Peter Calder: Travels with my mother

Reviewed by KAPKA KASSABOVA

The idea of cultural identity has been discussed often enough to become commonplace. Surely, the more integrated a society is, the more issues of identity must lose their urgency and eventually become a thing of the past.

New Zealand is increasingly a modern, multicultural society with an understanding of its place in the world and a mature relationship with its colonial past - or so we would like to believe.

New Zealand writing, for instance, has moved away from the obsession with identity that haunted the anxious days of Frank Sargeson and J.K. Baxter. Now we have the international literature of a new generation quite comfortable abandoning the New Zealand context and venturing to exotic locations.

Yet the uncomfortable feelings about identity persist. Travels With My Mother (the title no doubt a tribute to Graham Greene's quirky Travels With My Aunt) is an original new contribution to this vexing issue, and a highly articulate and entertaining one.

Peter Calder, a veteran writer for the Herald, decides to take his octogenarian mother to England for the first time, in an attempt to revive their flagging relationship and to explore with her the Mother Country to which she has been distantly loyal all her life. He is a seasoned traveller, she a provincially minded woman of her generation.

The result is a poignantly comic half-memoir, half-road story, featuring encounters with real English people who offset the New Zealandness of the travelling duo. It's an insipid, dated England "doggedly clinging to imperial measurements", where Calder and his mother struggle to find their imaginary English selves. There are many humorous and incisive memories from Calder's Kiwiana childhood and schooling tainted by the intrepid efforts of his family and often violent educators to raise him into "a little Englishman, learning to do my bit to make a little bit of England in this green and pleasant land".

Alongside wit and clarity of thought, there is an unflinching honesty in Calder's writing when dealing with tricky issues. One is his estrangement from his mother and what he sees as her deluded ways - she is to him a personification of the Antipodean cringe, and his reaction against this is a reaction against a culturally distorted upbringing which has succeeded in impressing the cringe on him permanently.

Another is his childhood which, in retrospect, is full of cultural absurdities: " ... the irony that a subdivision that houses mainly Maori residents is threaded with streets named after very dead, very Pakeha writers".

He is honest enough to recall that "this Englishness fascinated and entranced me ... I never questioned the assumptions about the endlessness of Empire that underlaid it". England was the young Calder's "spiritual home" and New Zealand was the "mediocre and provincial shores" on which he, and all his family before him, were marooned.

Comically infuriating episodes from his youth alternate elegantly with the fraught journey of mother and son across London and provincial England. The cultural nonentity which afflicted Calder and his mother's generations is harmful, and it explains in part the antagonism he feels towards the England he discovers with his mother, and the pity he feels for her obsequious attempts to blend in: "They said they thought I was an English woman. I felt quite flattered."

Calder is the Colony Strikes Back.

While many of his comments about England are fair, there is a grumpy excess of grievances: here is a second-rate country which has long lost its claims not only to grandeur, but to just about anything good, including nature, history and urban civilisation. It's a diminished, complacent culture that doesn't care where its former colonies are (New Zealand, that is), a joyless, musty countryside where one can't get a decent espresso (presumably one can in Paraparaumu), sad seasides with "locals gazing glumly at the icy water", tea rooms that can't make a decent Cornish pasty (unlike his mother).

The English are depicted as caricatures who seize every opportunity to stand in a queue, and London is an overpriced traffic inferno, with the Globe theatre as its only saving grace. Some of these are truisms, others are facile Bill Bryson-esque generalisations.

But these are small flaws in a rich blend of story and reflection that is full of thought-provoking ideas, unexpected and touching discoveries, and dazzlingly funny language. The bittersweet torments of identity are not fully resolved at the end as his mother concludes: "I wish, in many ways, that I had been born in England. Because it's in my blood and yet it's not."

But for the younger Calder, the journey has been much more definitive. Although he acknowledges the inborn desire to find in England "the fulfilment of some part of my destiny" and he admits to feeling coarse and provincial next to his sophisticated English relatives, he discovers that the English landscape is not his and that much of this expectation has always been a fantasy, like the vicarious Englishness of his mother.

On his return to New Zealand he feels "at last more here than before I went away". This is perhaps as culturally self-confident as Calder's generation will ever get, but at least he challenges himself and has a lot of fun along the way, and he leaves enough space for further travels of this kind by younger New Zealanders with a different outlook, in the ongoing search for where we come from - not necessarily a place but, in Calder's words, "something much more complicated than that".

Tandem Press, $27.95

****

* Kapka Kassabova is an Auckland novelist and poet.