Lloyd Jones: The Book of Fame

(Penguin $29.95.)

Review: Gilbert Wong*

Watch Todd Blackadder as he is interviewed. His replies come with quiet humility. We like and admire the man. He exudes what in our hearts we want the All Blacks to embody.

The rise of Blackadder and the demise last year of John Hart as coach make Lloyd Jones' latest novel all the more pertinent. As we plumb the meanings and implications of the national sport, we find Jones has already done it.

The novel is the story of the 1905 All Blacks but its concerns are more than an account of an historic tour. This book is about the seeds from which a national sport grew and the first experiences for New Zealanders of how celebrity can come from exploits of athleticism.

The Originals, as they have come to be known, sailed on the SS Rimutaka via Cape Horn to Britain. They weren't the first tourists, but their journey has been dubbed by rugby historians as the "the greatest and most momentous tour in the history of New Zealand Rugby." After 35 matches the team scored 976 points from 243 tries, averaging seven a match, with only one loss, by three points, to Wales.

Their string of victories and the novelty with which they played earned coverage in the British papers that put New Zealand, the little colony at the far end of the world, into the British consciousness. Through these men, New Zealanders everywhere walked a little taller, a little more confident of their place in the world.

As with the travelogue Biografi, which earned a place on the shortlist in the non-fiction category of the 1994 New Zealand Book Awards even though parts were fiction, Jones has again chosen to mix fact and imagination. Rugby purists might grumble, but sports writing in this country has always suffered from the pedantic recording of contests rather than focusing on why they matter.

In the case of the Originals, the players are gone and Jones has researched the tour extensively. Banquet menus and dance cards are reproduced, along with newspaper headlines, down to comparative word counts devoted to their exploits.

What interests Jones is myth creation, what they did, not what they might have said. This is a novel, not history. It is what might have been.

They worked ordinary jobs: cobblers, clerks, meatworkers. Yet their fame earned them a prime minister's welcome that would have beggared the America's Cup victory parade.

In structure, the novel follows the tour, bringing colour into a sepia world. The reader hears the crunch of frost, the delight as players flirt with barmaids. The sense of honour and joy they must have felt as they brought rugby to a new and sublime level.

Jones writes in terse sentences that strive and attain the intensity of poetry. No better than when he describes their newfound fame:

We were the stuff of the shop window

What children's birthdays are made of

We were Christmas

The bubble in the pop

The jam on the bread

We were the place smiles come from.

Even though the book is - as one sports writer told me - a "queer beast," it cuts to the truth of the game in a way endless match reports and profiles rife with cliches never will. Here's to the game as seen by Jones:

It was music new to English ears:

they weren't used to the fullback chiming in outside the wing to score tries

they weren't used to the ball travelling through so many hands

they weren't used to forwards mingling with the backs.

Look at how New Zealand and Australia play in the 21st century. The game is always changing but let's ensure the joy remains the same.

* Gilbert Wong is the Herald arts editor.