New Plymouth, 1968. Beneath the surface of the small coastal city in Taranaki, there is a hidden world. Godfrey Barnham, “nearly fifteen”, son of the owners of the Balmoral Hotel, reader of detective stories, movie-goer, Catholic high school attendee, mower of lawns, is on the edge of sexual discoveries – both his own and those of the people around him.
Jeffrey Buchanan’s new novel is a pitch-perfect evocation of a bygone era, lifting the venetian blinds of a buttoned-down society. Part-Lebanese, somehow both innocent and wise beyond his years, Godfrey’s intelligent and compulsive curiosity make him the perfect protagonist.
As yet unaware of his own attractiveness, his sexual experience limited to explorations with his best friend in a tree-hut high in a karaka tree, Godfrey’s interest is ignited by the missing bartender from his parents’ hotel. Reggie was effeminate but liked by the patrons, and suddenly he disappears.
The police are convinced he has taken his own life, as so many of “his kind” do. Godfrey remains sceptical. Modelling his search on the fictional detectives who have surrounded him all his life, he begins his own attempt to unearth the truth, interrogating the lives and habits of everyone he encounters.
There are the single men who stay at the Balmoral, then there is a lesbian couple, a bachelor who offers him dirty photographs, a fake religious “healer”, a young priest who thinks Godfrey should attend “classes”, and sailors on the merchant ships that still dock at the harbour.
In many ways, The Birds Began to Sing is a picaresque novel, following the episodic life of a single protagonist in search of meaning in a dense social world, depicted with clarity.
Godfrey has just learned the word “facade”, which he keeps in his lists of words to research. Everyone, it seems, has a concealed existence that he excavates by dint of boldness and persistence. He is compared by one character to Nabokov’s Lolita, but there is a crucial difference: Godfrey acts with complete agency. He is not acted upon. He initiates a remarkable number of sexual encounters for a New Zealand novel.
Buchanan was a member of Auckland’s ’90’s gay literary renaissance that would result in the landmark 1997 anthology Best Mates, where his work was featured. It was a full and frank collection with explicit incidents of gay sexuality, so unlike the neutered Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ writers from Aotearoa from 2021, which was reviewed in one outlet under the title “No sex, please we’re LGBTQIA+”. Expressions of sexuality are, after all, the basis of these communities.
Buchanan, inexplicably neglected by Out Here despite his long career, should be commended for his romping survey of a repressed era and an irrepressible protagonist in The Birds Began to Sing.
The author of other novels, including Harvard’s Hatreds, whose gay plot is set in America in the 1920s, and The Smile of the Dispossessed, about a pair of gay refugees from Iraq, Buchanan is the perfect writer to bring 1960s’ New Zealand to life. With more than a splash of the suburban gay Gothic, resemblances to the Hāwera novelist Ronald Hugh Morrieson’s local explorations, and hints of the American writer James Purdy’s descriptions of small-town American life, Buchanan’s new novel is a potent work.
The Birds Began to Sing, winner of the 2024 Michael Gifkins Prize for an unpublished novel, has a gentle humour, but it conveys powerful truths.
Given its preponderance of sex, Buchanan’s book still possesses the ability to shock. Godfrey becomes both a catalyst and a consequence to those around him. Nothing will ever be the same.
The Birds Began to Sing, by Jeffrey Buchanan (Text, $40), is out now.
