New Zealand Listener – August 03, 2019

50 LISTENER AUGUST 3 2019

BOOKS&CULTURE

by PETER CALDER

I

n the Māori world, the past lies before

us, the future behind, unseen. The

prepositions in the language say as

much: “I ngā wā o mua” (“In the times

in front of us”) is the English equivalent of

“in the olden days”.

The point is made glancingly in the

editors’ introduction to this excellent

collection of foundational stories of Māori

mythology, which are mostly set in strik-

ingly modern or everyday contexts.

The editors marvel, perhaps extrava-

gantly, at how “a people considered to be

the youngest of all human populations

[developed] one of the most magnificent

and richest of origin narratives”. But as

these stories underline, Māori myth is

a lived tradition in the modern world:

time and again in this collection they fix

the central tenets of legendary narratives

firmly into a contemporary setting. This

habit, on show in every whaikōrero and

pōwhiri, may not be peculiar to Māori, but

it is deeply embedded in the Māori way of

being.

A lot of the work has been published

elsewhere, but for the rest, Witi Ihimaera

and Whiti Hereaka have assembled a

dream team of mostly well-known Māori

writers who have taken to their brief with

vigour and imagination. A standout is

David Geary’s Māui Goes to Hollywood,

which conceives of the folk hero as a

rugby league player dogged by injury and

down on his luck. Geary plays riskily with

the celebrated method of Māui’s death.

Hereaka’s own Papatūanuku, perhaps

the most cheekily funny of the stories, has

by ANNA ROGERS

A

s film-makers (About Time’s

Richard Curtis immediately

springs to mind, or Midnight

in Paris’ Woody Allen) and

novelists (Diana Gabaldon, Kate

Atkinson, Audrey Niffenegger) know,

temporal tampering can be a popular and

successful idea. But in The Heavens, Sandra

Newman takes the notion of time travel to

a startlingly different and brilliant level, as

New Yorker Kate slips between a millen-

nial New York (though not one we have

ever known) and 1593 England, where

she is Emilia, mistress of a nobleman and

Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady”.

When Kate meets poet Ben at a “rich

girl’s party” in 2000, the US president is

a woman named Chen, carbon emis-

sions have “radically declined” and peace

accords have been signed in Jerusalem.

Or is she? And have they? Nothing in this

extraordinary novel can be relied upon or

taken for granted. As the relationship with

Ben grows, Kate’s alternative existence as

Emilia becomes so real that reality and

truth shatter into shifting, untrustworthy

concepts.

Kate apparently loses her grip on the

world around her and seems convinced

that her actions in the past can have a

world-saving butterfly effect on the pre-

sent. Is she losing her mind? Who can – or

should – be believed?

Newman pulls us to and fro, unset-

tling us with doubt – Ben’s challenging

That way

madness lies

A reality-bending

novel travels from

Shakespearean

England to a strangely

altered modern world.

Living

legends

Māori writers

reimagine their

mythology in

contemporary settings

and contexts.

GE

TT

Y^ I

M

AG

ES

Māui Goes to Hollywood

conceives of the folk hero

as a rugby league player

dogged by injury and

down on his luck.

Disturbing, compelling and

mesmeric: Sandra Newman.