Book Review: Jungle Rock Blues

Book cover of Jungle Rock Blues. Photo / Supplied

Jungle Rock Blues by Nigel Cox
Victoria University Press $40

Sometimes you pick up a novel and you know the stars have aligned. The sentences shimmer, the characters get under your skin, the narrative achieves a fitting momentum and the world of the novel adds to your world in surprising and delightful ways. So it was with this, Nigel Cox's fourth novel, first released in 2004 under a title no longer able to be used. I rate this as one of my all-time New Zealand favourites.

I loved the audacious premise. Cox takes two cultural icons - Tarzan and Elvis Presley - and makes a single character. This, however, did not please the estate of Tarzan's author and, under an agreement with the publisher, Victoria University Press, Cox's novel could only be reissued if all the Tarzan-related characters had a name change.

So Cox's novel has been re-released as Jungle Rock Blues (a title that Cox had toyed with initially) and Tarzan becomes Caliban. This tender, insightful portrait of a man is also a portrait of a world mad with consumption, mad over iconic figures, mad with pain and love and loss.

Caliban, raised by gorillas in the Wairarapa, discovers a hut with a radio left on. This, along with the books with photographs, is his first key to the outside world. Cox evokes Caliban's childhood vividly - from the tenderness he feels towards his gorilla mother to the senses he uses to understand where and how he lives. The radio, with its music of the time (the 1950s), ignites his musical core.

Caliban can sing, but he cannot talk; he can read the world, but not books. Looking at everything in the shack full of strange (but everyday) things, Caliban cannot yet grasp how humans constantly seek to change and transform their world into something other.

This absorption of music, this pouring over images that shift his gorilla soul into something human, is part of the novel's magic.

June, an American etymologist on the hunt for scarily large cave weta (human size), is Caliban's second key to the outside world. They meet. They fall in love. They move to America. He sings. The world listens.

Caliban becomes Elvis. He lives his life, yet it is also the life of a man who barely knows how to know the world. Food, clothes, ideas, television, love, money, even sadness are alien and instantly available without the instructive contours of childhood and adolescence.

The narrating voice lays down Caliban's history, dropping hints here and there as to his or her identity. It is a marvellous voice, reflective, original, insightful, haunting. When Caliban is in America, we learn, he is always inside something. He is inside his clothes, the expectations of others, buildings, behaviours, relationships, descriptions, rooms. He hungers to be outside this.

He hungers to be a man. The book we get to read brings that man to disconcerting, soaring, substantial life, and what makes this novel extra special, is the way Cox's narrative represents the world in a similar light: disconcerting, soaring, substantial.

The arrival of the reissue coincides with the fifth anniversary of Cox's death. This seems to me to be a very fine way to celebrate a novel that deserves to back in print and to gain new readership. I loved reading it just as much the second time, whatever the main character is called.

Paula Green is an Auckland poet and children's author.