James George: Wooden Horses

Hazard Press

$24.95

Review: John Connor*

As Jessye and Will wander hand in hand through the apple grove the old man sees them and plucks an apple from one of his trees. After breaking the apple and squeezing the juice into his hands, "He walks over to them and raises his hands again turning them over sowing the drops over their heads."

Most people would object to some old man splashing apple juice over their heads but Jessye and Will are not normal people; they live in the wonderful world of Wooden Horses created by James George.

In this world of portentous symbols, wise old people and mournful dreamers the true meaning of apple juice dripping through your hair is not lost on Jessye and Will.

Reminiscent of the flower power era at its worst, pretentious twaddle like this is scattered throughout the novel. If your tolerance for this sort of thing is low you might give up on Wooden Horses but that would be a mistake. It is an exasperating but strangely compelling novel.

Tom Solomon, a former UN peacekeeper, emotionally wounded by the war in Bosnia, is hiding from the world in Northland. An old Maori woman tells him the stories of other wounded people: her foster father, Will, half mad with guilt after the only shot he fired in the Waikato War killed a child, and her lover, Luca, brought back from the First World War shell-shocked and mute. Her message is clear: love healed them and it will heal Tom Solomon.

It looks as if we are back with the love generation again but, when he avoids the flowery metaphors, George is a superb writer. His simple image of the wind blowing through the marram grass captures all the lonely isolation of the Northland coast. His descriptions of the stupidity and casual cruelty of war are stark, unembellished and all the more real and tragic for it. His characters, when they stop acting like symbolic representations of some great universal drama, are normal human beings and their stories all the more real and moving for it.

Wooden Horses is well worth persisting with. Despite the misguided efforts of its author to decorate it with artificial flowers, it emerges finally as a work of great compassion and sensitivity.

* John Connor is an Auckland lecturer and writer.