Jake the Muss creator comes out of the shadows

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Alan Duff walks into the lobby of the Auckland hotel, brow furrowed, shoulder dragged down by the weight of his nice leather bag, and says, no thanks, he won't have a drink, but he'd like a coffee.

I ask the waiter for two flat whites. Duff says, "long black".

In Duff's new book, the third and last in the Once Were Warriors trilogy (maybe), Jake the Muss and Beth talk about getting together for a coffee. She drinks "flat white"; Jake "long black".

Ordering two flat whites was a slip of the tongue. Or perhaps an attempt at a never-to-be-repeated chance to boss Duff around a bit. With Duff you take your chances when you get them.

Early on, we hit a potentially rocky patch. He has been telling me that, despite railing against people "telling us not to do this, do everything in moderation" that he "probably does do most things in moderation".

Except saying what he thinks. "You reckon I'm not very moderate on that? I thought I was quite moderate in that as well, funnily enough. I thought I was just being honest." According to Duff, being honest has meant not dealing out what is dealt to him. His critics, "You know they've gone for the jugular with me and I haven't come back swinging".

According to Duff, he has been very well behaved indeed. Then he says, "If we're going to go that low, then you're a 48-year-old ugly, fat, unhappy, envious woman who writes about ... I'm not talking about you here," he says, his eyes glinting with mischief.

"I should bloody well hope not," I say.

"No, 'cos clearly you're not 48, you're 28."

He's rendered me speechless. He has managed to walk the line between being (almost) utterly offensive and delivering the most blatantly false flattery I've ever heard - and in one fell swoop. The only reasonable response to such cheek is to applaud.

He does everything in parenthesis. It's how he writes; how he talks. It's how he manages to behave with perfect manners and misbehave in the space of minutes.

Jake's Long Shadow is littered with parentheses. It's an economical way of explaining the complex and "because I don't use the conventional way of writing it can be a very effective device. Other people would say it's very irritating".

Duff is the bit of grit that gets inside the oyster and irritates away until it becomes a pearl. Reading Jake's Long Shadow you might find yourself shouting at the page: "Oh do shut up, Alan." Then you find you have been drawn into the story by the strength and rhythm of the writing.

The difficulty with Duff, he would acknowledge, is that there is a great and ongoing confusion between Duff the social commentator and Duff the fiction writer. Partly this is because, despite his moderation in all things, he has long been outspoken on issues such as how useless most Maori leaders are, how Maori are stuck in the welfare trap and so on and on.

He says, grinning, that you should see what he attempts to get past his fiction editor. If he got all of what he'd written into print, "I imagine I would totally embarrass myself". He says, slightly sheepishly, "I probably do stand up on my little soap box and go for it. You wouldn't believe it, would you?"

What a lot we know about Alan Duff. Grandson of Oliver Duff, founding editor of the Listener. Son of Pat Duff, scientist and intellectual. Son of Hinau Josephine Raimona, a brawling drunk (although in his memoir, Duff writes movingly that: "Her laughter, funny thing, stays in my mind"). Duff went bad: went to Borstal, went to prison, was violent.

Now here he is, a writer with such a well-known face that the doorman at the hotel, when I ask whether he knows what Duff looks like (so I can go and lay claim to a quiet table), says: "I surely do."

Yet Duff is notorious for telling interviewers who ask about his personal life to mind their own business. "You may get a similar response depending on the questions." He's given up fighting; still likes a good verbal tussle.

Still, when we already know so much, because he's told us, can he have it both ways? "Of course you can," he says. In any case, "There are certain things I find it distasteful to talk about."

Duff says he has been asked "every question", including how he could have written rape scenes if he wasn't a rapist. This is about as silly as asking Sir Anthony Hopkins whether he eats fava beans and bits of bodies for dinner. But as absurd as such questions are, it does point us back to that difficulty some readers and critics have with separating Duff's voice from his characters.

Take a vigilante scene from Jake's Long Shadow. Duff says he has left open the question of whether the violence was justified. That's the writer speaking.

N OW here's Duff on the farmer up north who recently shot a burglar. "Obviously I am completely in sympathy with the farmer. Because they're hard-working people and these lazy wankers ... steal his bike and sell it ... so that they can drink more beer. They can go to hell." Shooting such people is just fine by him. As long as he doesn't have to do it. Tough old Duff doesn't own a gun. "I got asked to kill a sheep the other day and I couldn't. No, I'm not good at that. I'm bloody good at saying it. Ha ha."

He once said of an incident in which he was provoked - and tempted - that "the real victory is that you don't punch the guy out". He knows what that feels like. "Ohhh," he sighs, "depending on where your maturity is. When you're immature it feels ... wonderful. You've just beaten another man."

Go to a rugby game, he says, "and see a big stoush and observe the crowd. It's not confined to the Jakes of this world. This is basic and primal". When you get older (he is 52), hopefully you grow out of it. Then "to hit somebody is the total opposite; it feels disgusting". His whole body clenches when he says this.

He is not a relaxed human being. His face doesn't hold happiness easily, smiles slip off the surfaces and into the shadows at the corners of his eyes and mouth. Sometimes he's in a room and thinks, "Why am I not enjoying this when all around me is gaiety and frivolity?" Sometimes he thinks, "I don't want to be an observer, I don't want to be a writer. I just want to be one of the boys."

He talks about depression: "Maybe mine is self-indulgent. Maybe it's that kid crying, that little boy who hasn't been listened to." But "It's no big deal, that's for sure."

He's a bit defensive, a bit wary sometimes, he says, because he's been open to the media and they've been mean to him. I think he gets a little bit hurt when I ask him if he's been wary today. "Oh, no. I think I've been okay." He's had "terrific fun". But "you know when I pick up the paper ... I might end up hurt." Well, as he knows better than anyone, there's no telling how somebody else is going to read words on a page.

But he can be terrific fun, in his complicated, touchy, droll way. So I tell him: "I think you've behaved very nicely today."

"Good, thank you," he says, looking like a little kid who's just been given a gold star by the teacher.