A conversation with Lloyd Jones

The winner of the Montana Deutz Medal for Fiction speaks with PENELOPE BIEDER about fame, fiction and footy - but not his more famous brother Bob.

If a wince could be heard there would be a small one in Lloyd Jones' voice. He is not unaware of the irony. Since winning the top prize at this year's Montana New Zealand Book Awards, the Deutz Medal for fiction, he has spent a remarkable amount of time juggling with the media, in similar fashion to the 1905 All Blacks in his acclaimed novel The Book of Fame.

So he's grabbing some of that splendid $15,000 prize money and flying away for a few weeks, first to Israel, to stay with a son, one of his three children, who is working on a kibbutz, and then to Corsica, where he plans to closely inspect the beaches and the many miles of walking tracks formed by centuries of goats and their shepherds.

"I was completely taken by surprise by how pleased I was to win the award," he confesses contentedly hours before his flight. "Over the years you develop a thick skin and pretend these things don't count, but it's all been quite dazzling. So many people have written letters, so many people have been extraordinarily nice."

From the study in his York Bay home Jones is gazing across a blue Wellington harbour.

"There are plenty of sayings in the Torah of the evils of believing in your own press," he says. "Once the camera is pointed at you the conceit is that you are better than the person behind the camera.

"I guess I don't have fame but recognition, and I do feel it is allied to some form of achievement. Pure celebrity on the other hand I find cheap and contemptible."

They are strong words from a writer who has spent a considerable time studying the corrosive effects of fame, and musing on the unexpected stampedes that accompanied the first All Black tour of Britain.

From a range of backgrounds and occupations, 27 young men set off around Cape Horn by steamer in 1905, entirely unprepared for the British crowds, the reporters, the questions, the complete lack of privacy they encountered as their winning streak went on and on.

They found they had to learn to deal with an endless stream of curious strangers, and deal with them diplomatically. To quote from the novel: "In Dublin as Dave Gallaher stepped from the train a young newspaperman bounded up to him. 'Mr Gallaher. Mr Gallaher, sir. How does it feel to be famous?'

"Gallaher told him, 'The pyramids are famous, son."'

Of course the myth of the 1905 Originals precedes Lloyd Jones' novel, as do various match reports on the games played. However, Jones found that actual events outside the matches were harder to come by. He spent many hours in Palmerston North's Rugby Museum and in the British Newspaper Library. And often he was to find material that was not terribly interesting or even illuminating. His vivid imagination slipped easily into the gaps.

"While this book is essentially a work of the imagination it is nonetheless bedded in research. You could say I began this novel thinking 'travelogue' - a writer can go anywhere with a travelogue, can slip into any genre. With a traditional narrative you are stuck with one voice and one pair of eyes.

"I wanted to achieve a collective voice. 'We' refers not only to the 1905 All Black team, but also to us as a nation, remembering the story over the years, reciting it as the myth that lies at the story's heart.

"I've always thought the best writing has the intimacy of a letter, quite seductive. It closes the distance between the reader and the words on the page. And the only honest way to approach this book is to see it as my perspective."

He discovered that the players themselves didn't seem to keep diaries, so in a way he was not constrained by fact, which he found liberating.

He invested each All Black with a distinct personality - "A friend of Jimmy Hunter's wondered how I got him so accurately!

"But when I rang Billy Wallace's son, a Wairarapa farmer also called Billy Wallace, he could not really shed much light on his father, who never said much or talked about the famous tour.

"Sometimes the other All Blacks would visit, is really all that he can recall."

Maybe this paucity of fact is revealing in itself. When All Black Billy took time to visit relatives in Ireland in 1905 he discovered "questions about his father and about the country he's made his life in; soon Billy finds himself giving the one answer, descriptions that seem to cover both the place and the person - quiet, warmish, given to long silences, the contentment of lakes and the way they reflect their surroundings".

At the end of the tour, back in New Zealand, they all realise that "we who had come to discover found ourselves discovered and, in the process, discovered ourselves".

The Book of Fame is an intense, sensual account of young, naive New Zealand men abroad, men whose success - they played 34 games, winning all but one (scoring 830 points and conceding 39) - catapulted them from rural obscurity to international fame. Becoming the first celebrated New Zealanders, their achievements shaped the way their country thought about itself, and a myth developed that was far bigger than a simple rugby tour.

As the book puts it: "In London fame was measurable. You could walk around it, look it in the eye and admire it."

Says Jones: "I think that rugby players don't readily stand up and give their opinion freely - to state an idea publicly is the ultimate expression of individuality.

"So I think we are quietly proud when we are noticed at an international level," Jones continues.

"I think because we live in a small society everyone knows you, and you're never allowed to think you're better than you are, but that doesn't mean I subscribe to the tall poppy syndrome.

"David Lange said that one of the great things about New Zealand is that growing up, everyone in your street knew who you were, and this meant that there were more parents than your own looking after you, as well as keeping you in check.

"Even after you leave home, you don't leave, really. I remember going from the Hutt to live with my sister in Kelburn when I was about 15, and what an amazing, exciting shift that was. It's hard to imagine now how grown-up it was. Suburbia was just a playground, but this was the city.

"Now at 46 I do wonder how many first sensations like this are there left?"

This visit to Corsica will be a first sensation for Jones.

When he had the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship and lived in Menton, once or twice a year on a cold, clear day he could see Corsica from the French coast. Looming hazily on the horizon, it had a hallucinatory effect on him, leaving an impression that it was hovering on the edge of the world. He has even written a children's story set in Corsica, called Napoleon and the Chicken Farmer.

A few years ago he retraced Corsican-born Napoleon's invasion route from Lithuania to Moscow, tying it in with some parallel exploration of his wife Jo-Ellen's Russian Jewish ancestors, who came from Minsk and Kiev. In The Book of Fame there is a moving tribute to his wife's family when Russian Jewish refugees are hauled aboard the All Blacks' ship, the SS New Yorker, out in the English Channel. They had shared column inches side by side in the newspapers and now they were sharing a boat to New York.

W HEN he wrote his first novel Biografi, Jones was to quickly come to grips with the duplicity that exists between fact and fiction.

On its publication he had to sharply defend the book - a clever fictional portrayal of an Albanian coup presented factually - when a publicist in London took it as the literal truth. It went on to become a critical success in the US, appearing on the New York Times bestseller list.

A subsequent novel, Choo Woo, also had stunning and stunned reviews - the Herald's critic wrote, "I was left feeling like a bystander at a traffic accident: shocked, mesmerised and implicitous."

If there is an author he perceives as a blood brother it is the late Bruce Chatwin. And he enjoys the brilliant exchange of ideas in Saul Bellow's work (he's now relishing his latest, Ravelstein) something he feels is lacking in our literature.

"Unlike New Zealand writing, in Ravelstein there is no mention of the outdoors, of nature. I wonder if our writing here has to do with our physicality, how we have made our living, how we have built our economy from the land. Ravelstein is utterly disinterested in nature or landscape."

He keenly agrees that any writer, whether it be Saul Bellow, or the poet Heinrich Heine lying paralysed in his Paris apartment, ultimately has only imagination to work with.

And he can't be bothered at all with the notion of writer's block. "It's a handy term, like Tapanui flu - a crutch. I don't really think there is such a thing, though I do feel a burst of self doubt every time I begin a new project.

"My firm view is that if you want to write you must just get on and do it."

Jones is quite unafraid of the hard slog at the computer. Before he left New Zealand he was busy putting the finishing touches to his latest novel, Here, At the End of the World We Learn to Dance, which on one level is about different people learning to dance, but is essentially a love story that journeys through time and place, including Buenos Aires, a city he loves.

And unlike many authors he is happy to divulge that he is halfway through another book, titled Paint Your Wife.

Jones is thrilled by the amazing range of writing being done here. "Some is not good, but we need a critical mass in order to sort out our feelings about it. The writing seems to me to be coming from nowhere, with younger writers possessing such lovely confidence and a strong sense of entitlement that I and my peers certainly never felt. They seem to come off the production line almost ready-made!

"It's hard to believe that until recently there was barely a literary infrastructure at all, no fellowships or grants, and I find this sort of progress necessary and gratifying."

Inevitably I get around to asking that question. He laughs and replies modestly.

"Yes, I did play rugby and I was in the first XV at school followed by a bit of senior rugby. For the last five years I've played touch rugby every Sunday morning. It's more a theatrical trading of insults."

Jones' gift with this fine new novel has been to locate rugby in literature, and literature in rugby, assisting us all in getting to know one another.