Geoff Cush: Son of France

By MARGIE THOMSON

It's a cute idea: 1930, and the French tricolour flies over New Zealand, the cities - Sainte-Chapelle in the southern Normandy Plain, New Lyon, the capital, in the north - are lined with cafes and estaminets, and vineyards are already springing up.

It sounds pretty good, and if it had been like that, it wouldn't have taken us until the 1980s to have discovered the particular power of a good cup of coffee. Neither, apparently, would we be so puritanical about smoking.

All the characters in this nicotine and absinthe-soaked novel enjoy (quelle horreur!) strong French tobacco, and the hero's main resource, as he heads off into the "tangled place" that is the New Zealand bush, is a stash of 2000 cigarettes.

The French seem a little wiser, a little more live-and-let-live than the English proved in our more familiar space-time continuum, and have allowed a large part of the North Island, known as National Park, to remain under Maori ownership and control (barring a Catholic mission run near Whanganui by devious, opportunistic Father Claude, which becomes central to the story).

But such liberalism can be as calculating - and as ineffectual - as overt brutality, we learn.

The English, vanquished, have largely abandoned the land they had hoped to colonise. But they have one city left, Wellington, where the decent English breakfast prevails (providing you reach the dining room in time) and a pompous bureaucracy holds sway, proclaimed every morning by the 9am chimes of the insurance offices.

Our hero, Lieutenant Verdier, 33 and dashing, loves his job managing the French Protectorate's motor pool in Sainte-Chapelle ("these machines that are the future," as he enthuses).

Unfortunately, he falls into favour with the new Resident who orders him up to the capital to become his personal chauffeur. Verdier is to choose and order an appropriate car, collect it from the main port of Wellington, and drive up to his new life.

Verdier, a speed-freak, selects an all-steel, ostentatious Citroen AC6 - a car that would have been just the thing on the boulevards of Paris, but is quite inappropriate for New Zealand's salt-laden climate (and for his own risk-seeking nature). It is already mysteriously damaged when it emerges from its packing crate.

Driving north, he stops for the night at "a certain legendary auberge" near Mangaweka where he dines on scallops with veloute sauce, mushrooms, shallots and so on, and wakes in the morning to find his car gone.

The car, it seems, was always just a device, first to entrap him in a life he didn't want, and then to carry him into the middle of nowhere with consequences he could never have foreseen.

Verdier's search for the car eventually becomes something else: an escape from the cloying, boring prospect of New Lyon - where the Resident is personally overseeing the decoration of his new chauffeur's apartment.

It is a slip-sliding from happy autonomy, where he felt gloriously in control of his life (our first glimpse of him, in the supremely French environment of an Akaroa restaurant, is as he chastises a waitress for bringing a red wine glass for his chablis, and muses that "his dissatisfaction was the force that civilised the world") into helplessness as he stumbles into a foreign world where nothing is as he expects.

Civilisation only stretches so far, and out in the bush, further even into the interior of National Park than the mission, is a cabin perched on an outcrop of rock that represents forces implacably opposed to anything French.

Yet the story doesn't move forward as resolutely as that synopsis implies, and neither is it about Verdier as a man, in that he is still, by book's end, a rather ghostly presence in his own story.

For all that, Son of France reads as lightly and delightfully as a simple comedy of manners. Yet it's a darkly witty satire, loaded with philosophical ideas and speculations.

Finally, it seems that Verdier is simply a cipher, wandering the country, taking part in a series of encounters that have no meaning for the plot but rather bolster up the social, ideological landscape in which it occurs (his French mistress Juliette, whose husband is away cutting down a teak forest in Tongking; the English insurance assessor Bentley, who drinks absinthe for his elevenses; the ancient kuia who makes him drive offroad to the beach to collect shellfish; most dangerously, the hate-filled lovers Marama and Titoko who together will change Verdier's life).

If it's a metaphor for the ineptness and fateful arrogance of colonial powers in general, Cush is at least even-handed: the militancy and extremism of the Maori radicals is revealed in the end to be just as hollow, and just as prone to hypocrisy, opportunism and brutality as the "isms" of everyone else.

I like it better as an exploration of villainy.

Most of the characters, even the relatively benign ones such as Verdier himself, are villains of one kind or another, and villainy, as we see most graphically as the book winds its way towards its dark end, wears many faces.

And, in the end, we see with no small horror that colonial powers themselves are a kind of mask for the real, raw life of a nation which ticks away regardless of what happens in the capital.

Vintage

$26.95