"...
I've been avoiding reading Janet Frame. I read some of her poetry in high school, but (thankfully) managed to miss having an English teacher who wanted to plough through a whole novel. Cat (my sister) says her books are very very dark.
Actually, considering that you've moved here from elsewhere: what's your take on the national character? Is it much different from Britain?
I wouldn't say Elizabeth Knox or Catherine Chidgey fit the dour mold at all. Most of the edgy stuff that came out of JAAM (the only lit journal I read) is a long way from this too. I think the trend was there but has been diluted away in the last decade/two decades.
CK Stead misused an apostrophe? Gosh.
I reckon that we get so much fluff from overseas, with Name authors and marketting strategies, that it's hard for local authors to get a word in edgewise. It's only if you're writing Literature with a capital L that you can get noticed. And it's generally easier to write Literature if you write something no one would want to read, hence the dark-and-depressing motif.
[incidentally, I recall reading in the Listener a while ago about a wildly successful kiwi author of Mills and Boon-style romance trash. So that's an exception to your rule :-) ]
CK Stead misused an apostrophe? Gosh.
[sic] That's what it said on the back of the book. Honest.
I wouldn't call it a rule, just an observation from the books I've read which by no means form a large sample. On the other hand, neither children's books nor SF novels generally fall into the category of Literature with a capital L, so to me they seem a better indicator of national psyche than 'serious' novels that are trying to be clever and interesting.
But I'll definitely have a look at Elizabeth Knox and Catherine Chidgey, thanks Morgan.
I don't really have any profound insights on the NZ national character, but I don't see the supposed miserabilism of NZ literature reflected in its people. On the whole I've found individual Kiwis to be much more positive than the British. This is kinda countered by a strange pessimism about New Zealand as a country, but that affects Britain as well and I suspect 90% of all countries, and unlike the British the Kiwis don't get all het up about the fact that their country is supposedly going to hell in a handbasket.
In fact I would suggest that pop music really does have the answer. I can't think of any other country, except maybe Australia, which could have produced "We Don't Know How Lucky We Are." Simultaneously proud and self-deprecating, resigned but cheerful, and blokey while retelling a Maori creation myth. From what little I've seen that's a truer reflection of the NZ national character than Janet Frame, and it's quite distinctive compared to the mix of self-loathing, paranoia and jingoism that characterises Britain.
(No individuals were harmed in the making of this stereotype, I hope. In particular, although Britain *as a nation* suffers from self-loathing, paranoia and jingoism, I stress that most British people do not *at an individual level*. To concoct an example, most British people get on with most French or German people, but as a nation we are utterly convinced that the French and the Germans are conspiring to "get" us in some ill-defined way. Usually involving sausages.)
Post a Comment