alysontheblog

“All this sweet hope lost. Lost to time, to dust, to heat. Like the dinosaurs’ hopes, like the fish that left the sea, like the fish that stayed in the sea knew they wouldn’t see one another again” – but can hope be regained?  Is there somewhere we can start again?

The new animals follows a group of people who work for an Auckland cutting edge fashion house through the day and night prior to an unscheduled photoshoot.  The company is the creation of three young males, Kurt, Cal and Tommy, who represent “the new sincere, the anti-irony” generation who respect their parents, and who live online where they believe they are “part of the global conversation.”

Carla and Sharona are the previous generation – they are ‘old’ – in their 40s – one a contract hairdresser and the other the woman who creates the fashions.  The young men treat them like shit, complaining that they “would bitch and moan about the way they ran things and where did they go to get paid?”  When Kurt talked to women he “sounded like he was talking to a small child he was trying to coax down from a tree”.  And Tommy “wasn’t talking to Sharona, he was talking to everyone else in the room, well, all the people who had penises”.

Carla on the outside is “polite and engaged” but inside she is an insecure wreck.  She escaped for a few years and now she is back and “didn’t want to look naggy. That was the worst thing a woman could look, especially an old woman”.  All the women are on edge, and Sharona momentarily tips over when Cal “wanted to cut the hem off the T-shirt … he doesn’t even know you can’t leave an unfinished edge on a weft-cut knit.”

Carla has a friend Duey, the only calm one, and the only one not sure about young make-up artist, Elodie: “Duey wasn’t sure she could be relied on as much as everyone thought. Young women were strange.”  All the others are in Elodie’s thrall, in awe of her youth, and don’t realise she is using them to get information – information about where Carla had been when she escaped for all those years …

This is where we realise The new animals isn’t about the fashion industry at all: “everyone thought what they were doing was making the difference, when really, when everything went to shit, it became clear it was just money. You really couldn’t do anything wrong when there was a lot of money around.”  If you have money you have a chance, if not you are a victim, a victim to bosses, to climate change, to homelessness.

Fashion is a metaphor for the disposable society, those things we reject when they go out of style, not when they wear out.  And for the money gap: “There were people sleeping in the street … The bright, bright shops keeping the merchandise warm and the people outside them under cardboard and newspaper.”  Shoes are $1000 shoes, a necklace is a $4000 necklace.  I also really, really had to read the descriptions of Carla’s dog Doug as though they were symbolic of all “the intense boredom mixed with nerve-electrifying stress” wrapped up in an aggressive, frustrated, potential killer bundle of muscle.  The alternative was too awful.

Clear headed Duey knows “The world was ending … It wasn’t just cynicism, or because she was old. It felt like the end. They’d all be underwater, soon enough. There was nothing anyone could do about it.”  And all through the novel the sea is leaking in: “The fountain at Mission Bay was going, the water, the water, the water. Carla looked away from it and down at her phone. In Duey’s periphery it looked like she was diving into the sea.”

Elodie is young, unknowable, estranged from her politician father who thinks whatever the world’s problems “someone will find a way to tidy it up.’  And Elodie wants to escape the way she thinks Carla did: Carla who came back: “Cold, wet, naked. Quietly, without any attention, and she’d fit back in again, eyes fucked, skin awful, bung feet. She’d come back, washed away the salt, got dressed, and fallen back in line” – but Elodie won’t make the mistake of returning.

Elodie gets what she wants by being nice, appearing optimistic and being young.  And she heads for the sea, believing in nothing but “fate and natural selection”.  But after Carla, Sharona and Duey’s rebelliousness, and Kurt, Cal and Tommy’s vacuous outlook, does Elodie’s vision reach beyond the journey away?   We love and fear the ocean as we love and fear our origins, the cold of the sea takes our thoughts away, but our curse on the land is taking over the sea.  No, poor Elodie is as lost as all the others, and her destination, as we guess where that is towards the end, is the real-world horror we have conjured up by our rituals of excess.

Can hope be regained?  Is there somewhere we can start again?  Probably not, we just do whatever small thing we can and read amazing books like The new animals!

Sita is on a zero-hours cleaning contract and is the only wage earner in her family.  Her husband, Thiru, is currently only able to contribute a Work and Income benefit, and her son, Satish, is still at school. So, when her boss demands she turn up for work in Wellington, despite a cyclone, road closures and no public transport, she leaves Naenae and heads South.

Sita is an Everyman on a journey, talking to those she encounters on the way.  Sita is a Sri Lankan refugee who finds the speed and slang of Kiwi English a mystery and she feels herself a “village bumpkin who didn’t know how New Zealand operated”.  At one stage in her journey Sita circles back to Naenae; another member of the Sri Lankan community picks her up and drops her back home – Sita is too embarrassed to explain her predicament. Financial and racial snobbery is alive and well within the community as well as outside of it.  Sita has dark skin – you wouldn’t see her in the dark unless she smiled quips a co-worker – Sita doesn’t understand.  And Sita feels inferior to those Sri Lankans who arrived as immigrants as opposed to refugees and who have made comfortable lives.

Sita is frail and in chronic pain from injuries she sustained in the Sri Lankan civil war: “There was so much that made her feel like she was a dandelion seed floating in the wind, waiting for someone else to rip it apart to make a wish”.  But somewhere inside Sita is a tough core, and she is determined to make a good life for Satish, and to make up for his early experiences in Sri Lanka, for which she feels responsible.  She is calm in the face of those things she can do nothing to stop, unlike Thiru who is petrified by his helplessness.  Sita repeats things to herself to keep herself on track, and to keep her memories at bay.  Memories that force their way through sometimes, and when she is alone and walking in the dark they rush over her like a torrent.

The water of the cyclone that soaks Sita as she travels is just one source of cold, wet and fear.  The swollen rivers she passes menace her as well, with their threat of bursting their banks and engulfing her – at one stage the water is described as having “paws.”  But the people she spends time with on her quest provide warmth, they are also on the periphery of society – those who aren’t don’t register her, or only enough to hurl abuse at her out their car windows.  Sita’s fellow travelers know nothing of Sri Lanka apart from cricket, they know nothing of the horrors of the war.  But they know what it is to be marginalised and financially powerless: the kid who can’t get a break from the Police, the homeless men, the prostitute, the transgender woman, the man just out of prison, the Māori mechanic who is used to casual racism – they are all in one way or another disenfranchised and poor.

Sita feels she should be grateful that New Zealand allowed her and Satish in to be reunited with Thiru, but she also knows that those in power don’t “give a shit” about her.  One homeless man offers her advice: “Don’t ever let them make you feel grateful” – but then he comments he is living on the streets and advises she might not want to take his advice.  Sodden downstream is a wonderfully moving portrait of an individual, a great description of what it might be like to be a refugee in a country whose language and rules are a mystery, and a really really good read.

Isabeau Martin is a lonely, insecure woman whose life has been shaped by a deserting father and chronically depressed mother.  She is asthmatic and grew up with the standing stones of Carnac as her only friends, avoiding other children, and sharing her thoughts with a massive menhir called the Manio giant.  After her father left, her mother took Isabeau away from Carnac.  At the start of this novel she has returned after her mother’s death and taken up the post of the Carnac Deputy Postmaster.  She is still shy, reclusive and asthmatic, and hoping to discover what happened to her father.

One day, when the Postmaster is not at work, Isabeau receives a parcel from New Zealand addressed to the Postmaster. She opens it and discovers a container of ashes and a request from a man for his father’s remains to be scattered amongst the standing stones.  We know the author of the request, Joseph, as the first sections of the book alternates between the story of Isabeau and that of Joseph.  Joseph was all set to carry out the task of scattering the ashes himself, when fate intervened.

Most of the book is written from Isabeau’s point of view, and after the first section we only hear from Joseph via the correspondence that starts up between the two.  Isabeau grows attached to Joseph’s father, George, or rather to his remains, and George joins the Manio Giant as another confidant for Isabeau.  She does make some live friends; she is drawn to a woman from the local bakery, Marianne, and through her to Pierrot, a potential love interest who offers to help Isabeau renovate her family house, which has fallen into disrepair.  There are also the Morel’s, neighbours from Isabeau’s childhood.

Despite these warm, welcoming, supportive people, Isabeau is still a fragile loner pursuing her mission to find her missing father.  But an epistolary relationship grows between her and Joseph, and when Joseph writes announcing that he and his cousin are planning to visit France, and Carnac, Isabeau is thrown into a bit of a tizz.  All of a sudden, she has Marianne’s wedding approaching, Pierrot expressing romantic interest in her, leads arising in the hunt for her father, a looming visit from Joseph – and the minor matter of un-scattered ashes.  Joseph is a musician, and she also has his recorded voice as the sound track to her anxiety.

I don’t want to relate exactly how this plays out – it has the typical romance arc, but quite a few unexpected moves along the way to the denouement.  There is lots of delicious French food described, and the French towns and environs are lovingly evoked.  It is a moving tale as Isabeau has been so damaged by her childhood, but I did struggle a bit with this damage playing out not only with some terrible decision-making on her part, but also with a lack of backbone where it comes to saying the important things that need to be said.  I recognise this is a plot structure requirement but still I found it trying.  The other gripe I had was with a character in her mid-sixties who is described as though she is one trembling step away from her timely grave!  But I was interested in how things were going to work out for the rather odd character Isabeau, and the book definitely made me want to visit Carnac – and there is helpful tourist information about the standing stones at the end of the novel.

All this by chance is a beautiful, beautiful book about memory and identity.  One of the characters muses at one point on how much of us is us, and how much is made up from the photos and paintings and books we surround ourselves with: “The before people” – “No one ever quite works out the mix”.

Stephen leaves New Zealand in the late 40s and travels to London to train as a pharmacist.  He falls in love with Eva, a young woman raised by a Quaker couple and keen to join him in his home country to start a new life.  But prior to leaving they received notification about Eva’s past – that she came from a German Jewish family, many of whom died in the camps, and that one survivor of that family is in London.

Despite Stephen wanting to “Deny that their lives were already somewhere else, where there was no going back from”, their lives are now on a new trajectory.  Babcia, Eva’s Aunt Ruth, travels with them to Auckland, to a house where the ghosts of the past move in with them and are engaged with in different ways: the son David eager to know all about his past and his faith; the daughter Lisa growing up closer to her father’s view that the past is best left to leave the present in peace; Eva spending hours silently keeping her aunt company.  Babcia for the most part sitting quietly day after day, the only person she can talk to a friend from the same camp who they meet on the voyage over, a friend Stephen hates for bringing unwanted information into his life.

All this by chance moves through the generations, with the point of view altering as we read.  It is a beautifully structured novel with the style and voice subtly changing with time and character.  “The past is always waiting to happen” – a thought O’Sullivan echoes in the novel, where names are mentioned before we catch up with who those people are and the roles they play.  And that is the central question – are they just roles?  What is an authentic self-determined existence, and what one that just emerges through time, place and acquaintance?

All the characters struggle with articulating who they ‘are’, Stephen when he first meets Eva, “unable to give her what she hoped to hear, some privileged understanding of what made him the man she loved.”  Lisa leaving her boyfriend Fergus when she sees him shy away from a dead body and lie on a principle of supporting the workers against the rich – recognising he sees everything as a performance and not real life.  Esther, David’s daughter: “I’m the sort of end to a long story I don’t even know”.  And when we catch up with Fergus, he is a bitter man still not able to fathom the role he played in his own and others’ lives.

The mystery of Babcia is in the heart of many of the characters; was she sitting there in a pleasant haze of not-remembering, or in a nightmare of the opposite?  Stephen hoping the former and David wracked with guilt over the latter and convinced “they could have done much more”.  David who wants so much to be part of the faith and people of Babcia “aware he was on the edge of so much yet believing himself at the centre”.

Lisa left Fergus due to his distancing himself from the world, but she ends up suspecting that there is an inevitability in such distance, that “If nothing is known about a person, then anything is possible. If anything is possible, there is no guessing with substance.”  It is fruitless to think of “The end of life that must be there in the beginning, somehow, surely?”  Life is too random, too full of agnostic Jewish fathers, silent African children, Australian librarians in London and Czech PhD students taking time out in New South Wales.

All this by chance is a novel to savour, to be moved by, and one to make you ponder your own place in the blurry selection of memories each one of us calls our past.

Two strangers arrive at a hotel in an unnamed and unplaced town.  They need help, but before providing help, the townsfolk want to know who they are and what has happened to them.  If the strangers can’t provide that information what are the townsfolk to do?

The cage is an extraordinarily intense metaphor for the dynamics of modern human communities: who belongs, who can join and what rights the community members have regarding their self-defence.  The strangers, who are initially given a room and food, become of concern when they cannot provide their names, place of origin, or nature of the disaster that has caused them to flee on foot and in rags.  They are invited to make a piece of art with wire to indicate that nature of their origins, and then that piece of art is copied and turned against them, turned into a cage, where they are trapped within their own otherness.  They are given nicknames (Doctor and Mole), but these are purely so the townsfolk can refer to each one – when there is only one, they are referred to as ‘the stranger’.

Throughout The cage, the strangers are likened to animals.  They become like exhibits in a zoo, they develop stereotypic movements in their cage, and they become defined by their excrement, the sight and smells the source of fun for scatalogically minded children.  They are also likened to domestic livestock, Doctor at one stage being compared to a thirsty cow, and they suffer the injuries and indignities of neglected domestic animals.  The other comparison frequently made is that they are seen as images or statues, inanimate things it is easy to look at and talk about with no compunction.  As the novel progresses plans are made for a stone memorial of the strangers’ tragedy, a monument that will replace the living beings that are an inconvenience to the smooth life of the town.

The narrator of the story is the nephew of the hotel owners, himself a ‘refugee’ who has been offered a home and from whom “some gratitude was expected”.  We also don’t learn his name, just his nickname, Sport. He also shares with the strangers our knowing about his toilet habits, he often makes his observations while visiting the loo.  Sport has memories of avoiding visits to his aunt and uncle when a child, not wanting to witness the ridiculing of his father, a school teacher who upset the community pattern by becoming a farmer.  Sport visits an aquarium and comments on the “the complete absence of interest by one creature in another”.  And that is how The cage sees our modern communities – a story is told of a boat trip where someone falls in the sea and the first call is for photos to be taken.

You would think that Sport, who has experienced entering a new community, to be sympathetic to the plight of the strangers, but, “With the strangers, I feel I am caught between looking at a crisis and wanting to solve it.”  A Trust is formed, and Sport is tasked with observation and reporting, he starts a ledger, he hides behind the rules laid down and decisions made by the Trust regarding the treatment of the strangers, and the responses to their requests.  Sport has sympathy, however “What is the point in sympathy that does not produce a change in circumstances?”, missing the point that he could make such a change.  But as his aunt reminds him, “You are not the strangers’ keeper”, a lovely pun on one in charge of lesser being and a protector or guardian of an equal.  In choosing this path of reporting within the confines of the Trust’s rules, Sport is also trapped, finding no way of reporting on the “strange new contortions of personality I find myself going through.”

The cage is set nowhere and everywhere, it is where school children sing Pōkarekare ana but also where they keep hamsters – so both hemispheres.  The Trust wants to know everything about the strangers and what happened to them, so they might know what steps to take to avoid it happening to them.  They put Sport in place to give them information much as we might watch the TV nightly, impassively watching the plight of refugees and those in war torn countries, calculating where any danger might be relevant to us.  When the wall for the memorial is being built, Sport looks out the window and sees a split screen, the strangers filthy in the mud on one side and his uncle playing tennis in tennis whites against the wall on the other.  With just a slight adjustment of our eyes, or the channel, the misery of others is gone.  Like Sport, we decide to see how ‘they’ will get on left to their own devices.

The strangers cannot tell of their experiences, and the Trust lays down rules that they in turn must not be informed – Sport gives them his nickname but they know no other names, or whether authorities have been informed, or when their incarceration will end.  The Trust does not even admit to incarceration, the strangers entered the cage (as a piece of sculpture) willingly, they won’t give their identities, so strictly speaking there is no-one detained.  As with the animals in the zoo that Sport frequently visits, “…there is a price to pay for not being local.”  In The cage communities can’t be sympathetic with people if they don’t know what has happened to them, but the comparisons between the strangers and the rough sleepers in the town suggest that sympathy can only really arises when the community-as-a-whole experiences a problem directly, just seeing it in their midst isn’t enough.  The haunted look of the strangers is put down to whatever they have experienced, not what they are experiencing.

What do we find out about the strangers?  They aren’t used to electric light, they are resilient when experiencing atrocious weather, they refuse to swap their clothes for new (seen as a refusal to assimilate), and give the reason as not wanting to dishonor those whose clothes they are – those who “in a moment of great misfortune had lost everything, all their possessions, in some cases even their skins”, they have nightmares of airborne dangers, and they are used to dealing with  those in authority.  And they are themselves sympathetic and conscientious, Doctor often offers to help the townsfolk (hence his nickname), he is courteous and polite, and at one point Mole ushers a child who has climbed onto the cage, to the safety of his father (reminiscent of Koola, the gorilla who carried an unconscious three year old boy to safety after he had fallen into Koola’s enclosure at Brooklyn Zoo).  But none of this makes the strangers into ‘one of the community’, even when Mole joins in to help the town in a crisis, he is not accepted as anything other than ‘other’.

The cage is a disturbing read – and sad to say, a totally transparent one, we know immediately what is being referred to, and how unjust and unfair communities can be.  It is a tale about what is demanded for what should be free: care and support.  The price for these is full disclosure, no space for healing, and a lack of privacy.  The price is those things that those who have lost everything might chose to hold onto – an observation once again from the zoo: “There is not much the ibex may keep to itself, except for what it is to be an ibex.”  Highly recommended.