Albert Wendt: The Mango's kiss

Reviewed by SIOBHAN HARVEY*

Everywhere, the historical novel is flavour of the month. It seems to have captured the centre-ground of literature only recently vacated by chick-lit, and any author of note seems to be releasing a book about the past.

Albert Wendt's latest novel is set in 19th-century Samoa. It might appear an attempt to follow literary fashion, but this novel has been 16 years in the writing.

A flick through its pages reveals a storytelling style that, though seemingly straightforward, is a clever deception. It lulls the reader into seeing the novel as a conventional narrative. However, like a beautiful island rock-pool, only when you dip into it do you discover that the true treasure lies in the sparkle of the organic matter beneath its surface.

Through a series of evocatively titled chapters, we are taken back to one village, Satoa, one aiga (family), and primarily, one voice: Pelepiui Tuifolau.

The opening pages of The Mango's Kiss detail Pele's first moments of consciousness, the taste of mango at her lips; the final pages detail her demise. In between, she grows from girl into woman, from woman to matriarch.

Compassion is the order of the day, but to the author's credit, it is compassion told with an eye towards realism.

Rather than creating Pele as a blameless, sainted icon, the reverse of all the prejudice and racism of these times, Wendt's heroine is a person whose strengths are derived as much from her faults as from her talents.

A plethora of finely crafted characters circle Pele. There's her father, Mautu, the village pastor who ignores convention to strike up a lifelong friendship with an agnostic papalagi (white man). A patriarch, he also nurtures his daughter's promise above that of his sons.

Lalaga is Mautu's wife - mother, homemaker, companion and teacher. As religious women often do, she underpins the whole edifice of cultural and social life in Satoa.

Her antithesis is Barker, a man whose true vividness occurs in death, not life.

There are even a few historical recreations, such as Leonard Roland Stenson, renowned Scottish author and Apia resident. American anthropologist Doctor Mardrek Freemeade devises racist and sexual doctrines about Polynesian life.

Wendt raises themes pertinent to Samoan life and its colonial past, such as truth versus dishonesty, identity versus masquerade. For instance, the reassurance the reader finds in the rich past Barker recounts is pulled from beneath us in a letter he writes from beyond the grave to Pele. This is mirrored at the close of the novel when the reader - through Pele - listens to another character recount his fantastical life on the high seas. The parallels leave us to ponder whether anything we have been told is real or a mirage, a spiced-up account of unseemliness for the audience.

If doubt hangs over us in the same way that Barker's ghost hangs over this novel, what keeps us reading are the eternal debates about religion versus spirituality, about English versus native language, about Western capitalism versus village life.

With these things, Wendt builds a novel whose complexity is like an immense piece of deftly woven fabric. We don't get one story, but multiple narrations. We don't get one point of view, but rather multiple accounts of similar and differing realities.

Indeed, in The Mango's Kiss, we don't get a novel so much as a Polynesian dictionary and cultural workbook, one that explains and translates historic practices, beliefs and words. Wendt returns time and again to his core conviction: that, like the book itself, in spite of its surface tranquillity and beauty, Samoa and its people are many-sided, many-textured and possess many pasts.

Academic and novelist David Lodge likens the historical novel to a vehicle delivering the reader into the past to discover something unknown about their ancestors, and, importantly, to see reflected back something unknown about themselves and their society.

If it is clear from The Mango's Kiss that we journey into history to find Samoans who are both real and unorthodox. What we see reflected back goes beyond a surface realisation that these people are not so different from ourselves, our complexities and social dilemmas.

The Mango's Kiss reminds us that the Pasifika Renaissance did not start with the flair of the Nesian Mystik hip-hop crop, but with the publication a generation back of writers such as Wendt. The Mango's Kiss cements Wendt's mantle as a primary figure in this Polynesian cultural rebirth.

Random House, $34.95

* Siobhan Harvey is an Auckland writer and tutor.