Witi Ihimaera: Whanau II

Reviewed by SUSAN JACOBS

The honoured and much-admired Witi Ihimaera is in danger of becoming a national living treasure. Internationally acclaimed for The Whale Rider, once a short novel, lately a film and now a musical, he is no stranger to the risks of re-honing a text for a wider audience.

This time the concept is even more ambitious. Take a novel published 30 years ago and rewrite it with the awareness brought about by the Maori renaissance. Not surprisingly, what emerges is something much more than Whanau Revisited.

For Ihimaera the issues propelling his first novel are just as relevant today. But this is an entirely different work.

The first Whanau, published in 1974, was the young Ihimaera's

second novel and it shows. Heavily influenced by Dylan Thomas' tribute to Welsh village life, Under Milkwood, it has a nostalgic pastoral quality sparkling with a mischievous humour that affectionately captures a way of life that was gradually eroding.

Whanau II is much more serious. Although many of the characters in the village of Waituhi are the same, tribal history, spirituality, Maori-Pakeha

relations, land grievances, poverty and the Treaty are now central elements, woven into the characters' lives and stories. The tone is darker and more contentious.

Ihimaera's splendid flowering as a writer is immediately apparent. The short, simple sentences of the earlier work give way to a luminous, textured, glittering prose. Its characters, old and new, display the depth and breadth of a writer at the height of his powers.

But what drives this work is Ihimaera's passionate desire to inform and educate his reader about Maori history and tradition. Segments of text interwoven with the stories are

dedicated to just this. My reservation is that some of it reads like an earnest text-book and, as a result, the writing loses its lustre, becoming sermonising that reverberates with lashings of righteous anger. In many ways Ihimaera, the author, becomes a voice-over character in his own book, chiselling away at what he wrote before and adding material he feels his reader should know.

His voice can be dogged. "A Maori is a person who has Maori blood, wants to claim Maori ancestry and follow a Maori path. That is our birthright."

However much it feels like being hit over the head with the political, Ihimaera's sense of urgency is engaging, if uncomfortable. Ignore at our peril is the challenge.

* Reed, $29.99

Susan Jacobs is the author of Fighting with the Enemy: New Zealand POWs and the Italian Resistance