Peter Hawes: Royce, Royce the people's choice

By MARGIE THOMSON

Not for the humourless or the overly politically correct, this fisherman's tale will make you blush and laugh in equal measure.

But don't be misled by the beery bars, filthy fishing boats, the profane, grungy men and women of the sea, and the fact that for most of the novel you're stuck inside the mind of a 17-year-old hunk from Westport.

In among the heavy drinking, sex (and wishful thinking) and the hilarious silliness is a story that is full of sensitivity and emotion. It's just that these admirable qualities are dressed a little differently than usual, in clothes that smell like old fish.

Royce Rowland, genetically endowed with waywardness by his no-good and absent father, is the kind of boy no teacher would want in class, but whom no one can truly dislike.

Girls are keen to try out their burgeoning sexuality on him, and he on them.

School comes to an abrupt end, however, when he is caught in a car on a neighbour's lawn, in a cramped and compromising position with the principal's secretary.

He's lucky to get a job on a fishing boat owned by rough-and-ready Bob Dodds and crewed by the mysteriously familiar Stinky, who plays a more pivotal role in the coming events than is anticipated at first glance.

It's on their second trip out over the sphincter-clenching Buller River bar that what turns out to have been preamble evolves into the book's main story: the catching by Royce (with the expert help of Betty, a wily prostitute rescued off a Japanese boat fishing) of the most beautiful fish in the world.

It's a fish to inspire awe in the most hardbitten official, a 700-ton bluefin tuna, the only one ever to have been found in these waters and worth maybe $200,000 on the Japanese market.

So begins the race to get the fish to Tokyo before it goes off. It's an odyssey that will see unsophisticated Royce pass through cities he has never seen before - Wellington, Auckland (a passing view that has nothing to do with tourist brochures, but a lot to do with the industrial rustiness of parts of South Auckland in 1978, when the story is set) and, finally, Tokyo.

Hawes' language is always colourful, as effortlessly evocative as a well-oiled yarnspinner holding court at the pub. In Tokyo, for instance, where Royce is on the trail of the Japanese mafia after his beloved fish has been stolen, he feels as if he's in a town "one size too small for him".

Will he find his fish and if so how will he get it back? It's a tribute to Hawes that our desire to know the answers to these questions has as much to do with wanting to know what kind of person Royce turns out to be, as it has to do with simply wanting the plot resolved.

Hawes must be one of our most vivid, colourful writers. He can create a character with just one line (Royce's mother "hangs a good line of washing"; a bank manager is "a little bloke with bulgy blue eyes and a laugh like a tap dripping"; one not-quite-right local kid was "born with a bit too much Darwinism in him"), and makes deft word-sketches that are more stirring than some other writers' pages of description.

If there's a complaint, it's that he goes on a bit at times (perhaps that well-oiled analogy fits here, too) and, should we absorb the detail, we'll know more than we ever wanted to about the technical side of boats, mechanical fishing systems, airplanes, import/export procedures and so on.

But what I like about Hawes' writing is that he never talks down to his characters, flawed, grimy and morally and socially suspect as most of them are.

The voice of Royce remains true to itself, and there is no sense that the narrator is sitting outside his creation with a secret sneer on his face.

I think Hawes loves his own characters, and so we come to, too, in an exasperated sort of way.

And as for the sexual antics, they might happen in cramped cabins or small cars, but never in a vacuum. This is not some emotionless Playboy world.

In Hawes' Westport, all actions have consequences, and the good thing about Royce is that he struggles to learn his lessons. He struggles and falls and struggles again.

Does he finally evolve into something other than he was at 17? Do any of us? You'd better catch this fish and find out.

Vintage

$26.95