Airana Ngarewa's second novel descends into chaos and farce but he remains 'a serious storytelling talent'
Airana Ngarewa's debut novel The Bone Tree was perhaps the feel-good literary story of 2023: good enough to earn acclaim from critics, accessible enough to spend a long time on the bestseller list, and focused on the sort of heavy-hitting issues that would lead many readers to elevate its promising young author into the company of Becky Manawatu and Alan Duff. But for me, the most enduring response to the novel was a negative one: Kelly Ana Morey's searing review for Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books, in which she - after some kind opening words - tore strips from Ngarewa's debut and essentially told him to keep reading and keep learning.
It's a memorable critique for a couple of reasons. For one, negative reviews are kind of just fun, and it feels like we don't get enough of them in Aotearoa. More importantly, however, I love her reading of The Bone Tree, the way she draws out its strangest, most uncertain qualities - features that many readers overlooked as they focused on its narratives of Māori suffering.
But the most interesting aspect of Morey's review is that the things she criticises about The Bone Tree are the things that I liked about it - or at the very least, the things that keep me thinking about the book two years on. For example, she talks about the narrative's odd sense of placelessness: "The city in the novel - where 'the steel and concrete buildings reached for the sky' - is oddly surreal and cries out to be anchored in reality, including the logistics of Kauri/Cody (and his father) walking into the city: it takes about an hour on foot, we're told, but that hardly places them 'in the wop-wops' of the Taranaki back blocks." She likewise questions the novel's almost unreal reliance on coincidence, in which every character the protagonist runs into turns out to be directly connected to his past. "How fortuitous," Morey remarks.
See, these are the things that fascinated me about The Bone Tree, a novel I've often seen described as grim, gritty and rooted in the confronting societal issues that so often characterise works of Māori literature. But it's also strange and surreal, its world small and otherworldly; there's something reminiscent of theatre in how characters move from 'the country' to 'the city' (which is evoked in dream-like terms), and the coincidence that pulls every character together feels more like a fable than the cutting social realism I expected. There's a lot of Māori literature that grounds itself in the real world, and a lot that envelops itself in spirituality and pūrākau - but I haven't read much like The Bone Tree, which exists in that uncertain space between.
And so, I was curious to read The Last Living Cannibal, Ngarewa's second novel, and see what it could retroactively reveal about the author. Were The Bone Tree's unorthodox aspects simply the result of a short story writer attempting to expand his scope too quickly? What parts of that debut would Ngarewa double down on? What parts would he smooth out?
For starters, the scope here is even narrower, despite the 1940s setting and references throughout to the ongoing World War; whereas The Bone Tree was a small story that spilled over the edges, The Last Living Cannibal is more confident in its limits. There are intergenerational elements here, but it hardly feels sweeping. The narrative focuses on Koko, a remnant of the New Zealand Wars - and the titular 'cannibal' - who dies after a confrontation with the local headmaster. From there, we follow a battle of words and wits over the fate of Koko's body, and his grandson Blackie, as past wrongs are brought to the fore. The plot, with its tight focus on a single character and a single setting - with almost the entire second half happening in and around 'the big house' (wharenui) - often feels more like a play than a novel. I could say the same about Ngarewa's airy attitude towards setting.
As with The Bone Tree, the city here is just 'the city', and while place and community are central pillars throughout, Koko's narrative voice doesn't linger on the non-human world like you might expect. There are some memorable exceptions, however, such as a late moment where Koko looks, from the window of a train, upon the tamed Taranaki landscape: "I'd long forgotten what [the world] looked like beyond the village. But I had guessed it'd changed since the last time I'd seen it, and I was right. The whole country had been divided into paddocks, fenced by gravelled and dirt roads. Everything was flattened. Everything grass. We travelled miles sometimes without sighting a single flock, forest or swamp. I looked at the others and saw Uncle watch the world with the same dread I did."
Here, the novel slips into that same ambiguous sense of place that characterised so much of The Bone Tree. The terrified awe with which Koko looks at 'the world' reflects the way in which that earlier novel evoked 'the city', and though The Last Living Cannibal uses the approach more sparingly, I still think it works in portraying characters coming to terms with the colonised landscape.
If the result of these structural choices is a novel that often feels like a play, I might go even further and say that Ngarewa's obvious love for his central protagonist, and the sheer amount of space his voice occupies here, specifically lends The Last Living Cannibal the feeling of a one-person play (or something close to it). I don't think too many tweaks would be needed to turn this story into something resembling John Broughton's Michael James Manaia or Witi Ihimaera's Woman Far Walking, and that's testament to the character of Koko, who almost entirely guides the narrative through his distinct voice. As much as I enjoyed The Bone Tree's somewhat-splotchy approach to characterisation, Ngarewa's second novel is a significant step up in this area. Perhaps this richness owes something to the way in which, according to the novel's afterword, Koko is shaped by the stories of several Taranaki figures of the past. If you've ever seen him speak at an event, you'll know of the knowledge and pride with which Ngarewa speaks of his history; The Last Living Cannibal feels like the strongest representation of that passion on the page to date.
In fact, I might even say that being more familiar with Ngarewa as a stage presence has given me a greater appreciation for his writing generally. He's a storyteller, in the most natural way possible, who clearly loves spinning a yarn and cracking jokes - qualities that are reflected in The Last Living Cannibal. It's not uncommon for writers and critics to invoke our oral storytelling tradition when discussing Māori literature, and I get it, but sometimes these comparisons can seem a little academic. Yes, a novel like Potiki is shaped by the form of whaikōrero, and obviously Patricia Grace is a master of wielding narrative voice - but I don't think Potiki could really work as a purely spoken piece. Grace's writing is, I believe, too tied to the page.
On the other hand, The Last Living Cannibal could. While reading I couldn't help but imagine Ngarewa delivering every sentence like he's strutting around a stage, and I feel like I get his narration as a result: the way it reflects the push and pull of engaging a live audience, the colloquialisms, the way in which cheeky jabs at the expense of characters punctuate the narrative (often at the ends of paragraphs). It goes some way to illuminating Ngarewa's loose, freewheeling style, with fragment sentences on fragment sentences; driving, forward-moving narratives; a focus on action. It's the sort of ethos that can result in some structural sloppiness - the aspects of The Bone Tree that some found undercooked - but can also produce outstanding stories like the vibrant "Pātea Pools" (still perhaps his best work) and honest, fully realised characters like the titular 'Last Living Cannibal'; there's a real warmth to Koko that never feels overwrought or too fussily edited.
There's likewise something unpretentiously giddy about the way in which the novel builds to, and revels in, scenes of chaos and hijinks - think of how The Bone Tree punctuated its narrative with car chases and showdowns. Ngarewa loves drawing out scenes of characters overstepping boundaries, of tempers rising and releasing. He loves a fight, and he loves describing a fight, blow-by-blow, each action a power play and a small character moment.
Large stretches of the novel's second half are concerned with tense conversations in which dark pasts are aired and tikanga is carefully tested. And yet, the climactic moment is a chaotic action scene that borders on farce, and I imagine that Ngarewa is having fun with this juxtaposition. But while there's something very funny about the sheer length of this extended brawl, it does run a little long, and to me moments like this do highlight some of the issues with the novel's narrative style. I couldn't help but think that these scenes would work better orally, with a live narrator - such as Ngarewa himself - bringing some clarity and rhythm to the chaos. It also seems like the novel's vibrant narrative voice falls away somewhat.
That intimate understanding of the central character is sidelined by the need to describe what happened, and when, and then what happened next. But when it works it manages to encapsulate what I love about Ngarewa's best writing (such as many of the short stories collected in 2024's Pātea Boys): that wide-eyed feeling of someone weaving a story on the fly, recounting some crazy events while finding time to poke fun, brag a little, and exaggerate where needed. In a recent Instagram post, Ngarewa whipped up a perfect little image to describe the experience of making fun of himself and other writers on stage at a gala evening in Nelson: "It [is] a very thin line, and I [have] heaps of fun dancing along it." I like to imagine that he approaches his fiction with a similar attitude.
Ultimately, The Last Living Cannibal proves that Airana Ngarewa is a serious storytelling talent, and I'm still as interested as I was two years ago in seeing how his writing develops from here (luckily, I probably won't have to wait long, considering he's been releasing a book a year). What I'm less sure about is whether the novel will even end up being Ngarewa's best form. This is a good story, but it's also a small story, and I wonder if this is one stop on the way to something with greater scope.
And yet, there's something so innately appealing to me about Ngarewa's voice - his ability to channel character, to build and ease tension - that I feel confident in saying he'll be a mainstay of Māori writing for a long time. Or at least as long as he has a story to tell.