Christine Leunens. Photo / Axel de Maupeou
By David Herkt
Christine Leunens is a writer and the multi-awarded author of Caging Skies, the novel that eventually became the basis for Taika Waititi's film, Jojo Rabbit. She is now a New Zealander and lives in Nelson, but she has also been a magazine model in Paris for fashion designers such as Givenchy and Pierre Balmain. She has featured in Vogue and Marie Claire. Leunens was also particularly well-known for one memorable European television commercial.
In it, she played a wife who waits for her absent husband to return home in the evening. Her mood changes from expectant and eager, to bored, furious, reflective, pacing, and frustrated. When her husband finally appears at the door, he is shame-faced. "I had a problem with the car," he mutters unconvincingly.
"With your Mercedes?" she asks. He nods, whereupon she suddenly slaps him hard across his face. "According to ADAC', a full-screen text card instantly reads, "a Mercedes breaks down only after 1 million kilometres … Next time, be smarter."
Leunens laughs when she is reminded of it.
"My life is completely opposite now to the life I had then. I wonder if two things could not be more opposite … I remember, after that advertisement screened, I would go places and people would notice and heads would turn – "You're that one!" Now, I feel like I have more of an inner life.
"What is the same is that when I did that 'Slap' commercial," she adds, "I had to put myself in the role of a woman who is alone, whose husband wasn't coming home … I'm putting myself into a character's feelings and that part is still similar to what I do now."
Although she was born in Hartford, Connecticut, the daughter of a Belgian father and an Italian mother, Leunens was global in her upbringing. She speaks English – very swiftly - with a European accent. She has a master's from Harvard and, more recently, a PhD from the International Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington. She is also a violinist with the Nelson Symphony Orchestra.
In 2006, Leunens immigrated with her husband, Axel de Maupeou, and their three children to New Zealand, where her new novel, In Amber's Wake, is set in the late 1970s and 80s. It was a time of "Carless Days" and the French government sinking the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour, when the Farmer's Department Store on Hobson St featured a huge children's playground and a parrot named Hector, who lived to the age of 131, and when Auckland housing was affordable – even in Ponsonby.
"After writing Caging Skies, which focused on World War II, my mind kept dwelling on how Hitler had been working on the nuclear bomb, and how the Americans were racing to get to it before he did, then the Soviets were on to it too. Then I kept thinking of the hippie movement," Leunens explains, "how a whole generation had envisioned a better world, environmentally friendly, sustainable, with more freedoms and less societal pressures – the whole more inclusive 'peace and love' attitude, anti-war, and anti-nuke.
"I felt there was something important and relevant to today, and started researching Greenpeace pioneers in New Zealand. Approaching it from the angle of fiction, I started with an environmental activist, Amber. It was only when I came up with the idea of her going for a much older, wealthy man, Stuart, who lets her use his yacht for her activism, rather than Ethan, the film student she's close to, that this story suddenly sparked into being.
"It's a story of love and secrets, involving three families. There are the Deerings, a seemingly picture-perfect family who own a stud farm in Fencourt in Cambridge. Then the Griegs, who scrape by in Ponsonby. Finally, the Reeds, who live a more luxurious life in Mt Eden and on their yacht, Santa Kathrina. Some of the critical moments in their lives converge with the major events of the turbulent 1980s."
The plot might be set against a larger social and political world but the personal lives of Leunens' characters have their own mysteries. The decisions and actions of parents play out in their children. Violence can flare in unsuspected places. At times, the novel possesses a classical inevitability – very much like an ancient Greek drama – where one human choice or misstep will affect the worlds of all of those around it, including the following generation.
"The setting was just so important for me," Leunens explains. "I felt it to be a major time in history. During the Cold War you had all of these nuclear tests going on … There were people who were risking their lives by going out single-handedly – or four of them in a tiny boat, a ketch – to try to face down a hydrogen bomb and say, 'Don't explode this!'
"They were ready to give up their lives – and for a kind of sustainable future, a more peaceful future, a more inclusive future. I think to myself, had we gone that way in the 1970s – had we gone to solar power like everyone wanted, for instance – wouldn't we be in such a different place than we are today?"
As always with writers, their own past and knowledge will frequently come into play in their novels – often in surprising ways. In 1990, Leunens had moved to Picardy in France and spent a year on a farm that bred horses. Now a stud in Cambridge, its owners, and its horses have a pivotal role in the plot of In Amber's Wake. Leunens' reader participates in the birth of foals, dressage training, and all the possibilities of a tragic accident.
"Horses used to be a huge part of my life in my younger years – right up to the time I was married. I had such a strong relationship at the time with horses. It was such a real connection with nature and the emotional intelligence that animals have which is so incredible. People sometimes think that when we talk about the feelings of animals, we are just projecting our ideas of feelings onto them, but I feel people who speak like that don't have any strong connection with animals.
"I remember very specific moments with horses. I used to jump and then for some reason I developed a phobia and I couldn't quite do it anymore. I was afraid to jump and even at the smallest obstacle I felt such an apprehension. I remember one time on a horse – it wasn't my horse, it was the club's horse, named Triumph," she laughs, "and I still remember once when I couldn't even do a little cross-bar, and the horse turned around to me with his eyes as if to say, 'Give me a break!'
While she awaits reaction to In Amber's Wake, there is still Caging Skies to figure in her life.
"Before Jojo Rabbit came out, Caging Skies had been translated 12 times, but since then there have been more than 20 translations. The movie meant that so many people were moved by it – and a lot of people wanted to read the book. Before then I guess it was what you would call 'literary fiction', so you'd get good critical responses to it. I knew I had a readership but nothing like it was afterwards.
"I had more interviews all over the world than I ever did before the film. There was a time when I could hardly keep up. I was invited to talk everywhere and that was wonderful and I embraced it all because the message that Taika presented had a good reach against the racism and domestic extremism and the far-right or the far-far-right. So, when people ask me to talk about the book, I still do it."
Asked to summarise her writing career as a whole, she is succinct.
"I like to feel the world through a character's eyes," she says, "and feel what their heart is feeling and their body is feeling and everything like that. I think it helps define who I am."
In Amber's Wake by Christine Leunens (Bateman Books, $35) is out now
Unbound Vol 1 weaves together pictures and interviews with NZ surfers.