Prize-winner unfazed by mix of fact and fiction

By GILBERT WONG Books editor

Lloyd Jones' last appearance at the national literary awards was fraught. Biografi was shortlisted in the non-fiction section in 1994, but some critics objected that the account of a journey through Albania was fiction.

This week he took the prize for best novel with The Book of Fame, which tells a true story using real people - the 1905 All Black tour of Great Britain. He's reconstructed an actual event and made it fiction. Jones isn't apologising. "All history is story-telling. And when it came to the 1905 team there was only fragmentary evidence of who these men were. I didn't feel uncomfortable at recreating their lives for fiction."

So far no relatives or friends of the 1905 team have taken exception to what Jones has done, with the only encounter coming from a relative of 1905 midfielder Jimmy Hunter who contacted Jones to say he had captured the man spot on. Says Jones: "But I'm just as sure that I have others in the team completely wrong."

The big winner in Napier on Tuesday at the Montana Books Awards was Michael King, who won the other two main prizes for his biography Wrestling with the Angel: A Life of Janet Frame, which took the Montana Medal for non-fiction and the Readers' Choice Award. King rang his reclusive subject from the crowded ceremony. Frame said she was chuffed and pleased for her biographer.

Their friendship, fostered during the research and writing, endures, strengthened by the sharing of so much that is so personal to Frame.

King has just returned from a stint as a visiting professor at the Australia and New Zealand Studies Centre at Georgetown University in Washington.

Wrestling with the Angel seemed a shoo-in for the non-fiction award, something King denies.

"It really was a surprise. Yes, it has sold well but you cannot take these things for granted.

"My attitude is to be solidly pessimistic so the only surprises can be pleasant ones."

For King the prize was validation for his work, but more importantly the $10,000 that accompanies it will give him freedom to continue to write his own projects without having to take on other work.

In Georgetown he took courses that showed the parallel events and forces that have shaped both this country and America: the frontier experience, civil war, resource booms based on whaling and goldmining.

His classes were sprinkled with the progeny of the diplomatic and public service elite of Washington, who proved particularly interested in the way this country handles multiculturalism.

King, author of Being Pakeha, and with a track record as a Maori historian, found the tensions of multiculturalism and biculturalism more pronounced in the United States than in this country.

"There's a real fear in what could be called the Anglo-Saxon mainstream of a society riven by different languages and customs."

Chief Montana judge Sharon Crosbie called Jones' novel highly original. It is. His prose, which is both terse and poetic, imbues the novel with a hyper-realism that could not easily be mistaken for fact. Jones calls it his effort to locate our "missing literature".

"I could never understand why there had never been a literary work on what is our national passion," he says on the phone from Napier.

For Jones, the tale of the band of 1905 sportsmen was our own Greek myth. Like Xenophon's retreat through Persia or Odysseus' wanderings, a band of men venture into hostile and unknown territory; through valour and brains they vanquish their foes and return, though not intact or unchanged by their journey.

Jones, a onetime sports reporter, is mad about rugby. He played at first five and fullback for his Hutt Valley High School first 15 and went on to play senior club rugby.

He laughs: "I'd say if a rugby player was to become a writer he would come from those positions. They allow the player to be something of an observer of the strategic position and give you a necessary distance on the game."

King is still researching a biography of Frame's great friend and supporter John Money, the expatriate New Zealander who became an influential sex therapist in the United States. He has another book due early next year.

Jones has been similarly busy. His next novel, Here at the end of the world we learn to dance, is due for publication about the same time.

Predictably, neither author is prepared to say much about the new books. Call that their natural New Zealand male caution at being dubbed tall poppies. Even so, few would disagree that the Montana judges have made the right choices this year.

King is relieved to be returning to his beloved Coromandel after six months away. Travel broadens the mind, but can also weary the spirit.

Jones is picking the All Blacks to win the Tri-Nations series. "They haven't quite got it yet. But to be champions they need to regain that arrogance the All Blacks once had that every game they played was merely another chance to show how good they were. The opposition didn't matter."

The team to watch from the author who finally found the literary in the mud, boots and glory of our national sport.