A NIGHT AT GREEN RIVER

Te Ao Hou, July 1969, Page 62

A NIGHT AT GREEN RIVER by Noel Hilliard Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd., $2.00 reviewed by G. M. Lawson The dust jacket of Noel Hilliard's latest novel tells us that his earlier novels have been praised by the Times Literary Supplement, by Geoffrey Moorhouse in the Guardian, by Professors J. C. Reid (Auckland University), and Joan Stevens (Victoria University of Wellington), and H. Winston Rhodes (Canterbury University). I am sure this one will be just as widely acclaimed. The story itself is very simple and unfolds during the short space of an afternoon and a night. During those few hours the author has shown what the ‘Maoriness’ of the Maori is and what he thinks of the Pakeha. It shows fairly and without sympathy the ‘Pakehatanga’ of the cow cocky Clyde Hastings and his weary day-dreaming wife; his uncompromising set of monetary values and her atrophied affection and emotions. Clyde asks Tiwha Morris and his relatives to ‘do a job for him’ — to help him get his hay in when they have finished their own. Politely they accept. ‘I'll offer them ten bob an hour and make any broken time up to the hour.’ He offers a ‘fair day's wage for a fair day's work’. Later Tiwha was to muse, ‘He could have said — “I have a lot of hay to shift and I cannot do it on my own as you very well know; will you lend me a hand?” But he did not. He chose to say instead — “I will lease you, HIRE you for an hour, two hours….” ‘Tiwha ‘could never hold out his hand for notes and coins without hearing the unspoken comment on the transaction — “This is what you are worth to me.” ‘ Similarly, attitudes to such things as having children come out. ‘Ruby was Purei's sister. She had been in Auckland for a while working as a housemaid and got mixed up with some Pakeha and came home to have her baby. A good little fellow he was too, although too much tangi-tangi at times. He was an illegitimate baby. And was there an illegitimate tree, too, for instance, or an illegitimate bird, or an illegitimate flower?’ Tiwha's relatives go inside when they have finished their hay. The meal is ready. The children play. The beer tastes good and they sing. Clyde Hastings and his hay recede to the back of the mind. And there we might have left them: Clyde Hastings boiling with a bitter pecuniary rage as he hears the singing in the distance and watches the rain ruin his hay while his wife emerges from her private world of might-have-been long enough to infer — ‘I told you so’; and Tiwha and his friends living life to the full with kids, songs, beer, food, smells, tastes, and sounds. But the story takes a twist which brings both groups and both sets of values into a head-on crash. In the crisis which follows, we are shown how, when the chips are down, the differences don't matter — just as it was during the war in Egypt which Clyde and Tiwha both reflect upon as ex-soldiers. The fight between Clyde and Tu is a physical manifestation of their cultural collision. The upturning of the Hastings’ china cabinet during the fight in the ‘best room’ is an extravagant symbol of the sweeping aside of Clyde and Edith's dead-loss bric-a-brac, both the porcelain kind and the mental ones. The story also brings home to the born city-dweller, be he Maori or Pakeha, the reality of the old tapus and conventions. Tiwha made certain he did not touch Martha's body while he and Roimata, his wife, helped her in labour. We go back to Tiwha's schooldays, when he wondered how the teacher couldn't see it was wrong to cuff him on the head instead of strapping him on the hand. Noel Hilliard tells the story from the two viewpoints of Clyde and Tiwha. This book hits below the belt at both Maori and Pakeha. It is not to be read by those who want to believe that all Maoris are happy, loving, and genial; they would be upset by, say, Tu's drunken brutality. Nor would the book ring true for those who want all Pakehas to be seen as efficient, unfeeling, and greedy. The opposite stereotype — that Europeans are intelligent and industrious, while Maoris are slovenly and ‘inferior’ —

is equally demolished. At the climax of the story, at the moment of collision, all that is sheared off and the real people underneath are shown up. The writing is exact and economical. The conversation is alive…. ‘You must be using a front end loader to fill your bank with money, man.’ ‘I've got no money.’ ‘How for you getting TV then?’ ‘It will be very nice to look at until the Pakeha come to take it back.’ The imagery is profuse and so pungent that after putting the book down, my head was spinning with colours, smells, sounds and pictures even though the novel is only a little longer than some short stories. There is a good sprinkling of Maori words and phrases throughout the conversation and a glossary might be of help to overseas readers and non-Maori-speaking New Zealanders who lamentably do not own a Maori dictionary, or unfortunately have no Maori friends from whom they would hear these terms. My sole criticism is that towards the end of the book the pungency of the imagery and the symbolism may be a little overwhelming — it might be poured on a bit thick — but the shortness of the novel prevents the author from getting out of his depth in this respect. The moral of the story, if there is one, is that neither the Maori or Pakeha way of looking at things is better or worse than the other — just different. The book is exciting, carries a hefty thump and in parts is very funny. I could not put it down until I had finished reading it.