Down on loose jokes

Press, 23 January 1988, Page 26

Down on loose jokes

Tell Half-backs. By Graham Hutchins. John Mclndoe, 1387. 116 pp. $14.95.

(Reviewed by A. K. Grant) This book is in many ways a black-and-white negative of "Foreskin’s Lament.” It is a hymn, a paean to the virtues of rugby in general, and fanatic coaches in particular, which were so effectively incinerated in Greg McGee’s magnificent play. Graham Hutchins loves rugby and writes well about it, but not in such a way as to dispel the doubts and fears which McGee raises. Take for instance a passage where the almost undisguisedly autobiographical hero, of what is only through the flimsiest of gauzes a work of fiction, is talking about “Butch”, the coach of the Te Pu High School third fifteen: " ‘Butch’ was utterly committed. He fared best as a coach in those whitehot areas where commitment is put on

trial. Securing the high kick, tackling an opponent twice your own weight, going down on the ball at the feet of clumsy, raw-boned farmers’ sons who were never more motivated than when tiny schoolboy eggheads lay unprotected in the mud. They were fair game and ‘Butch’, something of a sociologist, knew that.” You don’t have to be either a sociologist or an ex-tiny schoolboy egghead to feel that there is

something brutally wrong about a sport where it is regarded not only as within the rules, but also rather amusing to allow big boys to kick smaller boys in the head. Hutchins fails to convince this particular sceptic, anyway, about the justification for nostalgic tributes to a society founded on the rugby ethos.

But he writes sensitively and often amusingly about life in a small New Zealand town in the early Sixties.

Sometimes the humour is rather overly strained at: he goes down on a joke like a schoolboy egghead smothering a loose ball and waiting for the farmers’ sons to arrive. But he is particularly good on the impact on young people in Te Pu of the early Beatles. Not that his judgements on music are impeccable. At the end of the Beatles chapter, Hutchins writes: “With the break-up of the Beatles’ generation group consciousness, the Beatles, while retaining their charm, lost a lot of their significance. Bob Dylan, who at first hearing sounded like a sneering auctioneer, became the new icon, a rugged, little, jumped-up individualist who made the collectivism of the Beatles, the first fifteen and “The Bay” baskets seem boyish.”

This is historically inaccurate, in that some of Dylan’s best songs were written before the Beatles turned up, and other fine ones were released during the Beatles’ heyday, whether you define that heyday as being ’62-64, or ’65-67. And, while anyone is free in a free society not to like Dylan, to describe him as a “jumped-up individualist” betrays a fairly shallow understanding of one of the greatest of rock musicians.

The book, then, is far from flawless. But there is good writing surrounding the blemishes, and it tells the nostalgic or curious reader a lot about what life was like in New Zealand outside the cities in the early Sixties.’ Depending on your point of view it is either about Paradise Lost or Inferno (mercifully) Transcended.