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Whanau II, Witi Ihimaera
Reed
Reviewed by Jim Tucker (Courtesy of Taranaki Daily News)

Why did it take me a month to read this? And why, now I've finished, am I at a loss to know what to write about it (a first in about 70 reviews)? I just don't know.

I don't know what to think about this at times beautiful, at times fiendishly complex, at times revealing, at times boring book. Boring! Boring! How can something that reveals so much of our colonial past, of the haunting love songs of Maori, be boring?

I have only one theory, and it's a damned shaky one: the names. It's the names. I just couldn't remember them all and who fitted where and who was whose uncle, nephew, koro, mokopuna. So every time I put Witi down after a chapter read last thing in the day, it was almost impossible to pick up the threads when next I tried.

It's a problem many writers create for us poor readers. They live with their works to the point where they know every nuance and link. They carry the wiring diagram around in their heads. We don't. And unless you read a book like this at one sitting, you flounder all the way through.

And it's made a lot worse when the names seem so unfamiliar. There, I've said it: the names are unfamiliar. I couldn't say them fluently in my head and they became a distraction. Am I getting so old my mind won't retain information long enough to get me through a book – or is this symptomatic of a pakeha upbringing in which the names were Tom, Dick and Wendy? It's not as if Witi even uses many Maori words. Certainly, there were none that I hadn't seen before.

So this is a shock. These are names that have always been here, it's just that we in the majority culture haven't bothered with them.
Which is what Whanau II is about, in some ways: an indigenous race fretting to retain its identity within the careless neglect of modern society.

The book's founding idea is straightforward enough. Witi revisits the characters of his East Coast upbringing and carries his story on a complicated framework of households, all of them trying in their own ways to cope with a heritage desecrated by pakeha revenge on Te Kooti.

This is a book of iwi histories, arranged marriages, spirits, death, hierarchy, poverty, booze, yearnings for a better way. And all of it overlaid with the past, embodied by the Matua, the matriarchal power whose word must be obeyed. It isn't, and that leads to fractures that threaten to sweep away a hopeful future.

Witi is ambiguous in his disclaimer that the book is autobiographical. His denial is about as convincing as Janet Frame's were. His title comes from an explanation that this work is a revisiting of stories and people he wrote about in Whanau more than 30 years ago.

Incidentally, I've thought of another explanation for my problems getting through Whanau II: I've spent every waking "leisure" hour lately painting our house. When it came to reading, I was just too tired to concentrate. Sorry, Witi. It was probably just me.