Alan Duff: Jake's Long Shadow

By MARGIE THOMSON

Twelve years since Once Were Warriors socked into our consciousness, and six since What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?, Duff winds up his trilogy with this volume which, while it contains passages of mellowness and peace, for the most part bristles and lacerates with the same fury that shocked us all in the first two.

It opens with Beth, now a legal secretary and ruminating over her marriage to the kind, intelligent but not sexually charged Charlie Bennett. Her thoughts turn repeatedly to Jake, whom she hasn't seen for 10 years. She tells herself she couldn't go back: "Warriors are bores, Jake" - but from the beginning we have a strong sense that she is lying to herself.

We learn that Jake Heke, the man who has never travelled more than 100km from Pine Block, has been on his own journey towards "a fulfilment of sorts". He still enjoys a beer, but he's become contemplative, finds his action out in the bush, hunting with his good mates. Fights? "I don't do that. Not to anyone." He has accepted responsibility for the destruction of his family.

Perhaps most symbolic of the change these two have been through - and the country has also experienced - is that when they do bump into each other in the street they contemplate meeting for a coffee. "Long black," says Jake. "Flat white," says Beth.

With the same skill that he demonstrated in Broken Hearted, Duff weaves together a multitude of storylines and voices so we see all sides of this fractured community.

The Hekes, while splintered as a family, are mostly, and beyond all expectation, making a pretty good go of their lives. Boogie is in Wellington practising as a lawyer and seeking intellectual challenge; Huata (who doesn't appear in the story) is the only one not excelling, but at least he's not violent.

There's Abe, about to be promoted to foreman at Busby sheetmetal workshop and who has broken the curse of being a violent Heke, though he may be unable to escape the violence that comes looking for him.

Polly teams up with her Pakeha lover Simon to form Integrated Properties Ltd and starts buying up properties in Pine Block. She is on her way to becoming a millionaire. All life was a money opportunity, she discovers. "Let them rot," she says of those Pine Block types who couldn't be bothered to lift themselves up.

And in the Pine Block wasteland life is as grim as ever. Duff's cast of characters has expanded to include the welfare-dependent inmates of a grotty flat: Pakeha Alistair Trambert, son of the Hekes' former wealthy neighbour, whose life is a haze of self-pity and laziness. His depressed quarter-Maori flatmate Sharneeta, drawn to men who treat her bad, is unable to love or care for her baby, the product of a rape. And, in Paremoremo, Apeman, who has lost none of his terror, plots revenge against Abe for testifying against him, ensuring he received a life sentence for murdering Tania.

Duff also stalks the pages to a greater degree than many writers allow. Because his views are so well known, we easily sense him behind, for instance, the views expressed in Charlie Bennett's frustrated reports to the head office of the government welfare department for which he works.

"He dared to state a written view that the Maori societal model was inadequately equipped to give young people the means to cope in a modern world of knowledge and technology. His reports suggested parenting and life skills should be taught at school, rather than this blind, unquestioning adherence to Maori culture."

Duff excoriates finance companies, salesmen ("in their eyes there ain't no soul, just facial posing"), prisons, do-gooders, liberals, Maori who indulge themselves with an over-inflated idea of their suffering ("we didn't suffer like you Negroes did," Jake says), property speculators and even orthodontists.

He saves his real, deprecating rage, though, for those a more liberal person might choose to see as victims: those who begin as victims, brought up in violence and terror, who then go on to lust for violence in their own lives, wreaking havoc on their fellows and families.

"Losers," Duff calls them, speaking through a character, "blindly faithful to the cause of being blindly unknowing to ourselves. Those who wear electric-needle maori warrior masks - spelt with a small m cos this is not Maori, it's some warped notion, a comic-book perception. We wouldn't know true Maori warriorhood till it confronted us with the truth of ourselves, that we're nothings."

There are long tracts, for instance when the guardian/avenging angel character Nameless is looking around at his fellow prison inmates and musing on the whys and wherefores of their life journeys, where Duff veers dangerously close to losing his fictional voice and becoming a polemicist. He is rescued, though, by the power of his writing, which transports his reader to the unbearable tension at the heart of this dark world, viscerally into the lives of his characters.

And, while this one has moments as shockingly violent as Warriors and Broken Hearted, there is a quietness that is slowly layering itself over the gore.

There is a beautiful chapter which may redeem Duff in the eyes of his more idealistic readers, where he expresses all the good things about the Maori lifestyle in a day spent fishing, putting down a hangi, drinking beer in good company. "A world of loving, decent [men] who work hard all week and then share the weekend like this with the family."

But counterposing that and giving the lie to the peace he engenders, is an incident towards the end of the book which will probably be the most controversial. It certainly filled me with revulsion and despair.

Just at the point where we are feeling the most sickened by violence, Duff offers an Old Testament-style solution. "A good man's anger", he calls this sanctifying vigilantism that he would have us believe will chase the bad ones off for good.

The message, as ever, is empowering if simplistic and therefore sometimes irritating - an individualistic approach that grates against the dominant ethos of the helping agencies. Duff believes nothing is inevitable: people can make their own choices about how their life will be. As Jake realises, he "should have got over this growing-up baggage ages ago".

New Zealanders can be awfully polite when it comes to expressing ideas or passionate opinions. Well, there is nothing polite about Duff: he's out there, stirring us all up, tearing down shibboleths, facing up to public opinion with great courage, armed only with his mighty weapon, the written word.

With the Hekes, he has created one of the most powerfully realised families in New Zealand writing, a family gone from travesty to emergent role model. In Jake's case, the transformation could scarcely be more complete: from bar-brawling and wife-bashing to long, contemplative evenings on his verandah, a home-owner with a quiet beer in his hand and a vase of flowers inside, put there just for his own pleasure. It's good to catch up with them, to see that redemption is possible.

Duff is revealed as an eloquent optimist, a powerful advocate for the possibility of individual transformation. Whether his work will be read by the people who could most benefit - those still trapped in that social wasteland of Once Were Warriors - is doubtful, as Duff acknowledges. But for the rest of us, it makes extraordinarily compelling reading.

Vintage

$29.95