Nick Marsden: Shedding Skin

Peter McCoy returns to New Zealand after an extended overseas experience in a number of countries, funded by teaching English to speakers of other languages. He is also in full retreat from his failed marriage, having lost his wife along the way to the charms of a snake-hipped South American lambada aficionado.

What Peter doesn't know as he crosses the border at Auckland International Airport, and what the various border protection agencies don't detect, is that he has a live, venomous snake in his hand luggage, where it slipped upon awaking from hibernation in the underpants of an immigrant Brazilian herpetologist.

Settling back into life in Auckland, Peter takes up a post doing what he has come to know well: teaching English to foreigners. In the shabby premises of the Authentic Realia College of English (ARCE, presumably with a soft C) in Port St, upstairs from The Pink Thing massage parlour, he wrestles with the linguistic deficiencies of a band of accomplished, highly-qualified taxi drivers, hospital orderlies, prostitutes and cleaning ladies from all parts of the world. The snake, meanwhile, which has made good its escape from his luggage, does some settling in of its own.

There's plenty to like about this good-natured debut from Auckland writer Nick Marsden, whose day-job is ESOL teacher at Unitec and who is, one fancies, the real McCoy.

The stories of Peter's students struggling to find their feet in New Zealand are well told, and piquant with the ironies of immigration: a North African urologist drives taxis until, after one assault by a drunken patron too many, he quits to work for a fellow language student, Ivan, who has founded a garden services empire; the Serbian civil engineer, who spots at a glance a solution to Auckland's traffic problems, can't find any sort of job and resolves to take up bee-keeping; an Algerian dentist makes good with her belly-dancing company.

Meanwhile, a crusading politician, a former schoolmate of Peter's, thunders about the risks posed to the New Zealand way of life by immigrants and immigration. But when this man's diary falls into Peter's possession one day, he learns that the self-appointed guardian of all things Newzild is a far from savoury character himself; the fugitive snake is woven throughout as a metaphor for the various real threats we overlook while our attention is diverted.

Although, at times, the reach of Marsden's exuberance somewhat exceeds the grasp of his prose — metaphors are mixed, obscure puns are made and jokes suffer through heavy-handedness — you can forgive it plenty. And it's a salutary reminder that as the world changes, so must the face of our country and our people, and not necessarily for the worse.

* John McCrystal is a Wellington writer.