Finalist J.P. Pomare. Photo / NZME
Ngaio Marsh Awards finalists Becky Manawatu, J.P. Pomare and Renée talk to Craig Sisterson about bringing Māori perspectives to novels entwined with crime
An 8-year-old who revels in a fantasy world with the girl next door and covers his body with plasters for comfort. A teenager inside a van on a country road who holds a dosed rag to a younger girl's face after helping snatch her "new sister". A tough 30-something who revisits the children's home where she was abandoned as a baby, to solve the mystery of a friend's death.
Three wounded, fascinating characters at the heart of three compelling books.
Each story explores abuses of power, in vastly different tales. Each is among the six finalists for this year's Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Novel. And each was crafted by a talented Māori storyteller: two exciting newer voices and a legendary wahine toa, trying something new.
It was two years ago this month that pioneering dramatist Renée (Ngāti Kahungunu), a self-described "lesbian feminist with socialist working-class ideals", received the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement for her "outstanding contribution" to New Zealand fiction.
That contribution included writing more than 20 plays and several novels that put strong women front and centre. Approaching her 10th decade when she received the $60,000 prize, Renée was already working on adding to her oeuvre.
"I started to a write a crime novel because I was teaching how to write one," she says. "I realised in the first class that the only way I could really judge whether the course was working was by doing it myself."
Renée's students had to write 10 pages a week, for 10 weeks, so she did the same. "I'm a child of the Depression, I thought, 'Waste not, want not,' so then I wrote the book."
The positive response from readers and the Ngaio judges to The Wild Card, in which local theatre actress Ruby Palmer tries to piece together the puzzle of her friend Betty's death 30 years before and her own upbringing in the Porohiwi Home for Children, "was a hell of a surprise", says Renée. "I thought it would go out into the world but because I've labelled it a crime novel, it won't perhaps get a lot of attention. Then wham, it does get attention."
West Coast author Becky Manawatu (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Māmoe a Waitaha) has also been surprised by the attention she's received for her debut, Auē. The powerful story of brothers Arama and Taukiri, whose lives and family have been clawed and torn by gangs and violence, Auē has thrust its rather shy author into the local literary spotlight. "I'm not very articulate when I speak, which is why I write," says Manawatu partway through our conversation, apologising for not "giving a good answer", unaware how insightful and engaging she's been.
There's a sense that despite all the accolades, including winning the $55,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards back in May, Manawatu still doesn't fathom how sublime her storytelling is, or how her humble authenticity strikes a chord. Auē is at times harrowing, at times humorous or hopeful; beautifully written throughout.
More than a year after publication, it's still high on the New Zealand fiction bestseller list.
The last year or so has been "a really amazing journey", says Manawatu. She's particularly grateful to have been able
to share the highs and ride out any anxiety-inducing moments, with her family. "Having my kids and my husband with me along for the ride, it's been exciting but I have that grounding always. We look back on some of it now and can't believe we've all had this experience together. Some of the lockdown felt like a bit of a gift, being able to stay home."
While Manawatu and Renée will be appearing at the upcoming Word Christchurch Spring Festival, where this year's Ngaio Marsh Awards winners will be revealed on October 31, their fellow Ngaios finalist J.P. Pomare will be absent; he's marooned in Melbourne's lockdown.
Last year, Pomare (Ngāpuhi) became the second Māori writer to win a Ngaio Marsh Award when he scooped the Best First Novel prize for Call Me Evie, a twisting psychological thriller about a teenager with a fractured memory being hidden away in a cabin in Maketu.
Pomare's debut, like Manawatu's, appeared on the local bestseller list for more than a year after its publication. Call Me Evie was listed for book awards in Australia and the United States. His second novel In the Clearing, a creepy thriller inspired by a notorious Australian cult, also became a number one bestseller. (For weeks both of Pomare's novels were in the top 10 at the same time).
Emerging in the countryside outside Melbourne in the 1960s, "The Family" blended Christianity with Eastern mysticism, and centred on yoga teacher-turned-messianic figure Anne Hamilton-Byrne. Pomare says he'd been fascinated by the cult for several years, on a number of levels.
"Some of the greatest minds in Australia were enamoured with her," says Pomare. Fictionalising The Family for In The Clearing was difficult, he says, as the reality was so bizarre. "There really was no core message or central motivation for the cult, because everyone was just motivated by being around her and her aura and her motivations were a bit unclear."
Pomare recently appeared on a "Five Continents of Crime" panel for the Bloody Scotland online festival, alongside Nigerian Oyinkan Braithwaite, longlisted for the Booker Prize; Singaporean author Shamini Flint; award-winning African-American crime writer Attica Locke; and Scottish author Lin Anderson. It's great to see more authors of colour writing "unapologetic crime fiction", says Pomare, who first broke through writing literary short stories with a dark edge for magazines like Takahē and Meanjin, and has hosted author interview podcast On Writing since 2016.
The global popularity of crime writing provides interesting opportunities for writers of colour to explore vital issues via a page-turning story, says Pomare. "Crime fiction is such a great vehicle for these conversations, for these diverse experiences to be taken to a broad audience."
Called "the modern social novel" by the likes of Ian Rankin, crime fiction has evolved and expanded from the puzzle-like whodunnits of Agatha Christie and Marsh and mean streets gumshoes of Raymond Chandler. Nowadays it stretches from comic mysteries to horror-like serial killer tales, from psychological whydunnits to literary explorations of crime's impact on individuals and society.
"That's the whole pleasure of it, it's a very big whare and there's room for a lot of us in it," says Renée, who grew up enjoying a steady diet of Golden Age classics from her local library (she still regularly re-reads Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers) and nowadays reads plenty of New Zealand crime writing, or "yeahnoir". Renée's a fan of Pomare's mahi, along with the likes of Vanda Symon, Charity Norman, Jonothan Cullinane, Sherryl Clark and Nathan Blackwell.
Later this year, Pomare's Audible Original Tell Me Lies, about a Melbourne psychologist provoked into drastic action by a dangerous client, will be published as a print novella with a preview of his third novel, The Last Guests. A thriller set in Auckland and Lake Tarawera, that explores the risks of "letting certain forms of surveillance into our lives and our homes". While he's cautious about writing "a political novel", Pomare says his perspectives as a Māori author inform his writing.
"If I have the opportunity to point out the implications of being Māori in New Zealand and some of the attitudes, with the ways characters interact, then you know by all means I'm going to do that and try to demonstrate these things as best I can."
Pomare is fascinated by the tech world and how ideas that were once sci-fi are becoming reality (AI, automation, memory augmentation). "I'm really interested in the way that this will only enhance the divide between the rich and the poor, and between historically oppressed groups."
Class is also an "overriding interest" for Renée, who was raised by a Māori mother but had a "largely European" upbringing. "When I was little, that was the era when the largely Pākehā population thought Māori were going to die out," recalls Renée, who feels that she herself is culturally "standing on a bridge and I've got one foot on one side and one foot on the other".
For Manawatu, who both Renée and Pomare praise as a "fantastic author", the desire for her and her family to have more contact with their own Māori culture is one of the drivers of her writing, including with Auē. "There's some desperation in there in the characters to have some link to Te Ao Māori in their lives and around them, and the lack of it is an undercurrent of the story."
While Manawatu doesn't write "unapologetic crime fiction" like Pomare or the likes of Attica Locke, she also believes having more Māori, Pasifika, and other writers of colour flowing into genre/popular fiction along with poetry, short stories, or literary novels like hers, is a very good thing.
"To have a wider range of perspectives and more Māori writers published takes the weight off all Māori writers' shoulders that they have to be representing something, for everyone."
Auē's listing for the Ngaio Marsh Awards raised some eyebrows among those who take a classic view of crime fiction. But our local awards were modelled after the Hammett Prize in North America (whose winners include Margaret Atwood), and celebrate "literary excellence" in tales by New Zealanders that are entwined with crime. As the international judging panel said, Manawatu "doesn't use crime as a plot device but shows it woven into the fabric of her characters' lives, defining them, sometimes destroying them, and serving as a perverse unifier".
Like Once Were Warriors, a book to which Auē has been compared, Manawatu's novel is dosed with domestic violence and gang life, subjects that strike close to home for the author and which did cause her concern in the writing and since. Would another violence-tinged portrayal of Māori characters amplify real-life prejudice? "I didn't think about the people who could come to my story without the compassion or understanding of history, or of the damage of colonisation."
That ongoing concern illustrates why Manawatu believes having a greater number and range of Māori writers published is so vital – not just as role models "so that people like my daughter have people to look up to", but to showcase a broader range of stories and diffuse any singular representation that may be wrongly generalised as emblematic of Māori culture.
With overseas university studies having shown that reading fiction is a vehicle for empathy, having a diverse range of voices published is vital. Particularly in popular genres like crime fiction, which reach so many readers.
"I think what reading does, whether it's a crime novel or whatever, is that we learn about other people," says Renée. "And while a crime novel may be more carefully structured around a certain type of event like a murder, it doesn't really alter the fact that we're talking about people in the same way perhaps as the authors who regard themselves as more literary writers do. We've just chosen this different form."
The winners of the 2020 Ngaio Marsh Awards will be revealed on October 31 as part of the Word Christchurch Spring Festival. Becky Manawatu and Renée will be appearing at multiple events during the festival.
Unbound Vol 1 weaves together pictures and interviews with NZ surfers.