Brief notes: airplane reading, non-uplifting edition

You know how airplane reading is supposed to be light and fluffy? That memo appears not to have reached me.

Caryl Ferey, Utu, trans. Howard Curtis (2004; English, 2011).  Set in contemporary New Zealand, this novel practically swoons with postcolonial nausea--"all these people made him want to vomit" (342)--brought on by the pakehas (which the novel uses to refer solely to Europeans).  The anti-hero, who is definitely not Byronic, is Paul Osborne, an ex-cop boiled hard by what ought to be a lethal combination of alcohol and drugs; he has been unretired after the suicide of his sole friend, Jim Fitzgerald, whose investigation of a serial killer had gone badly awry.  In theory, Osborne has been brought back because of his expertise in Maori culture; in practice...well, in practice, that's not it.   Vile-tempered, vicious, and frequently violent, Osborne spends the entire novel brutalizing witnesses (male and female) in the course of investigating what turns out to be a massive plot involving virtually all of the local government and business movers-and-shakers, who are appropriating and destroying Maori ancestral lands in the name of capitalism.  Unfortunately for the plotters, there's also a Maori counter-plot at work, a revival of a nineteenth-century quasi-Christian cult that seeks to eliminate the pakehas and reclaim the land.  In case you're wondering, this all ends really badly. 

The novel represents New Zealand high society as a neo-Gothic den of iniquity, filled with depraved teenagers, bacchanalian parties, heartless money-grubbers...the works.  The middle- and working-class pakehas, though, are hardly an improvement, riddled with racism and alienated from their frequently criminal children.  Osborne is not an avenging angel from outside this culture--instead, he is exactly the lawman one would expect it to produce.  Under the circumstances, the calls for Maori "assimilation" that Osborne encounters in the media are, to say the least, bleakly ironic: the pakehas, Osborne included, appear to be governed by the world's strongest death drive, and the few assimilated Maori we meet (Timu, Glenn, Ann) are themselves corrupt, etiolated, or (in Ann's case) psychologically riven.  Similarly, the cult revival harks back not to Maori culture pre-colonization, but to an explicitly colonial moment, in which leaders sought to deploy Biblical rhetoric (i.e., learned via evangelization by the missionaries) against their persecutors; there appears to be no way back from European influence.  The novel is shot through with such illusionary fantasies of purification and liberation, most notably Osborne's lifelong obsession with Hana, a half-Maori girl, then woman, whom he never really knows or understands (an obsession that ultimately comes across as stalkerish rather than romantic); Hana's own quest for vengeance (utu) for her grandmother's death; and young Amelia's passion for Osborne, which is, to say the least, not a good idea.  All of these self-absorbed yearnings frequently rest on a bed of miscommunication, most explicitly in Osborne's ongoing misreadings of Hana's motives.   It's no wonder that Ferey is ready to go full-broke apocalyptic in the end.

William Boyd, An Ice-Cream War (1999).  Like so much fiction about WWI, An Ice-Cream War plays out the war's events as bitter black comedy.  This is WWI in "everyone is clueless" mode.  Everybody misunderstands or simply fails to communicate with everybody else, a problem haunting all of the would-be romances and marriages as well as the actual war (officers are repeatedly sent to the wrong place, given the wrong instructions, or offered the wrong advice).  Everything is a disappointment, from the remarkably optimistic Walter Smith's farming schemes to young Felix Cobb's experiences at attending Oxford; even sex has a habit of going awry (encounters with prostitutes that wind up with the men humiliated, Gabriel Cobb's difficulties in sleeping with his wife Charis, the ultimately tragic outcome of Felix's affair).  And every single "plot" fails, whether it be Walter's and Felix's attempts to avenge themselves on Von Bishop or Felix's belated quest-romance.  Major characters die abruptly and often offstage; one simply disappears.  Unlike Pat Barker's WWI trilogy, An Ice-Cream War does not so much arrive at a philosophical position on warfare as represent two generations utterly adrift in a sea of meaninglessness.  There might be something to learn, but these characters are not really capable of learning it.