An essay by Patrick Evans to mark his new novel The Back of His Head, which imagines that “a complete and utter prick” has won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

‘No entry to all vehicles, writer at work’ – the sign in the Jerusalem street the writer known to the West as SY Agnon lived in. One immediately thinks of Frank Sargeson and his safe little Takapuna cul-de-sac, cruelly chosen as an exit from the new harbour bridge in the later 1950s: standing in his cottage five years ago I listened to everything rattle and clink as trucks roared past just outside, where the hedge once was, and close to where Frank, inurned, still is, under a locquat tree.

It’s the dream of each of us to live on Agnon’s street and our fate to live on Sargeson’s. We yearn, all of us who read and write, to live in a society that values literature as much as we do: as a crucial cultural activity that tells us we’re civilised human beings and that life is rich, purposeful and imbued with meaning. Everything that has ever had value for us, our very sense of who we are and what the world is, goes on living in words and sentences and books, before us, during us, after us. Literature is what got us here; we’ve been shot through with it.

When Agnon went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966 he became part of another process by which the significance of imaginative writing has been marked in Western societies. In many of the citations given each laureate, the Prize of Prizes shows off its roots in Western liberal humanism and particularly in our long-held belief in human perfectibility: ‘evidence of lofty idealism’ (Sully Proudhomme, first Laureate, 1901); ‘an idealistic philosophy of life’ (Rudolf Christoph Eucken, 1908); ‘lofty idealism, vivid imagination and spiritual perception’ (Selma Lagerlof, first woman laureate, in 1909); ‘lofty idealism … and … sympathy and love of truth’ (Romain Rolland, 1915); ‘profound human sympathy’ (Anatole France, 1921); ‘both idealism and humanity’ (G.B. Shaw, 1925); ‘humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought’ (Bertrand Russell, 1950); and so on, right through to Patrick Modiano, last year’s winner: his forté, apparently, is grasping ‘ungraspable human destinies’.

All of which seems to have left New Zealand rather out of the loop. Even Australia, land of dingo, koala and Tony Abbott, has its own literary Nobel Laureate in Patrick White (‘epic and psychological narrative,’ 1973). According to no less a critic than Simon During, White’s series of heroic lunges will mean less and less to Australians as time goes on; but significant enough they seemed to me when, a student in rumpty, unlettered old Christchurch in the 1960s, I discovered them for myself in the Christchurch Public Library. Riders in the Chariot (1961), his sixth novel, had me caught in its first few pages, with their mannered, self-consciously-heightened description of Miss Hare, orphaned spinster oddball living in the remains of Xanadu, her family home, on the fringes (of course) of society and soon to be joined by other Significant Outsiders: Mordecai Himmelfarb, refugee (of course) from Hiter’s Europe, Alf Dubbo, Aboriginal waif and refugee from a pederastic (of course) clergyman, Ruth Godbold, humble (of course) washerwoman, housekeeper and reproach to us all. I turned the pages, open-mouthed: was I about to be vouchsafed the Meaning of life so early in my own?

It is Dubbo’s paintings – earthy, instinctual, primal, unfettered – ‘authentic’ – that capture the Ezekiel-lite riders of the title as they blaze across the sky, visible to this four alone as a mark of their status as an Elect up against a jolly, brainless Aussie Preterite who eventually crucify the Jew and burn his house down – in fact, one of these damned is actually called Mrs Jolley: ‘I like a fire,’ she tells her friend Mrs Flack as they watch the Jew’s timbers burn. So significant! – so full of compassion, of idealism, of the unquestioned values of T.S Eliot’s ‘thousand years of European continuity’: of Western liberal humanism, in short – values simply celebrated and reaffirmed. Of course that’s what we believe: which of us, after all, does not wish to be perfected, which of us does not want to move towards the light?

At the time I was devouring White like this all we had to match such vaulting ambition amongst our own fiction-writers here across the ditch, it seemed, was Maurice Shadbolt, a writer of considerable output and ambition but one somewhat underpowered, rather like those light three-wheeled breadvans the British used to build around a Raleigh motorcycle just after the Second World War. The title of Shadbolt’s first collection (The New Zealanders, 1959) bespoke his assumption that he was speaking for us all without even having to be asked. His novel Strangers and Journeys (1972) was probably his greatest attempt to write a work of some significance in what was seen at the time as a race to bring out The Great New Zealand Novel: but an attempt, in the end, was all it was.

He had great ideas for significant projects, someone once said: the pity was that he then went on to write them. Driven, remorselessly, by what Ian Wedde (in a scathing review) called ‘the will to write’, he had far less imaginative and expressive power than White, alas – and, in all truth, far less than Wedde himself (see, for example, Symmes Hole, 1988). Worse, Shadbolt had at times such a cloth ear that entire suits of clothing might have been made from it. Don’t mind the quality, feel the width. Writer at work.

*

Speaking of width, it’s time to ask who the Gnomes of Stockholm might have chosen had they been given a map that actually included New Zealand – who we think might have deserved to get that phone call the secretary to the Nobel committee makes a few hours before each Announcement, bringing joy to the laureate’s publisher and bank manager alike?

Well, Janet Frame, most obviously, since she was nominated a number of times, according to her Official Biographer. As I remember it the process began in the early 1980s, through PEN, and eventually, late in 2003, she was rumoured to be actually in the run-off for the award (though how did anyone know? – famously, the Prize is not shortlisted). This was a few months before she died; several times before that she’d been thought (those rumours again) to be ‘close’ and also to be appalled at the prospect of actually getting the Nobel. ‘Oh, Christ,’ was the (probably laundered) response of Doris Lessing when hovering reporters told her of her win in 2007, as she returned home from Waitrose’s, her shopping bags crammed with bargains. All that unwanted attention – all those people, too, with their vile, vile bodies, their uninteresting interests, their frightful accents and loud voices, their shocking teeth. Actual people, the writer’s perennial nightmare: resolved most memorably by Edna St. Vincent Millay, who announced that she loved humanity but hated people. Writer at work.

Frame’s vision of the world was remorselessly bleak – truth-telling to a scrupulous, unbearable extreme. Perhaps this is where her work fell short when confronted by the Gnomes of Stockholm?

I always remember the class of students who turned to anti-depressants after I made them read her work: ‘We liked Janet till we read her,’ one of them said, helplessly, when I asked what the problem was. Did they mean the scene at the end of The Adaptable Man (1965) in which a chandelier, just lit, collapses onto diners at the table below, killing or maiming them all? Or the mortality-obsessed beetle in Scented Gardens for the Blind (1964), yakking on and on about death? The mental hospitals of Faces in the Water (1961)? The death camps at the end of Intensive Care (1971), perhaps? Or the surgically-mutilated one-eyed dog in Daughter Buffalo (1972), which watches its owners bonking?

I’ve often wondered – if she did indeed come close to landing The Big One in the second half of 2003 – what the Nobel committee members, reading her, made of our ‘modest island nation’ (Bill Manhire’s wry description of us). Would a win for her have been quite what Helen Clark had in mind back then for branding our country’s kiwi fruit exports?

The other writer whom the committee might have taken very, very seriously, it has become Abundantly Clear To Me (a Bill Rowling phrase, that, by the way, since we’re talking of kiwi fruit), is Allen Curnow. This thought is not original to me, and is shared by others who have long known his worth. His long life (1911-2001) had that sense of being a work of art, with a beginning, a middle and an end (see Yeats, ‘Under Ben Bulben’). It moves from the vatic utterances of a self-appointed poet laureate in what someone has called his ‘state poems’ of the war years (‘Not in Narrow Seas,’ ‘The Unhistoric Story,’ ‘Landfall in Unknown Seas’) through a long, consistent middle period to the triumph of An Incorrigible Music (1979), centred on the magnificent sequence ‘Moro Assassinato,’ in which the poet imagines himself into the kidnap and murder of the Italian politician by the Red Brigades, which he sees as a rhythmic echo of the Pazzi conspiracy in the same place 500 years before.

There’s a resignation to the world in the poetry of this sequence, an ablation of ego and that ‘will-to-write’ that eventually yields the serene, clear-headed poems of Curnow’s final collection, The Bells of Saint Babel’s (2001), which seem to have been cleansed to utter purity: so brief, so simple: in the best sense, his senilia. He also fufilled – more than fulfilled – the role of Magus that seems to be implicit to the award of the Nobel: this more by the example of his poetry than by his many pronouncements (particularly earlier in his career) about How Poetry Should Be Written.

He became someone whose voice you couldn’t get out of your ear: either you were doing it his way, or you were trying as hard as possible not to do it his way. Reading him, we are always aware of what he called his ‘second unlicked self,’ his country. He was not ‘just a poet’.

Which of our more recent writers might we think of as worthy of that phone call from Stockholm at some stage of their lives, in the parallel universe in which New Zealand is as significant to the world as we collectively imagine it to be? My candidate (and others’, too, by the way; I’m indebted to my colleague Paul Millar in my thinking here) is Patricia Grace.

*

Someone once told me of sitting in a room full of elderly Maori on a marae as Patricia read some of her earlier stories to them. They purred with self-recognition, I was told, and at some points laughed themselves silly, frequently in places a Pakeha mightn’t expect: and suddenly the English she was writing started to sound to me less like ‘English’ – denoting a language of a dominant discourse – and more like ‘english’, uncapitalised, the many versions of the language spoken beyond the sort of streets city councils might block off to protect a Writer at Work.

You might say that where other Maori were writing ‘out,’ for a Pakeha audience first and a Maori audience second (if at all, in some cases), Grace has been writing ‘in’, and, crucially, addressing the conundrum of how to create a literature about dominated lives from within her country’s dominant discourse. Her novels imagine Maori experiences into words – a mixed marriage in Mutuwhenua (1978), women singing their men off to war in Cousins (1992), the battle at Monte Cassino in Tu (2004), more – but it is in her many unassuming short stories that I think her real significance lies, not least in rendering some of the most convincing dialogue ever written by a New Zealander. In effect, she has invented a language, one accessible both to Maori and to Pakeha readers across the world.

Compare this with the language Patrick White invented to write in – vatic, hieratic, deeply rooted in the European imaginary, a priestlike anti-vernacular devised largely for other priests – Writer at Work – and as resistant to the reader, in its own way, as Janet Frame’s. Why, then, did people unquestioningly nominate Frame for the Nobel Prize – she who described herself, according to Michael King, as ‘New Zealand’s greatest unread writer’ – and not Patricia Grace?

Which of them has been communicating, over the years, beyond the closed street, and isn’t that what we think writers should be doing? Or is there something else I’m missing here, and, if so, would someone please say what it is?

*

Lacking a local Nobel Laureate in Literature to talk about, I’ve gone ahead and invented one, in my new novel The Back of His Head (VUP, October 2015). This is Raymond Thomas Lawrence (1933-2007), author of Miss Furie’s Treasure Hunt (his first work, a perversion of the Hansel & Gretel myth, in which the children get eaten by whatever it is the witch turns into), Flatland (based on Lawrence’s experiences in the Algerian War of of Independence), The Outer Circle Transport Service (a Kiwi comes of age in Birmingham), Bisque (a young woman travels to Ibiza), and, most famously, Kerr, a version of his own solo trip across the Pacific in a home-made yacht and the novel that is widely agreed to be his finest work. He has ten novels in all and four collections of short stories; two further volumes were published posthumously by his estate.

Lawrence is of that second generation of New Zealand cultural nationalists Janet Frame and James K. Baxter – Shadbolt, too – were born into, the first tranche of our writers to have a sense of inheriting a significant local tradition at the end of the Second World War. Like many of that group he is insecure, sometimes rather self-conscious; at other times, though, he is fecklessly over-self-confident, stumping about where angels fear to tread.

Like some (though not all) of that second New Zealand generation he is, occasionally, a complete and utter prick, even (sometimes) sado-masochistic as well: he claims (apart from anything else) to have tortured and killed a young Berber in the Algerian desert and quite possibly done worse to him in his ongoing, Foucauldian quest for extreme experience.

After all, behind every successful novel, Lawrence claims – borrowing from Robbe-Grillet – lies a crime, something actual and unforgivable that somehow gives the work of art a kind of authenticity, of arising out of something Real (his mistress, who paints the painting of him that gives the novel its title, uses her own bodily excrements in the ‘hectic, potty’ later stages of her life when she edges into dementia and tries, tries, tries to cross that final barrier between Art and Life).

Over the years, a number of writers are known to have been ‘difficult’: White, notoriously, took his frustrations out on his life-partner, Manoly Lascaris; Malcolm Lowry was impossible when drunk and had to be dressed by his wife each morning-after-the-night-before (socks baffled him whether he was sober or drunk); Dickens has recently been revealed as a wife-beater (the composer William Walton, too); Hans Fallada shot a friend, Lawrence Durrell is said to have threatened his wife with a revolver; William Burroughs actually shot his, Louis Althusser strangled his, and so on: a friend of mine once watched one of our more famous writers belabouring his partner about the head with his hand luggage after they’d missed a flight at an airport. Anything to get through that writer’s block, I suppose.

It’s hard, though, to think of any of these as quite of the order of awfulness I’ve given my invented Dead White Male Author: he’s charming, certainly, but in the same way that Albert Speer reported Hitler to be charming. Most of the time he is contemptuous even of the welfare of the nephew he has adopted as his son, who narrates much of the novel and is the chief recipient of his uncle’s torments.

At one point Lawrence tries to write on the nephew’s adolescent neck with the tip of a knife: ‘You’ll never forget me,’ he promises the struggling, snivelling boy – who, in return, worships him – inevitably; Proust talks about this sort of thing – and is forever broken by him, something evident in the spinal scoliosis he develops as he gets older and which increasingly twists him about and bends him over even as he continues to defend the late writer as a genius and a great man. In a sad, provincial echo of Henry James he insists on calling his uncle ‘the Master’.

Why write all this, why bother with a man like this? – well, evviva il coltellino, as Italian audiences used to call out, apparently, whenever the famous castrati hit the high notes three hundred years ago – ‘Long live the little knife,’ in other words, the one that brought this magic about – aware as they were of the same irony in great artistic achievement that obsesses the Master – ‘the killing in it,’ as his nephew says. Art, in this novel, doesn’t come from Above; it comes from the gutters, the sewers, from the everyday places we prefer not to think of as we seek, desperately, to move towards the light. This is a writer who doesn’t need to be walled off from the noisy street: the noisy street needs to be walled off from him, so eager is he to remind us of the primeval ooze from which we all emerged.

How, then, did Raymond Thomas Lawrence become papabile, so to speak? – by putting all that dirty stuff behind him (‘maturing,’ it’s sometimes called) and writing a self-censoring suite of fictions in his middle years in which he does, indeed, and despite himself, turn the reader toward the light. ‘An extraordinary act of empathy,’ is one reviewer’s judgment of his turning-point novel, the Birmingham one, and the reviews get better and better as further novels appear. The Master himself becomes more and more cynical: ‘Drop in Dante and two fucking Shakespeare quotes and suddenly it’s great art,’ he tells his narrating nephew. ‘Suddenly they forget all the buggery and bestiality and cannibalism.’ Eventually, at some point in his journey the raft-tripping Kerr of Kerr realizes that Everything Is Connected – something like that – Australian readers should be thinking of Voss here, English readers of Pincher Martin, and everyone else of The Old Man and the Sea. As soon as Lawrence offers this glimpse into the Meaning of Life and the Perfectibility of the Imperfect, the prizes start to roll in.

Finally, for the Master, the call to Stockholm. ‘We knocked the bastard off,’ he informs his waiting friends after he puts the phone down (displacing, in that figment called the real world, poor Seamus Heaney, falsely rumoured actually to have received the same phone call in 1995, the year in question). ‘I’ve made it,’ Lawrence mutters to the narrating Peter as the celebrations run wild. ‘Now watch what I do. I’m going to fuck it all up.’ He goes back to his old ways, writing a late novel so appalling and unrelenting – at last he tells us what he actually did to the boy in the desert – so unliterary, so uncalled for – that readers and reviewers recoil alike and his reputation is in tatters (peeing on the stage during the opening of the creative writing school that bears his name doesn’t help, of course). Not long afterwards, he blows it up – the school, that is – in an act of penitence for having betrayed his earliest principles, for having been caught up and seduced by the prize-awarding system that dominates global publishing today: for descending to the writing of mere Literature, with all its feckless Hope and Meaning. Just as Major Kong goes down with the bomb at the end of Doctor Strangelove, the Master goes up with his at the end of The Back of His Head.

*

To me as its mere author, The Back of His Head reads like a parable of reading, a book that asks just how much and how little someone else’s writing can be expected to yield the reader. Can art ever go ‘beyond itself,’ or is it doomed always to be like the painting of the back of Raymond Lawrence’s head that names the novel, done by a woman who has spent her life trying to work out what makes him tick but has finally given up and gone round the back, so to speak?

I recall Billy Apple’s imperishable work ‘Used Bathroom Tissue After a Bowel Movement’, which utterly scandalised right-thinking Christchurch when exhibited there fifty years ago: it consisted of exactly what it says on the tin, no painting or drawing involved, just that most lumpen of realities itself: unredeemed, unredeemable poo, offset by a bonbon of twisted toilet paper artfully arranged. Offered in what just has to be called a po-faced manner, this work of art (well, the mounting was nice) represented the logical end-point of realism: ‘Is this what you meant, then?’ is the question it asks. But if the answer is ‘No,’ then we have to accept that art, from that point, progressively backs off and starts telling lies. It’s all that’s left for it to do.

The inevitable corollary, then: can art change anything (our greatest dream), can it make things happen out there in the world? Not according to Raymond Thomas Lawrence. For him, it has no real social function, after all, a belief that cuts against much that we assume prizes recognize and much that is implicit in the humanist’s belief in our perfectibility. ‘For his holding before our collective gaze the wretched of the earth,’ says his Nobel citation: for reminding us that the poor are always with us, I suppose, a fact that hasn’t actually changed since Matthew’s gospel told us of it early in the first millennium.

Actual Nobel citations given over the years, as we’ve seen, are no less idealistic, but are they anything more than expressions of hope that the rain might one day end and our washing be put out at last to dry? And if they’re not anything more than this, and if no other such prize is for anything better, why are these prizes still handed out? What are they rewarding; and what is it that they’re writing, those writers in their sealed-off streets real or figurative, if not Wilde’s ‘ugly things for the poor’ – things to be read by other residents in the same street to make them feel better about where they live?

‘No entry to all vehicles, writer at work.’

The Back of his Head by Patrick Evans (Victoria University Press, $30) is available at Unity Books.

The Spinoff’s editor, Duncan Greive, co-authored Dan Carter: My Story with the All Blacks’ first five. Here he shares his memories of the tumultuous year the pair spent working on the book.

The lowest I ever heard him was late in February. We spoke via Skype, as we often did through that portion of the year, he at home in Christchurch, me in Auckland. It was after his first Super Rugby game of the year, during which he had injured his right leg – the same one he’d broken just six months earlier. Even after healing, the break had lingered on, like a bad guest hanging around at the end of a party, as nerve issues which ran through the ITM Cup and to the edge of the Northern Hemisphere tour.

Now here he was again, at the other end of summer. Doing that terrible dance again: injury; rehab; hoping for the best. And all the while, the clock ticked away on his final year as a Crusader, as an All Black. And off in the distance, getting both closer and further away, the promise of one last World Cup.

It’s so easy to forget now, as the country basks in the aftermath of that game, but for much of the first half of this year his making the squad felt distinctly unlikely. He was playing – when he was playing – out of position at 12, portrayed as yesterday’s man next to the dynamism of Barrett and Cruden. So the most likely conclusion for the book we were writing together felt like the special agony of watching another man wearing 10 play out his dreams.

The mood was different when we began work on the project. We met in the backroom of a café toward the top of Mount Eden road, on the fringe of Auckland’s city centre. He and his agent, Dean Hegan, sat in a semi-private room, waiting to meet me. It was a feeling out process for everyone involved: Dean wanted to see what kind of a joker I was; I to see what kind of book they had in mind.

What Dan wanted surprised me. He was curious about the kind of sports books I thought would function as a model for his. I mentioned the two bios I’d read most recently: Agassi’s Open – in which he discusses the advantages of crystal meth as a housekeeping aid; and Mike Tyson’s Undisputed Truth – which is peopled by oligarchs and gangsters and untold depravity and might be the craziest autobiography I’ve ever read.

He’d read both, a good sign, and didn’t flinch at all, a better one. Not that his past contains those kind of revelations – or if it does, I never became privy to them – but I thought it interesting and instructive that he wanted to reveal, in as much detail as he was capable, the genuine realities of life as one of the two most scrutinised sportspeople in the country over this past decade.

We talked on for a couple of hours. About process, expectations, style. How much he’d reveal, how much he’d keep back.

By the end, it felt like we had the beginnings of an understanding, and even though the deal – between my publishers Upstart, and his agents at Essentially – wouldn’t be signed for a couple of months, we started working together from that point on.

This was early spring of 2014 – after the leg injury, before the nerve issues, a period of relative calm. A few weeks later he flew out to the US, for a sold-out game at Soldier Field in Chicago – an NFL stadium full of rugby fans. The first game tinged with history in a year strewn with them. The leg seemed like it had come right. He played a strong second half against a weak team, and we relaxed, just a little.

I spoke with him a couple of times as the tour went on, in London and Wales. He was mixed up. After a couple of years pitted with injuries, he was very happy to be close to fully fit and to be playing. But it was balanced with a frustration at the handful of games remaining, the scant opportunities to actually get on the field.

The publishing contract was signed some time in late November. Pre-Christmas is normally the All Blacks’ holiday, a chance to let bodies assaulted for 10 solid months heal as best they can ahead of the coming campaign. They often come back a little fat off of the good life, like the rest of us, and work it off through January.

Dan was not about that. He was negotiating a much bigger contract than the book deal – one to play in France when his NZRU contract ended. The signal was both loud and entirely unnecessary: the end of his New Zealand rugby career was coming.

A keen trainer since primary school, this summer’s conditioning had a distinct edge. It was also one of the few long windows he’d have to work on the book. So I borrowed my Mum’s car and pointed it toward Taupo, where his wife Honor’s mother has a bach.

It was Saturday, December 13, the roads clear and parched. I checked into the homely Quality Inn on the lake’s edge, and, a couple of hour’s later, drove out to meet him. We sat on the edge of a nearby park, drank a couple of beers and talked for three hours. Started at the start, talking about Southbridge, his hometown. About Neville and Bev, his parents. About his teenage years, down the road in Leeston, and maybe about his first, halting expeditions into the big wide world of Hornby.

I forget where the interview ended. High school, maybe? But I remember how he was. Attentive, earnest, trying as hard as he could to search his mind for memories which might get me back to the Canterbury Plains of his youth. I’d ask him a question, and he’d stare into the distance for a while. Then he’d break and say, very apologetically, “I can’t remember”. His memory isn’t the greatest. But he was very determined. Sometimes a particular path would trigger another recollection, and he’d talk happily about a late night ritual, or weird incident on stage at school.

*

The following morning I watched him train. Another brilliant, clear day. We met at Owen Delany Park, on the outskirts of town, a place I’d heard Phil Stevens call domestic cricket from countless times, but never visited. It was deserted, except for Dan. He ran through a series of drills designed by All Blacks’ training staff, each one utterly alien to the lame clichés of rugby training in my dumb head. I thought it was weights and tackle bags and maybe something to do with that wooden scrum machine thing.

Nope. Dan was quick stepping through batons, sprinting like hell for ten metres, stepping hard off either foot. Even towing some heavy grass sled, which looked a real serious pain in the butt.

It was a graft, a grind, a series of vaguely joyless actions, each one designed to make him fitter and suppler and also, slowly and ever-so-slightly, less susceptible to injury. It was the other side of sports, the kind fought at the margins which often separates winning from losing. The one I thought I was fascinated by, but found mostly boring in the flesh.

And all I was doing was watching! He had to actually complete these weird, tight little exercises. Over and over, hour after hour, day after day, week after week. And lately, his reward for all this discipline and exertion – aside from the money – had only been more injuries. For years.

I sat and watched and marveled at the guy. How he’d run into this wall, over and over again. Leaving him physically beaten and mentally shattered. And each morning, got up and done it again. Was he a maniac or a shaman? I wanted to know. This was the core of the book, for me – finding the human being nestled deep inside the superhuman athlete.

I wanted to know that, but I also wanted some company. Like I said – training is something sportswriters think we want to watch, but is in fact repetitive, monotonous work. Eventually I was saved by Honor and his son Marco, who came up from a nearby playground. Marco joined in the training, leaping on the sled, racing his Dad through the windsprints and all that. I don’t think it’s spoiling the future to point out that he will inevitably be an All Black.

Later still we were joined by some extended family, who did a friendly grown up version of what Marco was doing: watched and yelled encouragement and eventually tried to kick some goals. Again, not a spoiler to say that Dan’s in-laws won’t be troubling the All Blacks’ selectors any time soon.

*

This pattern repeated itself for another couple of days: watch training in the morning, drink a couple of beers – annoyingly, only a couple – and talk in the afternoon. It was a nice rhythm for me, and what passed for a holiday for him. We had one expedition to town, where he was essentially mobbed, which is why he can’t really go to town. Afterwards I drove back to Auckland, thinking that this guy was a Kiwi legend and surely in the shape of his life, and definitely going to put this coming season on blast.

I next saw him briefly, ringing the bell at the NZX, where a company he had invested in years earlier was listing. Then again, a couple of weeks into the new year, before dawn on the waterfront. He was filming a commercial for Rexona, an All Blacks sponsor, which involved walking along the balcony of the Viaduct Events Centre over and over and over. Each time looking into the sunrise, before putting on his headphones. The weird life of a modern professional athlete.

In late January I flew down to Christchurch. He was living in between places. All of the rugby guys do, a bit – hotels, airports, road life. Dan much more than most: his life, pregnant wife and kid in Auckland; his job in Canterbury.

The Clearwater Resort was another place I’d only heard about on RadioSport, a golf course and hotel which occasionally hosted tournaments of some scale. I caught a cab out there early one morning, and sat in a largely empty restaurant, waiting for my room to tick over, amid sculpted earth and pristine waterways.

We were miles from anywhere – a taxi to the shops and back cost over $50 – but the sleepy isolation on the outskirts of this city suited him. The first night he cooked us dinner: fillets of steak, which I’d just started eating after 21 years a vegetarian; piles of vegetables, because he’d assumed I still was one.

We ate on his deck overlooking the lake, while the neighbours pretended not to stare and he didn’t notice. We talked for hours about his late teens and early twenties, when he was a kid trying to figure out how to be a man, a country boy acclimatising to the city; all the while gradually coming to terms with the learned and born physical genius he possessed.

The following morning I watched him train with the Crusaders for the first time. It was much more interesting than the solo stuff. A drone hovered overhead, which seemed very modern, and the backs and forwards ran through a more complex series of drills.

A small and slightly motley crew of Cantabs looked on: kids, old folks, some slightly fringey people. They didn’t speak, mostly; just sat on benches, nodding and sometimes grunting.

Afterwards I had lunch with Aaron Mauger, an All Black and all-round New Zealand hero for talking to Express on LGBT issues a full decade ago. He’s a close friend of Dan’s, but now a coach at the Crusaders, a situation which has caused a small distance to open up between the two men. Mauger talked about Dan in glowing terms, this painfully shy kid who snuck into the Canterbury dressing room over a dozen years ago. About how he wanted to ‘leave the jersey in a better state when I left,’ a terrible cliché of which my journalistic training should leave me deeply cynical. But you hang around Canterbury players of a certain generation and buy every single piece of it.

The next day: rinse and repeat. Only this time I really struggled to pay attention to training and had lunch with Richie McCaw.

Richie McCaw! The captain, the legend, idolised by everyone from everyman to the Prime Minister. Richie! Somehow, being down there, amongst a team that didn’t seem to care, and a sleepy corner of town that had trained itself to ignore these guys, I was able to be hold it together.

We went to the same place the players go for everything. The only café anywhere near the training ground: a little converted villa which probably owes between some and all of its turnover to the Canterbury rugby mafia.

I ordered I don’t remember; Richie ordered the biggest chicken salad ever made. It came in a vessel I would describe as  in the sink/basin size range. For a full hour he ate methodically, refueling the greatest engine in New Zealand history. In between times he talked about Dan Carter.

He spoke at a time when Dan had quietly become almost a peripheral member of the All Blacks, and by no means certain of selection. He laboured over his words a little, thinking hard before answering, being very deliberate about what he said and delving deep into the complete archive of all Crusaders’ and All Blacks’ games he has stored in his mind to refine particular moments or attributes.

Mainly McCaw spoke emphatically about the importance of Dan to the side; with a force that was both keenly felt and also implied that the man he was speaking about had himself perhaps forgotten how much he meant to the team.

By the end I was left with the impression that these stoic Cantabs found it easier to discuss their feelings for one another through an intermediary – even a tourist journalist – than face-to-face. Much of this is facilitated by one man, who we visited later that day. Gilbert Enoka, real estate supremo and ‘mental skills coach’, a white man with a mystical African-reading name who might well be the single person most referenced by Dan in the book.

His home was lovely but unprepossessing; a bungalow with a small pool in a flat section of suburban Christchurch. We retired to a study studded with memoribilia and talked for a couple of hours about everything but Dan. About the All Blacks, and how they had changed, quite radically, during the 13 year span Dan had played for them. Particularly about certain psychological processes some of which distracted you from your task on the one hand, while others facilitated success on the other. He was definitely a true guru, and I felt a clarity as we walked from his house later that evening.

On the final day we toured his Christchurch. Dan drove a new black Falcon, I sat alongside him, watching, asking, recording. We cruised past his first, horrid flat. His second, slightly better flat. His third, quite nice flat. The first house he ever bought, metres away from the red zone, in an area still shook up.

His high school, his rugby club, the shop he invested in. The shuttered desolation of post-quake Lancaster Park. He hung on the gates, looking in for the first time since the shaking stopped, and I felt both privileged to watch him roll through his memories, and like an intruder on a private moment.

We journeyed on to the hastily assembled new ground of Rugby League Park at Addington. The whole time we sometimes talked and often didn’t about the earthquake scars which still criss-cross the city. He was buoyant throughout, reliving his youth, before the Crusaders and All Blacks and billboards and fame, remembering what was and never would be again.

Then we drove out to Southbridge, over flat, featureless plains. We stopped at Leeston: the big smoke for him at one time. We walked through his old school for the first time since he left it, and a startled teacher out of term time walked us through the buildings which shaped him and so many more both just like and entirely different to him.

Then we went on to Southbridge. Neville, tools deep in a rebuild of the local fire station. A café selling flat whites, which are now the only coffee. The shuttered dairies, the pool, the pub. The rugby club with its priceless memoribilia – a small museum. Then a slow drive down the road his father was born on and will likely die on. The already mythic section alongside his childhood home, where the goalposts a proud father built his son still stand.

Then back, swiftly, to the airport and home.

*

A month later and the bright, excited man was out of the nostalgic pool I’d encouraged him to wade into and into a pit of worry. His right leg had again let him down. Over the coming months he’d keep playing second five, for no good reason I could tell, and struggle with both ghosts in his limbs and frustration with his form.

All throughout he’d sometimes meet with Steve Hansen, and more often with Wayne Smith. They’d talk about what he might do, encourage a man who for much of that time felt like he was engaged in a long and not very funny act of supreme futility. Chasing a dream which increasingly few fans and far fewer sportswriters thought was possible.

I felt sad for him. Really sad. My own feelings had become coupled to his own. Some part of it was related to my financial incentive, surely: I stood to do better if the book sold well, which it was far more likely to do should he be fit and playing at his peak.

But I think I was beginning to just want it for him. I really liked the guy. He was really different to the people I spent time with. It took some getting used to. I grew up in inner cities – London until 10; Auckland since. Their citizens, either born or migrated, mostly have a particular kind of character. They’re pretty full-on. Dan has that Canterbury politeness, and a natural reticence. Over months I never recall hearing him angry, though there were many occasions when he had every right to be. At his worst he’d be a little exasperated. At his worst.

*

Time wore on. He and Honor had a second son, Fox. The season seemed headed to hell, his body bad, his form worse. The year, and with it his career, in a deathly spasm. It weighed on him. Yet he could barely talk about it in public; that’s not what All Blacks do.

Despite a fine late run which he played a big role in, the Crusaders missed the playoffs for the first time in forever. A moment bringing with it sadness – at the end of his time with that team happening on a bum note – but also relief, at an unplanned break and time with his newly expanded family.

He joined the All Blacks early, and played that pioneering game in Samoa, performing quite well. Then he did it again, and again. All year columnists wrote over and over about his spark having gone. Yet simply avoiding reading them wasn’t escape; his friends, well-meaning but misguided, texted him to ‘ignore the media’. So he felt the burden anyway.

Jerry Collins died suddenly, violently, tragically. It affected him deeply. Yet when we spoke it was hilarious – stories, as Morrrissey once said of Nick Kent, to uncurl the hair in your afro. Suddenly the Rugby Championship was over. He had not only survived, he had thrived. Months earlier, Aaron Cruden had suffered an awful injury, and both Colin Slade and Beauden Barrett setbacks of their own. Suddenly that creaky old man clinging to his career was essentially all that was left in the cupboard. Talking to Dan, you sensed the weird relief that brought. And the challenge: now it was, almost entirely, on him.

We last spoke in New Zealand via Skype, when he ducked away from a team function at that Novotel next to Auckland Airport. He was boiling and bubbling and on his way to a tournament which truly, truly seemed an outlandish unlikelihood for him a few short months earlier.

And you know what happened next. I watched in those brilliant early mornings, with some combination of my wife and three girls, and a few stray friends and family, as he grew into the most dominant force of the tournament. Culminating in that still-unfathomable pair of kicks. Which transformed both him and this book project from a hard luck story into a fairytale.

During the final I watched him get hit, late enough for a penalty but too early for a card, by Sekope Kepu. All the air went out of me and those milliseconds felt like minutes. He first moved, then got to his feet. I felt the whole country exhale, and soon enough he had the game on a string.

It doesn’t always happen in sport. It doesn’t even happen often. But it did on that day. I walked around, lighter than air, imagining how he might be feeling. I played basketball fueled by nervous energy. Got home, showered, and the phone rang. He was calling to describe the last chapter. The first in Dan Carter: My Story. A book we wrote, truly together, and which I hope goes some way to capturing both a very hard year and one of the most extraordinary endings in New Zealand sports.

Dan Carter: My Story is available nationwide for $49.99, but also at Unity Books, who sponsor The Spinoff’s book section – so if you live in the central city of Auckland or Wellington, get it from them.

The Spinoff’s sports section is supported by World Golf Pass and Premier League Pass – two superb products we heartily recommend.