Michael O'Leary (1)

Straight is the second book in the trilogy; I came to it without having read the first, but felt it stood alone well enough that I had no trouble following the plot. Paul Calvert returns to Auckland from "the Dreamland", te wahi moemoea, and finds his ambition to settle down with a job and a girlfriend interrupted by a gang of neo-Nazis blackmailing, then kidnapping him in search of a code entwined with his family history. As he investigates his Pākehā ancestors, he grows into his Māori heritage.

I did struggle with what degree of realism I should be reading into the story. It took me a while to realise that Calvert is doing the same: the story is told in an intermingling of the present with his memories of his childhood and his time in the dreamland. The theme is summarised in the line "Too much reality leads to unreality," and elaborated through dreams and daydreams; the trouble he has both sleeping and waking; his experiences sober and drunk and drugged. The fantastic events he gets caught up in even have him wondering whether they are real or he's dreamed his girlfriend's very existence.

But long before this payoff can be reached, the outrageous melodrama of the threats against Calvert had me doubting his sanity, or the writer's aim. His family history is unfolded through a similarly implausible piling up of coincidences of the "I just happened to be talking to an old colleague of your father yesterday" variety. And yet when the action-filled climax arrives it's glossed over in a few sentences, as if the two characters had parted with a shaking of hands.

Good prose can save the most incredible plot. I could have very easily got used to this mixture of the poetic and the prosaic, especially since I enjoyed its scatterings of bilingual wordplay. But it was too frequently stilted; the conversational tone felt unnaturally formal, especially when people were explaining themselves. And exclamation marks punctuated the most casual contexts - such as a statement that it's raining. Every time I found myself briefly interested in the story, some sentence would clunk and jar me out of it again.

So I can't say I enjoyed the book as a whole. I think it is ambitious; I think it could, with thorough line-editing, have been a strong novel; but as it stands it didn't, to my reading, succeed in its evident aims.… (mehr)