Ambitious yarn fails to convince

Strange days: Witi Ihimaera's protagonists are like 21st-century characters in 19th-century drag.

TheTrowenna Sea, Witi Ihimaera, Penguin, $37

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HISTORICAL novels are always a problem. Without exception, they are interpretations – or distortions – of historical events, as seen from a much later viewpoint.

But the good ones at least try to enter into the mentality of earlier times, and try to convey how people once felt and thought.

This is a test that Witi Ihimaera's latest novel fails, and fails badly.

On the surface, the factual core of the story could have been a natural for this author. In the 1840s, Hohepa Te Umuroa was one of five Maori prisoners who were transported to the British penal colony on Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) for their part in the Wairau Incident and other armed confrontations with New Zealand Company settlers. Hohepa died in exile. In the 1980s, with much ceremony, his remains were repatriated and re-interred in New Zealand.

Ihimaera blends Hohepa's factual story with that of two fictitious British characters – the assertive and independent wife Ismay Glossop, and her husband, the doctor Gower McKissock. The three characters take turns narrating the bulk of the 500-page novel.

Unfortunately, while many events happen to them, these three leading characters resolutely refuse to come to life. They are early established as the noble and upright Maori dissident, the proto-feminist wife, and the flawed-but-compassionate doctor. And that is the way they remain from beginning to end, without nuance or development.

As for the novel's sense of time and place, it's not just a matter of the odd anachronism, though the author's endnote does admit that there might be quite a few of those. Rather, it's the fact that the leading characters' attitudes and judgements are so clearly those of 2009, not of 1849. As they comment on historical events, social attitudes, race and culture, they all conveniently say things that are perfectly acceptable and commonplace now, but that would have sounded very strange to anybody back then.

In short, they are early 21st-century characters dressed in 19th-century drag. Much of the dialogue is crudely expository. This means gobbets of mugged-up historical information dropped into conversations, with no sense that this is what characters would really be likely to say.

It's not enough to give us text-book information on the Treaty of Waitangi, Te Rauparaha, the New Zealand Company, the Wairau Incident, colonial Hobart, the Black Line and the extermination of Tasmanian Aborigines.

If we want factual information about any of these things, we can look up the same long list of history books that Ihimaera gives in his endnote. With a novel for grown-ups, we have to believe that credible and adult characters are reacting to such things. The Trowenna Sea doesn't give us that option.

I'm happy to report that the story moves at a fair clip and (given its spots of melodrama) is reasonably entertaining. I also have to admit that I sometimes found myself laughing, though not in places the author may have wanted me to. My happiest chuckle was when a character says "It is 1917 now, and World War One still alarms us." (Think about it.)

In the end, The Trowenna Sea is a long, undemanding yarn mixed with history lite. For some readers, that will be a positive recommendation.

Nicholas Reid is an Auckland writer and historian.

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