The Bone Tree, by Airana Ngarewa.

 

            I was glad to finish this book.  Not because it was a rubbish read, poorly written – just the opposite:  it is a towering, brutal story of the sadness and violence endured by children of poverty in Aotearoa New Zealand;  the feelings of hopelessness and helplessness engendered by their terrible vulnerability – and the remedies some of them will employ in order to survive. 

            This is NOT an easy read for any New Zealand European as it delves mercilessly into our doubtful colonial history, different versions of which have been taught in schools for more than a century;  only in the last decades has the Maori language been recognised as the second official language of our country, and Te Reo is now being used extensively in everyday speech, to the joy of Tangata Whenua:  the language is alive and well!

            Sadly, teenager Kauri (or Cody, as his Irish dad and the welfare organisation reps call him) knows his father will not live much longer;  Kauri nurses him faithfully but doesn’t actually care if he dies;  he has been the victim of many vicious beatings when his dad came home drunk and raging against Kauri’s Maori mother ‘who woke up dead one day’ from a wrongly diagnosed illness.  Nah, good riddance to the old bastard - even though Kauri looks after him to the best of his ability, he certainly won’t be missing him.

            But Kauri’s main worry is his little brother Black – who is anything but, being as pale as milk and a stranger to schooling of any kind, making him a perfect target for the pakeha welfare guys who have been sniffing around too much lately;  Kauri has seen what happens to kids who get ‘uplifted’ by the Welfare – they turn out broken, and he can’t have that for his beloved little bro.  When the old man dies, Kauri will go on a quest to find his relatives –there must be some family left out there who will help them find their place in life, their ancestry, their place of belonging, their turangawaewae.

            And Kauri’s search leads him to the nearest city, and family to which he would never have dreamed of associating – a whole church full of them, not to mention a fallen sinner who introduced Kauri to all these Holier-than-Thous – every one of them pious to a fault, but never acknowledging their family connections.  In his efforts to find his family, Kauri also learns some very big life lessons about those who want to be found, and those who don’t.

            It was hard going reading this story.  It made me deeply ashamed of our country’s bloody history and the glossing-over of terrible mistakes made by the early colonial powers that are now finally being acknowledged.  Thank you, Airana Ngarewa, for this great and timely story.  SIX STARS. 

                 

 

A Better Place by Stephen Daisley.

 

            This is the third of Stephen Daisley’s novels that I have read and once again, I am in awe of his seemingly effortless talent to evoke myriad emotions from the reader as they journey through his characters’ lives, completely involved and living each experience, good or bad, with them – and there are so many searing, tragic experiences, for Stephen Daisley writes about war, and he doesn’t pretty it up for the reader:  in spare, short sentences he tells the story of twin brothers from New Plymouth in New Zealand’s North Island who, at the age of twenty enlist in the Army at the beginning of the Second World War.

            Roy and Tony Mitchell are jacks-of-all-trades.  They are identical twins, but Tony is an idealist and artistic.  Roy is relentlessly practical:  what you see is what you get.

They have had a rough start to life:  their father was given land by the government when he came back from the First World War but he also came back broken and turned to the drink.  Their mother left them to fend for themselves without a backward glance when they were fourteen.  She’d had enough.  After working for keep and learning stock handling, fencing and all the other backbreaking toil associated with hard-scrabble farming, the twins decide it’s time for a change:  might as well go to war!

            So they do, and end up at Maleme on the island of Crete with their Battalion, retreating from a huge German Offensive in which Tony the Introvert is believed lost.  Bloody good Joker Roy is understandably shattered, but he feels even worse because he ran away like a coward, leaving his brother behind, and when he returned, could only find Tony’s leg, shattered and shredded at the listening post where he left him.

            The fate of both brothers is masterfully revealed;  Roy is shipped to Italy with his regiment, and Tony becomes a Prisoner of War.  He is shown  compassion by his captors, while Roy sees the worst side of the enemy:  a whole village annihilated as the Allied troops came to liberate them:  the feelings of the hapless reader (me!) are trampled into the ground;  this is how it was, and this powerful, terrible story should – but won’t – act as a terrible, sickening example of what war does to the world, how long it takes for nations to recover, and the tragic fact, as evidenced by the Ukraine and Gaza, that nobody learns War’s lessons.  SIX STARS.