Recipe for disaster

The Catastrophe by Ian Wedde. Photo / Supplied

A middle-aged food critic, an expat New Zealander named Christopher Hare, is playing with his food in a restaurant in Nice. His dinner, Provencal braised rabbit and salt pork, is, he notes, rubbish and he is feeling bored and lonely. "No, not lonely. Alone," he quickly amends.

As he gazes out of the window, he notices a "tall, gangling" woman with pale hands - gloves? - get out of a taxi on the other side of the street. She looks up at him, framed in the window. Within seconds she's inside, gun drawn, shooting dead a large man and his young female companion in one of the booths. Then she drops her expensive-looking bag on the floor and calmly walks out, getting back into the cab.

Christopher, as if propelled by an invisible force, picks up the fake Gucci bag, runs after her and jumps in the "cab". He has inexplicably kidnapped himself, forcing himself upon a group of furious Palestinian assassins who must decide what to do with him. Why has he done it? Will he live or die?

Ian Wedde's new novel, The Catastrophe, written during his 2009 Michael King Writer's Centre Residency, begins with this self-inflicted abduction and evolves into the scrutiny of a range of calamities, past and present: the flowering then ending of Christopher's marriage to London photographer and ex-junkie Mary Pepper; the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe) triggered by the establishment of the state of Israel and the displacement of the Palestinians; the culinary hurdles a critic must cross, including the monstrous Ligurian dish, the Cappon Magro.

The book touches on serious issues: the international trade in body parts, arms dealing, crimes against humanity. Then there is sex, food and a vein of insidious dark humour...

Christopher Hare, says Auckland-based Wedde, who was last week named our third Poet Laureate, is a man who has lost the ability to make decisions.

"This decision that he makes to run after a woman who has just shot two people in front of him - no one in their right mind is going to do that and yet this impulse drives him and he does this totally irrational thing."

Abdul Yassou, the man shot in the restaurant, turns out to be the former husband of his killer, Dr Hawwa Habash, a pediatrician whose family memories give Wedde the vehicle to deliver a snapshot of the history of the Palestine tragedy.

Rarely for a novel, it includes a short bibliography, including Robert Fisk's Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon, a book Wedde describes as "a fabulous piece of journalism".

The novel is dedicated to the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who Wedde first became aware of when he lived in Jordan in the late-60s after travelling through North Africa. He settled in Amman, where his accountant father, who worked for the United Nations Development Programme, was based, and started working with the British Council, the local radio station and with the Jordanian Air Force, teaching technical English. Then he got arrested and thrown in prison, ludicrously under suspicion of being a spy.

"I was trying to be a freelance journalist and I was very wet behind the ears," he laughs. "I thought, this is where the scoops are, so I was snooping around the place, trips to the camps, but I didn't have a press pass. They picked me up and threw me into the slammer and began to interrogate me - it went on for a day or two.

"Eventually this very impatient lieutenant with the intelligence police came in and said, 'well, what the hell do you do? We can't put you anywhere here.' I thought what the hell and said, 'I'm a poet' and he gave me a big hug, kissed me on the cheeks, put me in an escorted car and sent me home. If everyone who'd been jailed said, 'I'm a poet' [in that region], the jails would be emptied pretty quickly."

WEDDE, WHO was born in Blenheim, says he doesn't know how he "became" a poet. "My family - there were books in the house but it wasn't a highly literate household. There was a great love of certain kinds of poetry and I remember my father - we spent a lot of time in the Marlborough Sounds when we were kids.

"He had my grandfather's big old kauri clinker dinghy, with big oars. He taught my brother and I to row in it and he used John Masefield's poem Cargoes with the lines 'Dirty British Coaster' to row with.

"I just started writing the stuff when I was quite young. I think I began when I was 8 or 9, and stories and things as well. It was a secret thing. I wrote a poem when I was 10 about Captain Oates and the doomed expedition to the South Pole: 'Brave Oates went out to have a pee and froze as a consequence of peeing in the cold air.' When I showed my father this poem, he was really outraged. To him, Oates was a great hero. He gave me a hiding," Wedde laughs.

Wedde describes his father as "one of those Kiwi men who never had a proper education" who began to get his accountancy qualifications during his war service, and "just stuck the pin in the accountancy gazette where there was a job and off they went" ... first to what was then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. Wedde was eventually sent to boarding school in Somerset.

"I had an interesting childhood in that I didn't have parents for very much part of it.

"My brother and I went to school in England for five years, a little school in Somerset [King's School in Bruton].

"There was a headmaster there called Mr Davies, one of those gruff, chain-smoking tweed kind of guys - a wonderful man.

"He spotted what I was up to. He never said much, just that 'I hear you write a bit of poetry' and then occasionally he'd give me a book. That helped.

"The school had a very unusual culture which my parents clearly hadn't heard about. Davies ran a film club - he showed us French new wave movies and Kurosawa. We stared at these things without much clue.

"He was a pacifist but the school had cadets so anyone who didn't want to run around the countryside carrying a heavy pack and a rifle was encouraged to join the brass band. So the school had this enormous brass band in which almost no one could play the instrument and we used to parade with this dreadful farting, honking shambles of a band past Headmaster Davies who, in an expressionless way, would take the salute. He was great."

As Poet Laureate for the next couple of years, along with his job at the University of Auckland - "spread between the art history and English departments - in art history I was asked to set up a graduate course in curatorial practice and art writing, and in English to take an undergraduate course" - Wedde will be a busy man.

"I will produce a body of work - the Laureate is a good cattle-prod. I will also engage through the National Library blog site with the resources of the library. There is a public expectation of raising awareness or being an advocate - we'll see how that works.

"I haven't done a lot of public readings. If I get asked I most often say yes but I haven't had a large public presence and I haven't wanted one. I have called myself lazy - that's one word but maybe reticent is another."

Ian Wedde, Poet Laureate

Born in Blenheim, 1946, Wedde moved with his parents at age seven to Bangladesh, then to England until he was 15, when he moved to Auckland. Wedde graduated with an MA in English at the University of Auckland in 1968. He lived in Jordan and England from the late 60s until the early 70s. He was the Burns Fellow in Dunedin in 1972, then moved to Wellington in 1975. From 1994 to 2004 he was the head of art and visual culture at Te Papa. Wedde was the 2005 Katherine Mansfield Fellow and was awarded an Arts Foundation Laureate in 2006.

His poetry collections include Pathway to the Sea, Earthly: Sonnets For Carlos, Spells for Coming Out and The Commonplace Odes. His novels include Dick Seddon's Great Dive, Symmes Hole and Survival Arts. He co-edited The Penguin Book of NZ Verse and The Penguin Book of Contemporary NZ Poetry. His critical writings are published in How To Be Nowhere: Essays and Texts.