Observing NZ book month
Well, NZ book month was actually in October, but that's when I read these. Along with the Witi Ihimaera edited collection I reviewed earlier (actually, with the current plagiarism revelations I'm unlikely to read anything of his own work for quite some time, although I read the collection before I knew this), and half of Keri Hulme's Lost Possessions, which keeps disappearing on my desk.
Mo Zhi Hong, The year of the Shanghai Shark. Hai Long is a teenager living in Dalian, China; he’s an orphan, raised by Uncle (relationship murky), who has a mysterious job and firm opinions about moral behaviour. It’s described as a novel (and won the Commonwealth writers’ prize for best first novel), but it’s really more episodic - more like a linked collection of anecdotes/short stories about Hai Long and his friends and his broader community. Each chunk keeps coming back to the year of the title, although it may start earlier. The Shanghai Shark(s) is a basketball team, and the year the book circles around was when Yao Ming became the first Chinese basketballer to be picked up by the NBA; it’s also the year of SARS, and the year in which Hai Long and his uncle will leave China (presumably, like Yao Ming, for America, but it’s not confirmed).
I really like the city-life aspects of this, and the day-to-day stuff - maintenance workers in Hai Long’s crumbling apartment building, hanging out with friends, learning English from cheerfully useless teachers, gambling, hints of local political corruption, the general street life… The story about Hai Long’s cousin, trying again and again to pass IELTS (the English language exam), and complaining bitterly after his first failure because the oral was conducted by an Australian woman whom he couldn’t understand, was the one I hit when initially flipping through the book, and tipped me over into picking it up; firstly, because it was funny, and secondly because I’ve sat IELTS (yes, English is my first language; complicated story to do with overseas employment offers) and felt a twinge of recognition.
There’s a lot of naivety on behalf of the narrator (& his peers), partly because of age, partly because of opportunities. Sometimes it works - I loved the bit where, when a character is protesting against Americans, one of the boys is completely surprised to discover that McDonalds fries are American - and at others it feels a little forced, as if the reader is expected to be too smug at their superior knowledge. The whole set-up with Uncle feels almost too Dickensian to fit the more specific contemporary nature of the writing, and it doesn't help when Hai Long is also so passive in the final chapter, where what is presumably meant to be a key event takes place. Here, I think, I’m also having structural problems, in that just returning to one particular year over and over (from a narrator presumably in the future, but who only talks about that year and those before it) is not enough for me to make this into a novel, or at least not without a better pay-off. Neither SARS nor basketball seem strong enough to hang the story on, either, which is a shame because I enjoyed a lot of the rest of it. (Also, if you're wondering about the NZ thing - born in Singapore to Mainland China/Malaysian Chinese parents, went to high school in NZ, travelled some more and is now a self-described Aucklander.)
James George, Hummingbird. Three people are brought together north of Auckland, on Ninety Mile Beach: Kataraina, back from Australia with a hard, painful past; Jordan, out of prison after being loyal to the wrong people for too long; and Kingi Heremia, an ex-RAF fighter pilot, who crashes his Tiger Moth there. They’re joined by Leonie, who is tracking her birth mother and has her own small daughter with her. All are Maori, which is central to their experiences and characters without taking over the story, and it’s all very nicely done. The dialogue is particularly strong, as well as the sense of all the characters, and the place itself.
It’s a bit lacking in action, tho’, if you just have five people sitting around on a beach, but running through the middle,= is Kingi’s past in WWII; first as a fighter pilot, and then, after injury forced him to the ground and a passing Maori battalion, as a fighter in Crete, lost behind enemy lines. This is fascinating and I could have read a lot more of it, actually, because although I like all the other characters it becomes all too apparent that it’s going to end like so many other NZ novels/short stories, with a character dying in a way that feels like a TV safety campaign (previous candidates too many to list, but most notable - the movie/book Rain, where holidays near the beach have only one possible ending involving the absence of life-jackets, and a truly appalling winner of the Listener short story contest where a small child at a socioeconomically deprived school gets fatally electrocuted by faulty Christmas lights). At least George doesn't kill one of the children, but it's still annoying because there are other ways to end things than death - in some ways, this is the point of Kingi's narrative. Fortunately, that has a more satisfactory conclusion.
I'd definitely read another book by George, especially if it were historical - and, conveniently, that's what Ocean Roads, his latest, looks like. Mo Zhi Hong - short stories yes, novel maybe.
Mo Zhi Hong, The year of the Shanghai Shark. Hai Long is a teenager living in Dalian, China; he’s an orphan, raised by Uncle (relationship murky), who has a mysterious job and firm opinions about moral behaviour. It’s described as a novel (and won the Commonwealth writers’ prize for best first novel), but it’s really more episodic - more like a linked collection of anecdotes/short stories about Hai Long and his friends and his broader community. Each chunk keeps coming back to the year of the title, although it may start earlier. The Shanghai Shark(s) is a basketball team, and the year the book circles around was when Yao Ming became the first Chinese basketballer to be picked up by the NBA; it’s also the year of SARS, and the year in which Hai Long and his uncle will leave China (presumably, like Yao Ming, for America, but it’s not confirmed).
I really like the city-life aspects of this, and the day-to-day stuff - maintenance workers in Hai Long’s crumbling apartment building, hanging out with friends, learning English from cheerfully useless teachers, gambling, hints of local political corruption, the general street life… The story about Hai Long’s cousin, trying again and again to pass IELTS (the English language exam), and complaining bitterly after his first failure because the oral was conducted by an Australian woman whom he couldn’t understand, was the one I hit when initially flipping through the book, and tipped me over into picking it up; firstly, because it was funny, and secondly because I’ve sat IELTS (yes, English is my first language; complicated story to do with overseas employment offers) and felt a twinge of recognition.
There’s a lot of naivety on behalf of the narrator (& his peers), partly because of age, partly because of opportunities. Sometimes it works - I loved the bit where, when a character is protesting against Americans, one of the boys is completely surprised to discover that McDonalds fries are American - and at others it feels a little forced, as if the reader is expected to be too smug at their superior knowledge. The whole set-up with Uncle feels almost too Dickensian to fit the more specific contemporary nature of the writing, and it doesn't help when Hai Long is also so passive in the final chapter, where what is presumably meant to be a key event takes place. Here, I think, I’m also having structural problems, in that just returning to one particular year over and over (from a narrator presumably in the future, but who only talks about that year and those before it) is not enough for me to make this into a novel, or at least not without a better pay-off. Neither SARS nor basketball seem strong enough to hang the story on, either, which is a shame because I enjoyed a lot of the rest of it. (Also, if you're wondering about the NZ thing - born in Singapore to Mainland China/Malaysian Chinese parents, went to high school in NZ, travelled some more and is now a self-described Aucklander.)
James George, Hummingbird. Three people are brought together north of Auckland, on Ninety Mile Beach: Kataraina, back from Australia with a hard, painful past; Jordan, out of prison after being loyal to the wrong people for too long; and Kingi Heremia, an ex-RAF fighter pilot, who crashes his Tiger Moth there. They’re joined by Leonie, who is tracking her birth mother and has her own small daughter with her. All are Maori, which is central to their experiences and characters without taking over the story, and it’s all very nicely done. The dialogue is particularly strong, as well as the sense of all the characters, and the place itself.
It’s a bit lacking in action, tho’, if you just have five people sitting around on a beach, but running through the middle,= is Kingi’s past in WWII; first as a fighter pilot, and then, after injury forced him to the ground and a passing Maori battalion, as a fighter in Crete, lost behind enemy lines. This is fascinating and I could have read a lot more of it, actually, because although I like all the other characters it becomes all too apparent that it’s going to end like so many other NZ novels/short stories, with a character dying in a way that feels like a TV safety campaign (previous candidates too many to list, but most notable - the movie/book Rain, where holidays near the beach have only one possible ending involving the absence of life-jackets, and a truly appalling winner of the Listener short story contest where a small child at a socioeconomically deprived school gets fatally electrocuted by faulty Christmas lights). At least George doesn't kill one of the children, but it's still annoying because there are other ways to end things than death - in some ways, this is the point of Kingi's narrative. Fortunately, that has a more satisfactory conclusion.
I'd definitely read another book by George, especially if it were historical - and, conveniently, that's what Ocean Roads, his latest, looks like. Mo Zhi Hong - short stories yes, novel maybe.