OUT OF THE MIST & STEAM

by Alan Duff

reviewed by Mike Crowl

Two things used to strike me about Alan Duff's weekly newspaper column. First, though he was passionate about his subject matter, his style lacked the sort of edge that makes the reader take notice. He seemed to write as he'd speak, without much reshaping of the words. Secondly, he was passionate week after week on the same topic: the need for the Maori people to pull themselves up out of the dust rather than waiting for anyone else to do it for them. Duff's new book is in the same vein. Though the writing is generally better than it was in the columns - there are some vivid passages, particularly in the earlier part of the book - he sometimes drifts into a shapeless mode, presenting details that made me want to skip paragraphs at a time. Do we really need to know who all the neighbours were in his childhood street? That might be of interest if they played some further part in the story. But when they're given a few sentences and then forgotten, it's like the introduction of extraneous characters into a novel. Duff is excellent in his delineation of his mother and father, a couple so contrasted that it's a puzzle to the reader as to why they ever came together. The early part of the book is worth reading for the picture he paints of his family life. We have a sense of completeness regarding the portrait of his father, but the mother, after she moves out of the family home, moves out of the book too, and we're left with little comment as to what further part she played in Duff's life. According to a photograph reproduced in this book, she was on hand when Once Were Warriors was published, but the one mention of her in the latter part of the text is when she wrote Duff a letter while he was in an English prison. Duff's mother was a strong-willed woman, violent when drunk - as she increasingly was - and opposed to the intellectual side of life. There were some warm family times with her, but overall she epitomises all that Duff has been angry about: Maori people who express their lives in violent behaviour towards their spouses and children, and who can't stand those for whom the mind is a source of pleasure. It took Alan three or four decades to overcome the tendency in himself towards this kind of behaviour, though contradictorily he was often excellent in academic work, and excelled in sports. And it took him as long to appreciate that he was in any way loveable after the damage his mother had wrought to his self-esteem. As a result he progressed from a Boys' Home to Borstal to Prison (both in NZ and the UK) with increased leanings towards the criminal element in society. And the violent stream within his family made him a person who decided arguments with his fists. Duff's father was an intellectual man, from an artistic family, and aimed to pass on the joy of thinking to his children. Somewhat eccentric - he painted his house black with creosote, insisted that the children ate health foods long before they were the norm, and refused to own a car - he was nevertheless the mainstay in Duff's life, always there whatever strife Duff got himself into, always willing to forgive. A man of considerable integrity. Duff presents us with a 'memoir,' which led me, perhaps incorrectly, to expect some reflection on the events of his life. He's good at telling us what emotions he went through at the time, but never seems willing or able to review those emotions from the present. Perhaps Duff feels unable to answer the questions himself yet, but I would expect the novelist in him to propose some possibilities beyond being a child of two worlds. Neither does he give us answers as to the behaviour of the people who populate his world. Why was his mother the way she was? In spite of being the strongest character in the book, she remains all surface and no depth. We never know why she behaved so violently, so angrily, or so ambivalently towards her children and husband. Duff notes that the older Maori women spoke against her behaviour and that of her confederates, so it wasn't something, apparently, she had inherited from the previous generation. The latter part of the book is much more roughly sketched than the rest. There's a curious gap from the time of his last prison spell, when he determined to use the time to write, to the completion of Once Were Warriors. We're given no idea why he chose to write this particular book, nor how it evolved. It appears out of nowhere, full-blown, and immediately successful. A little more about the writing style. Apart from his tendency to shift from past to present tense within a section for no obvious reason, early in the piece (pg. 21) Duff tells us his father taught all the children correct grammar. This comes after he has written on pg. 11, "I'm said not to be great in that area [grammar] anyway. I'm confident enough to think that some of my writing may well force a few changes in the rules!" This is ironic in view of the number of very odd sentence constructions scattered throughout the book. Without intending irreverence to our esteemed author, their construction reminded me of Yoda in the Star Wars movies and his peculiar way of putting words out of normal sequence. Duff acknowledges the input of an editor, but the puzzle is why the style and shape were allowed to remain as they are. I have to ask myself, would this book have been published as it is if Duff hadn't been well-known from other work?

Published 1999 by Tandem Press ends

© Mike Crowl 1999

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