David Hill on Into the River by Ted Dawe
Anyone who genuinely believes this is…’just pandering to sex and filth’ must have read the novel with their frontal lobes disconnected.
- David Hill
Last week it was announced that Into the River by Ted Dawe has been subject to an interim restriction order pending a decision by the Film and Literature Board of Review, which means it cannot be sold in New Zealand, or taken out of the library. A decision as to its classification is expected in October, but it is considered unlikely that the book will actually be banned.
The New Zealand Book Council is dedicated to encouraging a vibrant reading culture in New Zealand. We are therefore alarmed by the Board of Review’s decision to issue an interim restriction order for access to Into the River by Ted Dawe.
David Hill reviewed Into the River last year in the Winter edition of New Zealand Books. We think he makes many excellent points about this novel, and thought we’d share them with you. Below is an excerpt from David Hill’s article Hormones and Hedges. For the full review, click here.
Anyone present when Into the River won the Senior Fiction and Book of the Year categories at last year’s New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards couldn’t fail to be impressed – and moved – by the emotion of Ted Dawe’s speech: a speech which, it’s worth noting, he delivered in English and Te Reo.
Similarly, anyone reading the deluge of diatribe that followed the triumph of this unsettling, unflinching YA novel couldn’t fail to be moved (to denture-grinding despair, this time) by the illogic and rant of so many objectors. Sample text: “Pornography is pornography, no matter what you call it.” Indeed, madam, and an idiot is an idiot, no matter what….etc, etc.
Forgive the florid tone. I think we sometimes display an Anglo-Saxon aversion to acknowledging that authors often write with passion, that they frequently build stories and characters that brim with feelings. Reviewers especially seem embarrassed at responding in similar subjective, emotional terms. Robert Graves’ “cool web of language binds us in”, which is hardly the way to discuss Dawe’s visceral, bubblingly hormonal novel.
Dawe originally self-published Into the River, under the nifty name of The University of Mangakino Press. Now it’s been picked up by one of his previous mainstream publishers. So the print is clearer, the paper less glassy, the imprimatur more authoritative.
This is a book with big, bold ambitions, one that jumps with physical immediacy. His gift for words takes young Te Arepa from a tiny country settlement to Auckland, and a scholarship as the only Maori at a prestigious – read “reactionary” – private college whose masters with their gowns, Latin tags and compound-complex sentences evoke the late 19th as much as the early 21st century. It’s not easy to picture a contemporary school where boys “sneak out for a midnight ramble”.
Life at Barwell’s Collegiate is nasty, brutish, and occasionally short. Favouritism and unrestrained bullying rule. Te Arepa quickly finds it easier to conceal his Maori-Spanish ancestry; for much of the narrative, he’ll be called Devon. Joltingly soon, he’s off on a corrugated road to sex, cannabis and vodka, renunciation, betrayal and school theatricals. He seems to lose or abandon almost everything, yet at the very end there’s a departure and a yell of liberation that become a prequel to the author’s earlier, also award-winning Thunder Road.
It’s a percussively authentic rendering. The elbowing, anarchic humour is tone-perfect. Young males do jostle and abuse and jeer and confront like this. (They don’t always talk like this; I haven’t heard all that many kids announcing “I carry a huge weight and it slows me down”, but Dawe generally gets away with it.) They do make moral compromises and disastrous choices. They do throb for the sorts of imaginative – and disarmingly comical – sexual encounters that have outraged those who resent any book which reduces readers’ ignorance. Into the River is indeed a novel which empowers by informing. It’s not an issues book, however; narrative and characters always come first.
It’s not only the rawness that distinguishes Dawe’s story. There’s also the building sense of alienation and solitariness that drives Devon towards his defiant future. There’s reverence as well: for spirits of the river and land; for natural life, mythology, legend, whakapapa; for the potency of narrative. Anyone who genuinely believes this is (second sample text) “just pandering to sex and filth” must have read the novel with their frontal lobes disconnected.
You can fault aspects of Into the River. The Rural Maori Boy Comes to Pakeha City motif is incipiently cliched. The writing can be lush; characters declaim rather a lot and the author explains rather a lot. But the urgency and integrity are undeniable. Colin McCahon wrote once about not wanting any refinement of style to moderate the intensity of his content, and you can see a good deal of that in Dawe’s memorable book.
ABOUT DAVID HILL
David Hill is a versatile journalist, reviewer, fiction writer, playwright and children’s writer. Born in Napier, he spent fourteen years teaching before writing full-time. His many published books range from studies on poetry, to teenage fiction, for which he has received numerous prizes. His first young adult novel won the 1994 Times Educational Supplement Award for Special Needs. He won the 2002 Children’s Literature Foundation Gaelyn Gordon Award for a Much-Loved Book and the 2003 LIANZA Esther Glen Medal. David is available to visit schools through the Writers in Schools programme.
ABOUT NZ BOOKS
This review first appeared in New Zealand Books Volume 24 | Number 2 | Issue 106 | Winter 2014 edition. New Zealand Books is a quarterly publication dedicated to reviewing New Zealand literature. As well as in-depth reviews, you’ll find lively opinion on books and publishing, new poetry, and a prize-winning cryptic crossword. To find out more about New Zealand Books click here.