Kāwai: Tree of Nourishment
by Monty Soutar

Tree of Nourishment, the second instalment of esteemed historian Monty Soutar’s Kāwai trilogy opens with Hine-aute the granddaughter of Kaitanga – the central character from the first novel – fleeing through the bush towards her home village with her father’s recently decapitated head in a fishing net. Naturally enough she’s consumed by dark thoughts of utu relating to those who have done such a thing to her beloved father. So, in many ways, the beginning is not dissimilar to the first novel in the series, For Such a Time As This, which chronicles the intensive warrior training of Kaitanga and his peers and their brutal act of utu on the iwi who had slaughtered his grandfather when he was a child.

However, while Tree of Nourishment initially follows a similar narrative trajectory with warrior training replaced by warfare at the pā-face, its primary focus is the winds of change on te ao Māori. These have arrived with the Pākehā in the form of the three afflictions of muskets, disease and Christianity. All will have irrevocable consequences for Hine, her family and her iwi. As in For Such a Time As This, the very real strength of Tree of Nourishment is in the sheer weight of knowledge of te ao Māori and its history that Soutar brings to the page. Want to know how to preserve a head? How bodies are treated after death? How a pā is defended from attack and how its inhabitants ae able to escape? The role of cannibalism in Māori life? Hierarchies within Māori communities? How tohunga are trained and operate within their communities? Soutar has got it covered. It’s all incredibly interesting and ostensibly a clever way of bringing this type of knowledge to rangatahi readers, in particular, in a way that feels alive and believable. This is something that a non-fiction historical account may struggle to do.

I say rangatahi, because although the novel is being pitched as an adult fiction, there’s no doubt that its real value lies with young readers and the recent expansion of the history curriculum at secondary level to finally include a major focus on the Māori history of Aotearoa. I know at least one kura – and I’m sure there were many judging by the book’s phenomenal sales – that embraced For Such A Time As This, such was its value and interest to teachers and students. It’s a smart move by the writer and the publisher to offer a novel that not only fills a gaping hole in terms of available material for a mandated curriculum but also attracts and informs adult readers.

However, although the story is presented as fiction, the research is very close to the surface of both novels, often at the expense of the storyteller’s craft. Often it needs to be bedded a little more seamlessly into the story rather than taking the place of the story itself. But more on that later.

At first it appears that Tree of Nourishment will place women as central to its narrative, if not quite told from a female perspective. This would have been an astute move. But all too quickly the novel defaults to a male-centric focus with women taking on secondary roles as wives, mothers, love interests, punching bags and tradable commodities while the men are chiefs, tohunga and warriors. This is a pity because I suspect the novel was intended to speak to a female readership after the overtly masculine focus of For Such a Time As This. Although Hine is the main character, The Tree of Nourishment doesn’t quite fulfil its initial promise. This may reflect the reality of the lives and roles of Māori women in that era, but a novel can offer less predictability and more possibilities for its female characters.

What really lets the novel down from a critical viewpoint – and will not matter one bit to the vast majority of its readership, hungry for this type of fiction – is the writing. This includes the use of a passive rather than active narrative voice; the ‘piercing’, ‘glowering’ and ‘arch’ looks; the ‘cloak-like tresses’ of one of the love interests; and tropes like the ‘wise old sage’. The sometimes ponderous and dated feel to the storytelling as a whole feels reminiscent of stories about Māori in School Journals decades ago. The tone of the novel’s spoken voice swings wildly between gnomic utterances that feel almost like whakataukī, overwrought declarations and contemporary dialogue with the use of words like ‘heck’ and ‘wow’.

The last of these sins in fiction occur at times in the space of a mere paragraph or page. In the midst of battle, Tūhe asks his wife, ‘What are you up to, Hine?’ She tells him, ‘I can fight. You just watch me.’ A few sentences later she speaks in an entirely different tone: ‘I have willingly surrendered my body to the clutches of death, a sacrifice fuelled by the depths of my sorrow for our fallen father. Life, in its fragile existence, holds no value for me anymore.’

Again, towards the end of the novel, Uha asks his brother, ’Why are you so hung up on Kairau anyway?’ Ipumare’s reply: ‘That woman is not my destiny, this much I know. But for some reason she seems to have bewitched me, and at times it has made me doubt myself and my life’s path.’ Uha follows suit a few sentences later. ‘I would never liaise with a woman you had desired, certainly not without discussing it with you first,’ he says. ‘Nothing would ever tempt me to betray our brotherly bond.’ The scene concludes with them continuing ‘their journey along the shore, the crashing waves serving as a backdrop to their tumultuous thoughts.’

There is also too much telling rather than showing: this feels like notes that haven’t quite made it to the rewrite stage. Early on we’re told:

Hine was smaller than most of the women in her village, but what she lacked in size she made up for in confidence, wit and mental fortitude. If she had a plan in mind, she wouldn’t let anything stand in her way. When she needed the help of others to achieve her goals, she could be very persuasive. Since childhood, she’d been firmly grounded in a strong sense of self-belief, a key attribute her father had instilled in her.

These are things which the novel has a further 325 pages to show us, but anyway, Hine doesn’t seem to be persuasive at all. She loses the fight to prevent her eldest son, Ipumare, from being taken for tohunga training and later from the clutches of the village’s loose woman with whom he is enamoured; she fails to convince anyone in the village to tread warily when the Pākehā and their new God arrive with a mission to convert Māori from their heathen ways.

Information is presented like this:

Christianity was gaining influence among the tribes all along the eastern seaboard and even among their former enemies, the Aitanga Nui. Many of their traditional practices were being phased out, including the hahunga – the scraping of the bones ceremony … Once the men retrieved the bones they would be cleaned with grass then the remaining flesh would be carefully removed using sharp mussel shells. The discarded remains would be buried on the spot as a final act of cleansing and respect and the bones would be arranged carefully into separate carved boxes.

This is incredibly interesting, but it all reads far more like an extract from a non-fiction book or working notes rather than a finished novel. It would have been much more engaging to show the hahunga of Tūhe’s body in real time rather than as an abstract construct.

It hasn’t escaped my notice that Tree of Nourishment, published in both hardcover and paperback, instantly topped local bestseller lists just as For Such a Time As This did: it will probably stay in the top ten for months, completely unaffected by my opinion. But I can’t help but think how much better the novel could have been with more attention to craft, the words doing more than simply delivering the narrative.