A few chapters were enough to show me that Ihimaera was not going to be troubled with plagiarism charges this time, for he had devised a narrative method to circumvent that problem.
He uses two first-person narrators: Erenora, the woman of Parihaka; and an unnamed retired Maori history teacher, one of her descendants. The second narrator is ostensibly primarily the translator of Erenora's account from Maori to English, but he increasingly supplements it not only with historical background but also with his version of what she must have been feeling and his comments and interpretation, until he finally confesses: "I've come to realise that although I'm writing Erenora's history, I'm doing so, unintentionally, in a fictional way".
He takes over entirely for the last quarter of the book, aided only by a diary of one of the other characters, for he tells us that Erenora's manuscript is missing those pages.
When the unnamed narrator is filling in historical background, he quotes or summarises the writings of various historians, The longer quotations, from such as Dick Scott, James Belich or G.W. Rusden, he (or Ihimaera) footnotes in the text. The shorter quotations, paraphrases and even allusions are identified by Ihimaera in his "Chapter Notes" at the end. By his "documentation" Ihimaera is covering his back against (and perhaps thumbing his nose at) any plagiarism hunters, while with his elaborate narrative method he is playing postmodern games with blurring the line between fiction and history, inventing a fictional narrator who quotes actual historians while he "translates" a fictional manuscript and then confesses that he is fictionalising his story.
So I could read on without any nagging concern about plagiarism issues concerning this historical novel, but I found that I was bothered by the relative thinness and flatness of its historical world, lacking the rich sense of place and individual characters, the sensuous and psychological detail of such successful historical novels as Maurice Shadbolt's Land Wars trilogy, The Season of the Jew, Monday's Warriors. and The House of Strife. The story of Parihaka was more summarised than brought to life, and the aftermath, Erenora's quest for her missing husband, from Taranaki to Southland, was almost perfunctory in its lack of realised detail and its occasional lapses into guidebook prose.
Then there was the introduction of the Pakeha villain, called "Piharo" by Erenora, as the narrator explains: "from the Maori word pi'arongo, a very hard black stone, because what she had seen of his i'i, his life force, had been so dark and sinister".
I wondered why Ihimaera felt the need to introduce a black-hearted villain out of Victorian melodrama into an historical situation already so saturated in irony and injustice: such history needed no melodramatic villainy. But then, moving back and forth between the text and the notes at the back I landed on the "Author's Note" immediately following the end of the story, and all became clear. The note begins "I have always loved political opera", and I suddenly saw that that was what the book really was, a "political opera" without the music, presented as an historical novel. That was the reason for entitling the sections of the book "acts", for having a stagey villain engaged in a most unlikely scheme of revenge, for the lack of the thick texture of realistic detail of the historical novel.
Ihimaera's note goes on to explain that he had written an opera libretto, Erenora, in 1993, based on Beethoven's opera Fidelio "recasting Beethoven's heroine as a Maori woman". The libretto, as in Beethoven's opera, originally dealt only with the hero's imprisonment by the villain, his relationship with his jailer and the jailer's daughter, and the heroine's rescue of him; when Ihimaera realised that a performance of his libretto in New Zealand was unlikely, he rewrote it as a short novel for a collection, giving it "a preceding context: the extraordinary events of Parihaka and the exile of the prisoners of Parihaka to the South Island".
As he developed his short novel, incorporating elements from other favourite operas and the central motif of Alexandre Dumas' The Man in the Iron Mask, his manuscript grew to become a book in itself. The resultant opera-as-novel is an original, daring conception, but for this reader it does not really work.
The events of Parihaka seem to me not to fit well with the plot and characters of Fidelio that provide the material for Ihimaera's fourth "act": the story of Parihaka to me is not one of individual villainy and heroism so much as one of the institutional theft of land and the communal nonviolent resistance to it - the appropriate image not the melodramatic imposition of an iron mask upon one individual by another, but rather the unmasking of the face of colonialism by principled resistance.
Other readers, not bringing to the novel my concepts of the realistic historical novel and the meaning of Parihaka, maybe bringing instead a love of Fidelio and a pleasure in picking up Ihimaera's ingenious parallels and adaptations, may have different responses. The book is open to many readings: Ihimaera himself told Lynn Freeman on the Arts on Sunday that for him Erenora's courageous quest to rescue her husband played, in another key, as it were, his mother's loyal support of his father through their long marriage.
- Lawrence Jones is an emeritus professor of English.
