In 1869, the Pakakohi iwi from Taranaki were almost wiped out – not in battle, but in retribution, Vincent O’Malley tells us in his book Voices from the New Zealand Wars. After a decade of fighting for a gifted military commander, Tītokowaru, more than 200 men, women and children surrendered to the crown. Seventy-six of the men were tried for treason in Wellington and sentenced to death; most ended up transported to a Dunedin prison. According to eyewitnesses to their arrival in Otago, the prisoners were largely old men and boys. Within three years, almost a quarter were dead.
Koko William, the main narrative voice of Airana Ngarewa’s second novel, is “the final survivor of Tītokowaru’s war”. He doesn’t see it as a surrender: “When everything was said and done, we scattered into the winds, taking refuge on ancient grounds or among the other tribes. I s’pose we believed we’d made our point. We’d shown the soldiers and the blowhards in the House we weren’t gonna roll over when they started marching in and telling us where to go.” Koko is bitter that “the Māori on the Pātea … were made an example of. All of us men – me, my father, my grandfather, my brothers – were sent down to the South Island to labour, rot and die in their gaols.”
When the novel begins, Koko is a very old man spending World War II drinking tea and watching the rough-and-tumble of the pā children. His village, Parirua, like most in south Taranaki, is decades rather than centuries old: everything “ancient was reduced to scorched earth during the war”. It’s also shrinking, because of urban drift. “Those fighting men left a lot of jobs behind and the fighting created still more.”
Koko is proud that the west coasters have refused to sign up “quick smart to fight” overseas. “There ain’t a lot nowadays that reminds me of much of my time as a young man. But I’ll die well knowing Taranaki was still as stubborn as our mountain was bare in the summer and tall all year round.”
Ngarewa has great story material here: a lesser-known and devastating story from the New Zealand Wars; what he describes in the epigraph as the “long and complicated history between Taranaki and Waikato-Tainui”; a period of tremendous social change for Māori, numbers decimated by flu and TB, trying to reconcile the old and new ways of living, including language and religion; and the life of a man who has personal experience of all of this. The novel’s title describes the nickname Koko tolerates, because as a teenager in the war he was obliged to take part in “a tradition that’d long been put to rest” – a “sacred moment” he can’t stomach.
After Koko rides to the local school to threaten the headmaster for strapping the kids, he dies; for much of the novel, his spirit remains “stuck here, among the living ‘til they reckoned it was a good moment to chuck me in the dirt and let me be on my way”). He observes the different steps of his own tangi, from preparing the body to discussion about preparing the food. Visitors are expected, and with them trouble (and a demand for muru – resolution and compensation).
Koko explains everything about “this darn funeral”, so the novel often reads at times as a new genre, the Marae Procedural. Sometimes, he serves as an omniscient narrator, able to see into other minds and move freely from place to place. Towards the end of the novel, by necessity, other points of view take over the story. There’s a narrative indiscipline to this, also revealed in anachronisms (like “hit with the lucky stick” and several references to the Queen’s, rather than the King’s, English).
Some of the weaknesses of Ngarewa’s debut novel, The Bone Tree, persist, like the excess of plot points, often predictable, instead of depth in characterisation, as well as a hard lean towards melodrama and stereotype. Older women are all ferocious, and if they’d been sent to Europe to fight, Koko thinks, “we’d see how brave ol’ Hitler and Mussolini were. War would’ve finished faster than it started.”
But where The Bone Tree was relentlessly bleak, The Last Living Cannibal seems determined to be uplifting. This can feel cosy and sentimental. Koko is folksy and chatty (“Geez Louise” is one of his favourite sayings), his point of view too superficial. The way the story will play out is over-signalled early on: “Ain’t nothing in the world like a good scrap to settle a beef,” Koko tells us in chapter two. He is the only character in the book with a firsthand memory of the shocking trial in Wellington and the misery of incarceration in Otago, the only one who can transport readers to the sensory and psychological experience of those traumatic years. Yet all he gives us of that time is summary, not intense, detailed scenes.
The events of the New Zealand Wars have deep resonance for Ngarewa, as he tells us in his author’s note: one of his tūpuna was just 14 when sentenced to prison. We also learn his aim in the novel is to explore “four defining moments” in the often-fraught “shared history” of Taranaki and Waikato-Tainui. This is an admirable ambition, but it demands much more from a novel’s narrative focus, pace and balance.
