by Kristine Walsh W ITI Ihimaera was thousands of kilometres away as the launch of his new book approached, but he knew even that wasn’t going to be far enough to remove him from some tough questioning.
In fact, with the content of the book, The Parihaka Woman, Ihimaera appears to be saying “go on, bring it on”.
Two years ago the Gisborne born and raised writer — regarded as one of the country’s finest — was facing accusations of plagiarism after it was revealed that his 2009 novel, The Trowenna Sea, included uncredited historical tracts.
He apologised. He and then publisher Penguin parted ways. But he always knew that, come the release of his next book, he would have to face those accusations once more.
And he has confronted them head on. Rather than writing a different kind of book, Ihimaera has opted to again create a fictionalised record of a disgraceful event in history, this time the oppression of the peaceful separatist movement centred at the Taranaki settlement of Parihaka.
So, yes, bring it on, he says. Point out any elephants in the room “which I may then sit on”.
It’s a defiant attitude from a writer who was, for a while, very much under siege. (Readers will likely hear all about it in his memoir Native Son — affectionately titled Ihimaera: Te Book — which is due out next year.)
Anyway, he says his absence from New Zealand was not a ploy to escape probing critics. His trip to England (where he represented New Zealand at the Cheltenham Writers Festival and lectured at Leeds University) and Germany (to support New Zealand’s role as guests of honour at the 2012 Frankfurt Book Fair) was planned well before his new publishers, Random House, scheduled the publication date for Parihaka Woman.
It couldn’t be changed, he says. Now, about those elephants.
The troubles around Trowenna Sea were two years ago and after that there was more hurt in the loss of both his Gisborne parents, Julia and Tom Smiler: “Losing Mum and then Dad was certainly the hardest thing but I’m a farm boy, I’m accustomed to the seasons and, even if it’s pissing down with rain, getting on with the mustering or putting the cattle through the dip.”
Also hard, he said, was to know what sort of novel to write next.
“With the publication of The Parihaka Woman — another historical novel — some people have told me I must look for trouble but, hey, there’s a third one whirl-ing in my brain so I was always somebody who could never resist the disastrous.”
Not that the idea was entirely new. The story of the book’s central character, the androgynous Erenora, began 18 years ago as an opera libretto then, two years ago, developed into a novella which eventually became a novel.
Weaving together fact and fiction, it sets the story of Erenora against the background of the events that occurred at Parihaka during the 1870s and 1880s. There is war. Land confiscation. Imprisonment of the settlement’s menfolk. And at the centre of it all, romantic love.
In telling it, Ihimaera has employed the cunning device of appointing a retired history teacher as narrator, letting him recite historical tracts and allowing him to apologise for any omissions (or additions) of fact.
But while Parihaka Woman is historical, it is also personal.
“I have recently realised that the main character of Erenora is really my mother, Julia, who was a very faithful wife to my father and, like Erenora, would have gone to the ends of the earth if she ever had to save him,” Ihimaera says. “So I was working out a lot of grief I had about the fact that she had died.
“Also, writing about Parihaka, what an honour is that? It made me ashamed to think of my own petty concerns, and I took a lot of inspiration from the ways those people saw things on the bigger scale and in the longer term.”
Parihaka Woman gets off to a bit of a clunky start but evolves into a rollicking tale that readers will
learn if they explore the endnotes, was much influenced by Beethoven’s epic 1805 opera Fidelio (which, incidentally, has a central character called Leonore — Erenora, get it?).
Despite those European influences, though, he believes it will appeal to Maori readers as it conforms to the expectations they have about whakapapa or genealogy.
“I like to think that this book is something new,” he says. “It is not a historical fiction, in which the history is rewritten and where fictional motives are more important. Rather, it is a fictional history in which the history is not invisibilised.”
Still, he’d rather readers didn’t spend too much time burrowing through the additional material he has supplied.
“I guess one of the things that I’m a bit sad about (after the Trowenna troubles) is that now writers have to say where things come from and account for every piece that might or might not have been borrowed.
“That doesn’t leave much pleasure of discovery to make so, if I was the reader, I’d stay clear of the endnotes.”
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