This film of a Maori chieftain’s search for a successor who will keep the rural community’s culture alive is also an appraisal of the culture itself and the values it represents. The community is dying as its young people leave for the city and do not return, except briefly as visitors, and the chief, Koro has no successor. His own firstborn son, Porourangi, who would normally have succeeded him, has left the community after his wife died giving birth to twins–a son who died, and a daughter who lived. Naming the surviving daughter Paikea, after the whale rider who formed the culture a thousand years ago, Porourangi abandons her to the care of her grandmother. This is Paikea’s story as she learns of her heritage.
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Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India will expand and alter your view of India, Pakistan, and the British Raj. Using a child-narrator, a literary device over-employed and often unsuccessful, this author has found the perfect vehicle for conveying the heart-breaking story of the Partition of India in l947, without being coy and without descending into bathos. Lenny, as the child of a Parsee family, roams freely through the Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, and Parsee society of her household and neighborhood in Lahore. Because she is lame and receiving private schooling, she is at home when momentous events and important conversations occur, and because she is very young and has no ethnic biases, she observes the disintegration of her society with the puzzlement of an outsider.
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Eight-year-old Jessamy Harrison, the daughter of a Nigerian mother and a British father, has a particularly difficult time deciding who she is, and she seems to fit in nowhere. Significant emotional problems leave her unable to deal with the outside world, and she can spend five or more hours hiding in the family’s linen closet, attempting to find some sort of “fragile peace” in the tumult which she sees as her life. Given to uncontrollable screaming fits, both at home and at school, she also falls ill, sometimes with high fevers, has panic attacks, and often talks to herself. A psychological horror story, the novel provides plenty of intense scenes, somewhat reminiscent of Thomas Tryon’s The Other, and the battle for Jess’s soul is dramatic and action-packed. The conclusion feels somewhat artificial, since it relies on accident and is not the inevitable outgrowth of the actions of a rounded character, but Oyeyemi has created a page-turner that dares to be different.
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Living in the remote community of Munda on New Georgia Island without the “necessities of life,” provides author Will Randall with an opportunity to experience a delayed coming of age, a process he documents in this good-humored tale, filled with delightful characters and observations about life in a community in which there is little change. Ingenuous and unambitious, he quickly leaves behind his preconceived notions of what he should be doing with his life, and falls into the lullaby rhythms of life in the tropics, where “It was quite acceptable,” he discovered, “to do nothing but simply enjoy the natural beauty of the world about [him] and the genuine, nonjudgmental friendship of the sweet-tempered villagers.” His primary worry, upon first being ensconced in his small cottage, is whether one of the island’s six varieties of rats will fall on his head while he is sleeping. He soon becomes part of the life there, conveying something of the spirit of the island in this mellow, often wry, account of his search for a way to help the village.
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A finalist in 1994 for both the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award, Paradise hides major themes and ideas within the seemingly simple story of Yusuf, a twelve-year-old boy in rural East Africa whose father sells him to a trader to settle a debt. East Africa is in turmoil–on the verge of World War I and the fighting which eventually develops between the Germans in Tanzania and the British in Kenya. Cities are growing, populations are moving, merchants are trading and selling, and colonialists from many countries are vying for influence. A novel which begins as a beautifully realized coming-of-age story develops into a story of high adventure, social and political realism, and eventually love.
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