When is a Novel not a Novel?
Sixth Week: 6-12 December 2008
One of the joys (or horrors) of writing online in draft form is that the book becomes a shape shifter that is made available to readers while still in a fluid state. This happens with all forms of writing but is made visible as a process when you write directly onto the internet. At this particular moment I have changed my mind yet again about the structure and time frame of the book. But I don’t care. The truth is that I have fallen in love with online writing. I feel rejuvenated, alive, creative, and above all free.
I had not realised how weary I had become with my old way of writing fiction; the loneliness, the uncertainty, the lack of energy to go back day after day (sometimes for years) to revisit a world lived entirely within my own imagination. What other occupation requires a person to live like this without any feedback until the job is finished, published, done and dusted and then thrown out to the circling sharks (aka book reviewers)?
Not only have I fallen in love with the online process I have also become enamoured with the possibility of the retrieval of an earlier fictional form that is currently out of favour: the novella. The novella was once an important form in nineteenth century German literature and often had a rigid structure with strict narrative rules. This is no longer the case except for the necessity of creating an intense gaze upon one major theme.
A novella is not a short novel written by a novelist who ran out of ideas. It is not an extended short story. It is what it is; a slippery customer that I am just coming to grips with. It is not the word count that is the crucial factor although novellas are usually shorter than novels. This annoys some contemporary publishers who see novellas as having little commercial value. In novellas, character, incident, theme and language are focussed on one issue of universal significance. Death in Venice by Thomas Mann is a wonderful example of a writer using the novella form to portray a story of love, death and obsession and the tragedy of the loss of identity and hope through the aging process. I wonder how different his book would be if he had written a full length novel. I believe that the intensity of emotion and drama would have become seriously watered down.
I might end up writing three novellas, the first one being my current work The Black Stones of Hannalore (working title). Each novella will be set within the same landscapes of the west coast of the North Island of New Zealand. The time frame will be just after the end of the First World War, then moving to 1946 for the second book, and the last one being in the near future, about 2020. This means that I won’t be able to have the same characters in all the books but they can be linked together by descent. This is not a problem because it is the themes and the landscapes (and in particular domestic landscapes) that will remain constant throughout.
None of the above is set in concrete. Meanwhile, I tend my summer garden and tie up the tomatoes that are threatening to outgrow their cages. I have two deep wooden boxes filled with organic compost on my front lawn and green plastic bags bursting with potatoes down the back. When the writing stalls, I go outside and pluck the laterals from the Beefsteak and the Money Maker and smell the distinctive aroma of crushed tomato leaves on my fingers. This brings me back to earth with a jolt. Growing vegetables is similar to writing fiction: you start from a tiny seed and the narrative develops from that. The story ends (hopefully) in a feast.
Part Five: The Black Stones of Hannalore
In the last episode, we learned that that Juno’s position in the community may be under threat. Hannalore is released from interment so that she can take control of Juno’s increasingly strange behaviour. Hannalore tells Juno that they are leaving the religious community soon. She swears her to secrecy. Now read on…
Two nights after the scene in the kitchen Hannalore was awakened by something blowing softly into her left ear. At first she thought that a flapping moth had taken up residence inside her head but then she heard a faint whisper. ‘Wake up, wake up.’ It was Sarah.
‘Has something happened to Juno?’
‘No, she’s sound asleep.’
‘Can’t this wait until the morning? I’m tired.’
‘Sorry,’ said Sarah. ‘But I need to speak with you urgently.’
Heavy rain was falling. The howling wind performed a series of suspended cadences that never quite developed into a decisive final note. Hannalore crept out of the hut and followed Sarah to the kitchen.
Sarah raked the glowing embers in the fire box with the poker. She put some small logs onto the embers and the dry bark on the wood flared up with a hissing sound. She filled the teapot with boiling water from the tap at the side of the range and brought out the milk jug and the jar of sugar from the safe.
‘I know that you are leaving,’ she said.
Hannalore took a gulp of hot tea that almost burnt her gullet. It had been a mistake to trust Juno. She did not understand the necessity for secrecy. The girl had no guile, no artifice and she trusted all adults implicitly.
Hannalore decided to bluff it out. ‘Whatever do you mean?’
‘For what it’s worth, I believe that you’re doing the right thing. I have worked out a plan. I’ve borrowed bed rolls and a pikau for you to take. But you must be careful. Winter time is dangerous in the bush.’
‘Thank you,’ said Hannalore. ‘But why are you taking such a risk?’
Sarah poured more tea into her cup. ‘I have not always been kind to you and Juno and I wish to make amends. You must leave as soon as possible. A man and a lady are coming from the orphanage when the weather clears to take Juno away.’ She went over to the sideboard and retrieved a stained manila envelope from the back of the cupboard. ‘Photographs,’ she said. ‘You will need to take them with you.’ She laid out three photographs on the table and placed the candle closer to Hannalore.
One photograph was of a shop window displaying men’s clothing. The second one was of a young woman dressed in a satin gown with an intricate pleated bodice and the last one was the same woman, a little older, holding a baby dressed in a sailor suit.
‘Eleanor,’ said Hannalore. ‘God help me, it’s Eleanor.’
‘And you, in the sailor suit, dressed as a boy.’
Hannalore could not take her eyes off the face of her young mother dressed in her satin finery. She was beautiful. The iridescent perfection of her skin glowed through the matt sepia surface with the lustre of pearls.
Sarah complained of feeling faint. She fetched a pillow and propped herself up on the settle. Hannalore offered her another cup of tea. Sarah shook her head.
Someone knocked on the kitchen door. Hannalore ignored it at first. It was barely audible above the raging wind playing havoc with a flapping sheet of tin on the roof. The knocking became more insistent. Hannalore placed the photographs back into the manila envelope and hid it beneath her night shirt but before she could blow out the candle, the kitchen door opened.
It was Jimmy. He was dressed in dripping wet oilskins and leather boots. He stood in the doorway awkwardly with his sodden hat in his hands.
‘Take off your boots and come close to the fire,’ said Sarah. ‘You’ll catch your death.’
‘It’s a filthy night outside,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we should wait a little longer.’
Sarah said that she had just suffered one of her turns and that she must keep still for a few moments until the blood came back into her face. Hannalore asked him what he was doing here.
‘Enough,’ said Sarah, ‘let’s get down to business. Jimmy is part of my plan for your escape. He will take you and Juno to the edge of the bush before first light. He will show you how to follow the river to where you are headed. You are going to Piopio.’
‘Time for me to go and catch Prince and prepare the konaki,’ said Jimmy.
‘We should go and wake Juno soon,’ said Sarah. ‘I will help to pack her things.’
Hannalore waited until Jimmy had closed the kitchen door behind him before she removed the photographs from her night shirt. She took them out of the envelope and laid them out on the table. The young woman was looking down at the baby in the sailor suit with a look of utter adoration. The baby could not be, was not, an image of Hannalore when young. To be so loved and then abandoned made no sense.
Sarah looked shrunken and somehow diminished in the flickering candlelight. She offered Hannalore some waterproof wrapping to protect the photographs from the rain.
‘I should have given you these images a long time ago,’ she said, ‘but I was afraid that you would find them unsettling.’
Outside, the storm-driven rain roared like an inland tidal sea. Hannalore thought she heard Sarah whisper, please forgive me but it might have been the desperate sigh of a tree fern being uprooted from the sodden ground or some drowning animal fighting for a final gasp of air against the power of the storm.
Sarah stood up. ‘Come now,’ she said. ‘My head has settled. It’s time to leave.’
9
The konaki proved to be a problem right from the start. Jimmy said little but when he did he surprised her with the coarseness of his language. Some blankety-blank idiot had attached two small wheels to the back of the sledge and they kept getting caught in the low branches of the bush along the track. He rode slowly and cautiously, but every so often he had to dismount from Prince and chop at the vegetation caught in the wheels with his pig knife. He had to shout over the noise of the wind and the rain and the flailing trees. Another blankety-blank idiot had not put runners on the konaki and if he, Jimmy, ever met this person, he would tell him to go to the hot place.
By the time the dawn light appeared the rain had reduced to a dribble and the wind had died down to a mere whisper of its former self. Hannalore marvelled at Juno’s ability to sleep through the severe jolting of their transportation through the terrible night. But as soon as they stopped, Juno awoke. She sat encased in her blankets with her head scarf pulled down low over her forehead.
Jimmy removed the horse from the shafts of the konaki. Juno slid down the front of the sledge onto the ground. She giggled.
Hannalore was annoyed. Jimmy could at least have lifted Juno out of the konaki before he released his horse. She could have hurt herself.
Jimmy tied on a canvas feedbag over Prince’s head. The horse snuffled and coughed into his oats. Jimmy said that he would light a fire to make tea and dry out their things. He took some shredded bark and small pieces of paper from his pikau. He fiddled about trying to make sparks with a stick of hardwood and a piece of whitey-wood but the dampness defeated him.
Hannalore gave him one of her precious matches. He asked her where she had got it from but she would not tell him. Jimmy said it was a shame that Hannalore had never learned to ride a horse. He could have saddled up one for her and Juno and then they would not be at the mercy of this wretched konaki.
‘Do you know where we are?’ he asked.
She shook her head. The paper caught fire and she helped Jimmy to place small pieces of bark in a pyramid shape to feed the flames. Soon, the fire was well alight and when it had died down Jimmy made a flat area in the middle of the embers to make a nest for the billy. When the water boiled, he lifted the billy out of the fire and placed it on the ground. He removed the lid and threw in a handful of tea. He gave it a vigorous stir with his pig knife.
‘Now we must wait for it to steep,’ he said. ‘Nothing worser than rushed bush tea.’
‘I’m hungry,’ said Juno. Hannalore opened her pikau and unwrapped a brown paper parcel. Inside were two honey sandwiches, four slices of thick unbuttered bread and a small wheel of cheese. She offered a slice of bread to Jimmy. He shook his head and beckoned to Juno. ‘Got pork hocks in me saddlebag. Come over here and get some meat.’
Juno came closer to the fire. Hannalore felt uneasy, not at what Jimmy had said but the tone of his voice. He kept staring at Juno’s face as if he had never seen her before. He tipped up the billy and poured strong dark tea into chipped enamel mugs. Juno wolfed down the chunks of fatty meat and gristle that Jimmy hacked from one of the hocks. She wanted to know how the pig walked after someone took its legs away.
Jimmy laughed. ‘Oh aren’t you the funny one, a breath of fresh air you are.’
Hannalore’s unease deepened. She had known Jimmy since she came to the settlement with Juno and Eleanor. He was a few years older than her and had always seemed a quiet young man, respectful of his uncle Abraham and the other elders. He was gentle with the farm animals and, unlike some of the other men, never whipped his dog or kicked the house cows.
Now, it seemed as if he was playing a different game. He had taken on an air of authority over them, an ownership. Hannalore wondered why he was helping them when he knew of the possible consequences of his action.
The bush was wet and dripping with moisture. The horse had dozed off with his feedbag still attached to his head. Jimmy put some more fuel on the fire.
‘Time is moving on,’ said Hannalore. ‘Perhaps we should resume our journey.’
‘Soon,’ said Jimmy. Then he told them a story of a boy and a girl who fell in love and who had run away from the settlement. They had become lost in the bush.
‘Were they punished?’
‘They died of cold and hunger. But their ghosts live on in the bush. Listen, can you hear what they are doing?’
Hannalore saw a look of panic on Juno’s face at the mention of ghosts. ‘Come Juno,’ she said. ‘Help me pack up the food.’
Jimmy made a circle of his left index finger and thumb and jabbed his other index finger up and down inside the circle.
Hannalore hoped that Juno had not seen this sickening gesture. Jimmy jumped to his feet and said that he was not prepared to risk his horse by going any further. Those blankety-blank wheels on the konaki had to go.
Hannalore was afraid. Without transport, she and Juno were in danger of becoming trapped here. There were entirely at Jimmy’s mercy. His behaviour was becoming more disquieting by the minute. She did not believe the story about the dead lovers. The women in the settlement would have known about it and told the story over and over again. Stories of love and loss were their favourite tales especially when the characters broke the rules and were punished for it by an ever vigilant God.
Juno drained her mug. ‘Can’t read my tea leaves,’ she said. ‘Too many.’
‘Wait here,’ said Jimmy. ‘I need to go into the gulley below and cut some totara.’
‘What for?’ asked Hannalore.
‘Makeshift runners,’ said Jimmy. ‘Those wheels have to go.’
Hannalore took Juno’s mug and saw a tangle of dark brown tea leaves clinging to the sides. ‘Bunches of grapes,’ she said. ‘Luscious fruit and an important journey.’
‘I want the grapes now,’ said Juno. ‘Sweet in my mouth.’
Hannalore could hear Jimmy thrashing about below them and then the rhythmic chopping of his axe. ‘We have to go now,’ she whispered. ‘You fold the bed rolls and I’ll pack the pikau.’
Juno pushed out her lower lip. This was her signal that she did not want to do what Hannalore asked of her.
‘We must leave here,’ said Hannalore.
Juno pushed her bottom lip out even further.
The sound of chopping stopped. Hannalore, feeling more and more certain that they were in danger, told Juno that there were ghosts here, dangerous ones with little red eyes.
Juno sprang to her feet and followed Hannalore’s instructions to fold up the bed rolls. Hannalore grabbed a water bottle and a canvas ground sheet from the konaki. She untied the horse’s halter and smacked him lightly on the rump. Prince did not run away as she had planned. He stood there blinking at her in the morning light. She tried once more but again he just looked at her and blew air through his nostrils and stamped his white feathered feet up and down, up and down.
Hannalore and Juno walked away as quietly as they could. Hannalore turned for one last look at Prince and saw him toss his big head sideways, as if to say goodbye.
‘Are the red eyes gone?’ asked Juno.
‘We will soon be safe.’
‘Cross your heart?’
‘Da da da and hope to die.’