Book description
In his new bachelor flat, too close to comfort to his former family
home, Mike Newall, Oxford don and Wittgenstein scholar seeks to
rebuild his life, but feels increasingly weighed down by the past.
When Donovan O'Dwyer, his colleague and fellow expatriate New
Zealander dies, Newall attends the funeral. Afterwards, Newall reveals
to his old friend Bertie Winterstoke the secret that O'Dwyer carried
with him to his grave. During the battle for Crete in the Second World
War, a soldier in New Zealand's Maori battalion died in harrowing
circumstances. Believing his commanding officer, O'Dwyer, was
responsible for the death, the soldier's family placed a makutu, a
Maori curse, on him.
Winterstoke demands to be told all, and in the days that follow
Newall obliges. But Newall's life and O'Dwyer's are curiously
interconnected and Newall finds that he must interweave O'Dwyer's tale
with his own - his childhood in New Zealand, his self imposed exile in
Oxford, his marriage and divorce, the pilgrimage recently made to
Croatia and the promise of a new beginning that this may hold.
Gradually, through a series of entwined stories, beautifully told,
reflecting on decades of war and of peace, on memory and its failures,
and on language and its limitations, Mike Newall comes to see a way of
laying the ghosts of O'Dwyer's - and his own - past to rest.
C. K. Stead was Professor of English at the University of Auckland
until 1986. He is known among students of literature as the author of
The New Poetic
, a study of Yeats, Eliot and the Georgian poets. He is the only New
Zealand writer to have won the New Zealand Book Award for both poetry
and fiction, winning twice for the novels
All Visitors Ashore
and
The Singing Whakapapa
. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1984 he was
awarded the C. B.E. for services to New Zealand Literature.
