(Milford Sound, Fjordland, NZ - 27th October 2009)
So, we're back from New Zealand. In body if not in spirit. Ever since we landed at Heathrow, nearly two weeks ago now, it has been nothing but lashing rain and that ferocious wind. The day has barely been with us, at its best in the very early morning when the winter sun is theatrical and everything looks stark and backlit. On the other side of the world it was late spring, turning into summer, and we were lucky with the weather; it was blue skies when we needed them, and if it rained it rained at night or when we were travelling from one beautiful place to another. We had some extraodinary experiences: flying over Fjordland in a tiny Cesna Caravan; cycling across the Maniototo; standing on a beach on the Otago Peninsula in a perfect dusk watching yellow-eyed penguins come in from the sea; sailing Lake Taupo on a yacht once owned by Errol Flynn; trekking 14 kilometres through native bush on Waiheke Island, just Esther and I all alone, just to paddle on a glorious, deserted golden shoreline. It was, and probably will remain, one of the most wonderful and impulsive things I have ever done.
While I was there I learnt several things about New Zealand. First, it is true what they say about the sheep - sheep, sheep, sheep, everywhere you look in their ruminating millions - and the mountains. You look up and there are mountains; if not mountains, volcanos. Every town has a mountain range for a backdrop, even Christchurch which stands on the edge of the notoriously flat Canterbury plains. If you take in a vista without a peak or two you feel a strange sense of emptiness. Second, it is a young country. For Europeans, a very very young country. Permanent white settlement of the islands only really began in the mid-nineteenth century, by which point the Maori had been there perhaps 800 years at most. When William the Bastard was conquering England in the eleventh century the Land of the Long White Cloud was nothing but birds, bugs and trees. This has the effect of making New Zealand's history very intimate, uncanonised, like a breath on the back of your neck. It is also very manageable, but no less mysterious and compelling for it. In Dunedin we visited the Otago Settler's Museum and spent a fascinating hour in a room filled from floor to ceiling with photographs and portraits of settlers who arrived on the first ships in the late 1840s, mostly from Scotland. It was a potent experience, to think of their long journey across the sea and their prospects of building a new life on completely alien and strangely inhabited shores. They tried to bring home with them in the form of animals and plants, to transform what they found. The legacy of it is everywhere you look - every hillside in Otago is sown with gorse and broom like a Scottish hillside; today's farmers spend hundreds of thousands of pounds trying to uproot the stuff. (Because sheep can't eat it.) Not to mention the devastation wrought on native bird species like the kiwi and flightless wren by introduced predators, like stoats and cats.
(Flying over Queenstown, NZ - 27th October 2009)
Another thing about New Zealand: books are very expensive there. Very expensive. A regular paperback will set you back $25 NZD, about £11.00, while a hardback will cost anything up to $50 or £35. And so I didn't buy any, not a single one. I could have bought dozens; NZ seems to have a flourishing trade with lots of independent bookshops to inspire impulse buys, but alas alack the cost and weight stopped me. I am determined to read some Janet Frame now though, and more Katherine Mansfield. To my surprise I read surprisingly little while I was there, even on the flights there and back. When I wasn't sleeping (on the flights, I mean), I was being plyed with plasticated foodstuffs or watching movies or wandering up and down the aisles. I flicked through a couple of magazines; read a couple of hundred pages each of Shirley and Acacia but was never seriously in danger of finishing either of them. Shirley I finished this morning; Acacia, dare I say it, is still stuck around the three hundred page mark.
It isn't that I haven't enjoyed what I've read of David Anthony Durham's book so far. It is all well and good, and the world-building is solid. But solid, perhaps, at the cost of its spark. Acacia puts its feet firmly in the grooves worn by others that have gone before it - decaying Empire, devastating secrets, betrayal, the fate of the world on the shoulders of children. And there is something missing in the characters for me. I can't put my finger on it yet; I am simply not convinced by them. If I want to read on and (and at present I do want to) it is because of a primitive desire to find out what happens, to see through the endgame, not to spend more time in Durham's world with the individuals of his making. They haven't become enough of themselves yet to warrant being of interest in their own rights. This is precisely opposite to the way I have felt about Shirley (and note, I'm pretty sure this is the only time and place in the world you will see these two books compared). From very early on in Bronte's novel I knew what the end would be. The end is inevitable, and all the gentle twists of the plot are visible a mile away through mist, but the desire to read on was strong. The difference was that I wanted to hear the characters speak and think and interact again, and then again. They were their own reward, entirely predictable in action but thoroughly unpredictable in personality - one minute witty, the next obtuse; one minute arrogant, the next vulnerable, like real people moving about. I feel I know Durham's characters because they are familiar to me from the dozens of fantasy sagas I have read before; I feel I recognise Bronte's characters because, like individuals in the flesh, they are barely knowable at all. Their convincing realism, and what makes them so compelling, is the sense that we do not and cannot perceive them in their entireties.
~~Victoria~~
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