Settlers’ Creek by Carl Nixon
Random House $29.99
Carl Nixon's first two books signalled a writer worth watching. His new work, Settlers' Creek, is a Pandora's box. It is the kind of novel that will be loved as much as it is loathed. It will raise fiercely contested issues as much as it tells a story.
The
storyline is simple, the effects complicated. Two families come into conflict over the burial of a teenage boy. Box Saxton wants to bury his stepson (he raised him most of his life) in the local cemetery, but the biological father wants to return him to ancestral ground.
This seems to be a novel of multiple contestations. How to bury the dead. How to connect with the land. How to be a father. How to farewell someone you love dearly.
For a large part of the book it seems to be Pakeha ways colliding with Maori ways. This gets into dangerous territory, not because we ought not to write or talk about different ways of doing things, but because we need to be acutely aware of how we do so.
You have two choices when you pick up this book: you can engage with it at the level of story or you can engage with the issues it raises (or both, of course). I cannot avoid the issues, because they are so entwined with the way Nixon writes his story.
Settlers' Creek opens with the dramatic discovery of the boy's naked body hanging from a tree. This felt like a device, a catalyst for the issues to come or a literary metaphor as much as a real event.
In the first part of the narrative, Box takes his billowing grief over the hills to the bay where he grew up. The underlying message is that Pakeha also have a strong connection with the land, whether spiritual, through memory, family generations or the stories told. I felt I was being lectured in a fictional form.
The land has an extraordinary power to act as a balm when you are at your most vulnerable, particularly a place that has figured in your past or where you have laid down roots. For me it was not necessarily a case of what Nixon was saying but how he was saying it.
The second half of the book is a terrific portrait of the way grief can send you out of your mind and make you behave in unpredictable and irrational ways.
When Tipene, the biological father, steals the body from the funeral home, Box sets out to steal it back. At times the grief felt palpable. At other times the issues took over and you were face to face with stereotypes - a perspective that tilted in favour of the Pakeha, that was overstated - and that included action that defied credulity (how did Box get the body on the back of the ute in his weakened state?).
Despite my criticism that the core issues have hijacked the narrative to some degree, Nixon still shows what a master craftsman he can be. There is the poignant scene where Box and Liz bathe the un-balmed body of their dead son. Exquisite writing.
Paula Green is an Auckland poet and children's author.
