James George: Hummingbird

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

I was curious to see that Hummingbird is Whitcoulls' May book of the month, not because of any doubts about the novel's quality - it's extraordinarily beautiful, thoughtful and moving - but because of the possibility that its slow, deliberate pace would count against it finding a place in the mainstream.

Not necessarily, it seems. "It's a really good book," explains the chain's national book buyer Joan MacKenzie, who read the book in manuscript form and knew she was on to a winner. "We think it's accessible enough to take to a mainstream audience."

This is George's second novel (his first, Wooden Horses, was published in 2000) since the 40-year-old began writing eight years ago. He still has a day job, working in the purchasing office of an Auckland machinery company, and fits in his writing early in the morning and late at night.

Hummingbird begins as three strangers arrive independently at a rundown camping ground beside the isolated expanse of Ninety Mile Beach. They are former prostitute Kataraina, Jordan, just released from Paremoremo prison, and Kingi, a retired Cambridge don, former Battle of Britain pilot and veteran of the Battle of Crete.

George lets the drama play out between these three and 20-year-old Leonie who arrives later with her infant daughter. He examines their lives, looking deep inside each person, but also travelling enormous distances both in time and geographically, to place them in the cosmos of his imagination.

They are all Maori, but this is scarcely alluded to. As George tells their stories and watches them circle each other in ever-tightening orbits, he explores ideas that are at the heart of human experience. He examines the essential aloneness of each person, creating a lovely ongoing motif of the Horse's Head Nebula, a universe of stars, in which Jordan imagines himself rolling like a swimmer, and juxtaposes that with the ultrasound image of a foetus floating in amniotic fluid, "you but not you". He looks at the meaning of "home" - not a what or a where, but a why, as Kataraina finally realises - and the power of the word "we", which in George's lexicon seems exactly equivalent to love.

The three main characters at the novel's core are damaged, lost souls who find a salve from the relentless work of pretending they are whole in this place of endless sand, sea and sky.

Jordan and Kataraina have both come because they have happy childhood memories of time spent in this place.

It's Jordan's turangawaewae, and he's living in an old boat in the sand dunes at the foot of his ancestral hill. We learn about his life growing up in Auckland, hating the gang culture, but in the end becoming a casualty of it. He ended up in prison for a killing he didn't commit, too proud to name the real murderer. His partner was pregnant when he was arrested. He doesn't even know the sex of his child and conducts imaginary conversations with this unknown being, pretending nonchalance, but revealing infinite suffering.

Kataraina also suffered the loss of a child, and it's that birth and loss that opens the book, delivering an immediate emotional punch which reminded me of Keri Hulme's the bone people. Her life journey has taken her from the Far North, to Sydney's King's Cross and now she's homeward-bound, although it's unclear where home is.

Kingi's story is riveting. It tells his part in the battle against the Germans on Crete, the Allies' rout, his escape into the mountains, and his refuge in a small farmhouse, where he falls in love with a woman so mysterious, so statuesquely alone she's a snap for Kingi's future companions on Ninety Mile Beach.

What happens between Kingi and Alissandra is enthralling and appalling. Kingi's final answer, at book's end, to the mistake that has lain like a glacier in his heart for 50 years, is a genuine, soaring triumph of cheek and imagination.

To tell this complicated, interlaced series of stories, George uses narrative like a camera, fixing a scene, capturing a moment, switching to something else, then back again.

In fact, as you read this novel, it plays in your mind like a film, because of George's minute attention to detail, and the richness of the experience he creates. This detailing, breaking actions down into their smallest parts, dictates the slow pace, and at times demands the reader's patience and commitment.

There is a great quiet at the core of the novel - it's central characters' reluctance to be known, or to waste words. Questions are answered with questions or terseness. "Damn," complains Kataraina at one point (although when really confronted, she's as reticent as the others), "I'm going to grow old waiting for answers." This can be annoying, until you realise that credible relationships have developed, and closeness - tenuous, vulnerable, yet meaningful and enduring - has been achieved.

Every person is a vessel, a total of both their own experience and, in some important senses, of history. This premise gives Hummingbird its richness. The novel is full of thematic and physical echoes, histories that repeat under different guises and actions reflected in later actions. George's characters must painfully learn this lesson. Numbed, paralysed, their salvations lie in discovering second chances are not only possible, but necessary to go on living in any meaningful sense.

Demanding and ambitious, Hummingbird is above all incredibly moving. In future George may well tighten and hone his skills, but he has already achieved something very fine.

Huia, $34.95