Books
The life of the city
by Lydia Wevers
Emma Taupere is a forger. Trained in China, she is hired by her on-the-make ex-boyfriend to copy two of the Auckland Museum’s Goldie portraits. Unscrupulous dealers, bitchy corrupt curators, violent alienated art students and a flower-delivering sweetie from Kumeu provide a fast, gripping plot; like Morris’s first, prize-winning novel Queen of Beauty, Hibiscus Coast is a must read. Paula Morris is that rare thing among literary novelists – someone who can write with depth and subtlety and also tune up a plot that drives like a … I was going to say Ferrari, but then I realised that Morris actually misses a beat on cars. She never reveals what kind of car the ex-boyfriend Siaki drives – surely a wide-boy Samoan setting up a big money forgery deal would care about his wheels?
But that’s a red herring. The point is that not only is Morris a seriously good writer – the tone doesn’t jar, the characters are satisfyingly complex, and there is an interesting reflection of the way we are now – she can also deliver entertainment. The end is maybe a little lurid, and there are some highly coloured characters – especially a wonderfully icy, manipulative, scheming Aussie art curator called Petra Barton – and perhaps the detail of the forgery skates over a few of the hard parts, like how you make a freshly painted surface look 100 years old, but none of those things really ruffled my attention.
Like J K Rowling, Paula Morris is a writer who knows what will make a story work. There is a mystique about her central character, Emma, the daughter of a Chinese mother who died when she was young, and a Maori father with some disreputable relations. Emma starts off as an art student and ends up in Shanghai being trained by a demanding master of copying who teaches her that the art of the successful forger is to get into the painter’s head. Emma proves to be technically superb and to have the meditative gift, and is able to produce a copy of Goldie’s “Patara Te Tuhi” that can pass for the real thing. This is not a far-fetched idea. There are a lot of Goldie forgeries and though, as art curator Roger Blackley has pointed out, forgers have always concentrated on his small portraits, which are easier to reproduce, there are famous examples of big, daring frauds – Han van Meegeren’s forgeries of Vermeer being the most obvious.
It is not clear why Emma agrees to become a forger. Although she is being paid a lot of money, her motivation is not really financial, and it is her experience of doing the painting that gives her satisfaction. Indeed, copying has a long and venerable artistic history. In Italy there is a Museum of Fakes, and its founder, Salvatore Castillo, said recently that very good counterfeiters eventually get their own show. Emma is clearly in this kind of class and in Morris’s novel this air of exceptionalism gives the novel its centre – around her can revolve the opportunistic, materialist, mixed-up world of contemporary Auckland.
Morris is particularly good at evoking her characters’ international lives. In Queen of Beauty, Virginia’s visit to home town Auckland is balanced by a persuasively knowing account of her life in New Orleans. Emma’s life in Shanghai is similarly detailed and rich – the brassy K-girls out partying with beefy, moneyed white businessmen.Like Shanghai, Auckland is a city with many different faces. At home Emma tries to connect with her cousin Ani, daughter of the attention-seeking, substance-abusing Erana. Morris doesn’t do easy generalising and is, I think, powerfully free of any nascent obligation to somehow account for or explain her homeland – people are all kinds of things, including Maori, Samoan, Chinese, Pakeha, Australian and gay and none of it seems forced or pointed. Lost Gauguins, car chases, forgeries and vandalism – there is plenty of excitement, but that’s not what kept me turning the pages. Morris has a nose for our times. Like Dickens, she can tell a great story but also “catch” the world we live in, with all its complications and ambiguities.
HIBISCUS COAST, by Paula Morris (Penguin, $28).
