Books
Once were fathers
by John McCrystal
Alan Duff plays for high stakes with the release
of Dreamboat Dad.
The emotional stakes in the release of Alan Duff’s latest novel must be higher than usual. It not only represents the usual exposure of delicate artistic sensibility to the slings and arrows of critical and public reception, but is also step one in the author’s financial rescue package.
For Duff and his creditors – to whom he owes more than $3 million – all hope Dreamboat Dad (and a nameless second novel still in the pipeline) will make a splash big enough to keep the wolves from the door.
At his best (Once Were Warriors), Duff is capable of writing with great emotional power, using his idiosyncratic prose and singular voice to illuminate some of the darker regions of the human condition. At his worst (Szabad, parts of Both Sides of the Moon), he’s guilty of wallowing in excess, particularly violence, and of mangling the English language.
In Dreamboat Dad, Mark Takahe is growing up in the aftermath of World War II in the little Maori village of Waiwera, appended to the town of Twin Lakes. He’s a war baby, the product of the union between an American serviceman and Lena Takahe, a Waiwera local and part-time guide to the village’s internationally renowned thermal wonderland. He’s also something of an outcast, disowned by his war-hero stepfather, Henry Takahe, and saddled with the nickname “Yank”, a constant jolting reminder of his provenance. But he’s also gifted with the voice of an angel and blessed with the unflinching, indomitable love of his mother. Between them, these seem to offer him the slim prospect of a bright future.
Yank’s life takes a turn for the better when a letter arrives for Lena, announcing that 13 years after her American lover embarked for Guadalcanal – and presumably a war grave – he’s alive after all. Yank writes to him, and they forge a long-distance bond. Knowledge of his father’s affection and a few fat cheques provide Yank with the launching pad he needs to transcend his unpropitious start in life. Yank has always had a mental picture of his dreamboat dad – a kind of cross between John Wayne and Elvis Presley – but when finally a photograph arrives for him, he is forced to redraw the picture and to make a radical reassessment of his self and set of possibilities.
Through its plot and subplots, Dreamboat Dad revisits common Duff preoccupations: the deleterious effects of violence, particularly against the vulnerable; the cruel collusion that occurs where the downtrodden reinforce their subjugation by turning on their own; and, of course, the redeeming power of love.
What’s more, linking 1950s New Zealand with the American South at the dawn of the Civil Rights movement enables Duff to push another hobbyhorse along, too – namely, his impatience with Maori claims that they have suffered major injustice on the global scale of racial discrimination.
It also has the happy consequence of internationalising the novel, thereby enhancing its prospects of doing a Mister Pip and making it big on the international stage.
There’s other evidence, too, that the novel has been carefully crafted to maximise its general appeal.
Perhaps the tensest moment comes in a subplot, when Yank’s childhood buddy Chud finds Yank’s 17-year-old sister, Wiki, sitting naked and alone in a hot pool late at night. Chud was a nice enough kid, a promising footy player, but he was doomed by the violence visited on him by his drunken loser whanau to become just another incarnation of Jake the Muss. By the time he stumbles across Wiki, he’s a muscle-bound, tattooed thug who’s just got out of jug. There’s a certain inevitability about how the scene will play – or there would have been in the days when Duff was more insistent on his artistic freedom and less at the mercy of commercial imperative.
Dreamboat Dad is not without its merits, but there’s an uneasy bespoke quality to it that diminishes its power.
Dreamboat Dad, by Alan Duff (Vintage, $34.99).
