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A book cover showing a stylised illustration of a fish, all done in blues on cream. Background design using the blues.
(Image: Supplied; Design: Archi Banal)

BooksMarch 20, 2022

Vincent O’Sullivan reviews the strange and slippery new novel by Lloyd Jones

A book cover showing a stylised illustration of a fish, all done in blues on cream. Background design using the blues.
(Image: Supplied; Design: Archi Banal)

Near the start of the Booker-shortlisted writer’s latest novel, a boy visits a beach caravan where his 19-year-old sister has given birth to a reeking, repulsive baby: the Fish. This is its story. But what does it mean? 

“Fable” isn’t a word that immediately catches a contemporary reader, although it was one widely used of Lloyd Jones last novel, The Cage. It’s a word that tells us what we are reading is about something as well as the story it tells – a moral point of view, echoings that may surprise, that what seems like a fact may be something more expansive. Should someone ask what it is “about”, we might offer a precis of events, but that would be a meagre answer, and not do justice to it. With a writer as skilled as Jones, we need to add that his language often extends to so much more than he describes; that, like good poetry, it demands we attend to what it suggests, what hovers there, seemingly just out of reach. It can be like hearing a new piece of music we’re not at first sure about. Of course we’re not. Because we’ve not heard anything quite like it before. It’s asking us to go beyond cosy expectations. As a reader, there’s an excitement with that, even if the puzzle remains.

Early in The Fish, we know the story is set in New Zealand suburbia, and a clue tells us precisely when. The movie Dr Zhivago is currently showing in the cinemas, so this is the summer of 1966. The characters live in Wellington, close to the sea. It is a decade we tend to look back on with a mild condescension. 

This was Kiwi life at its most “ordinary”. This was mum and dad in an ordinary house, there was a craving for security, there were few tentative dabs at sophistication. This is what a generation after the War wanted, after all – just don’t bother us with anything that upsets. Apple carts are very difficult things to come by, so don’t risk tipping them. Time in the novels zig-zags round a bit, but the kind of lives it touches on stay very much in that period. What can’t be avoided, is when inevitably sex raises an ugly head. (As the Mazengarb Report 10 years before had assured us it would.)

As far as the events of the story go, sex is covert, nasty, lawless, the one thing sure to mess up lives. It would be easy to take one reading of the story, which I’m putting aside, that could turn it to a yet darker tale of incest. I could not believe the publisher’s blurb of The Fish that found it a tender family story. One sister becomes “a ship girl”, the other, with more smarts, finds success overseas in “professional girl friending”. And of course it is from a mangled sex life that we get to the title of the book, and the child – Shakespeare offered a handy line as it came to mind  – “sent into the world before my time, scarce half made up”. How it survives, how it is regarded, how it swims into and out of events, carries the fable. And note, its pronouns are always “it” and “its”. 

By now anything like run-of-the-trade realism is left well behind. We never know for certain what the Fish thinks, what it looks like, any more than we know what, in the fable it swims in, quite what it means. All we are certain of is that it is central to whatever happens to the family, as the story variously drenches us in compassion, puzzlement, confusion, loss. There are distant texts drifting about in the current we’re caught up in. Moby Dick glides by. So does Robinson Crusoe. You’re unlikely not to think of Kafka’s famous changeling. More than once, the Fish’s siblings are referred to as crabs, its grandmother as a cockroach. As much as Ahab, we’re on a quest we don’t fully comprehend, fingering a code that obsesses but eludes us. The quest takes us through some compelling incidents, spare but memorable imagery, and the best writing about the Wahine storm I have read.

I expect many of us remember the excitement, and the shock, when as children we first saw the image or a model of an embryo. Just how it looked anything but human, at the same time as it unmistakably was. A tadpole may have been the closest we had come to that enormous head, those tapering limbs. There may have been that appalled fascination, to learn that on the way to being ourselves we had passed though being other things as well. Most of all, how like fish we had to be on the voyage out. I remember a curious moment of adult discomfort, as a doctor once felt my neck, and remarked on where my gills would have been.

So the Fish is what we were then, what we have absorbed into ourselves? No problem with that. But what if this is also what we still are? Alien, other to ourselves. Jones always has seemed to me a writer inescapably compassionate. “Nothing that is human is alien to me,” as the Latin tag goes. Is the Fish us, when we don’t want it to be? At our weakest, our most unattractive? Perhaps. Jones is masterly on human weakness, on what goes wrong with us. On how hard it can be to get things right. This is a story that is heard, as it were, through half opened windows, put together in events the characters themselves are confused by, the human tangle at its most elusive, where hints and nudges and guesses are worked overtime. It is about, most certainly but not only, how people are to be saved, against the odds. If some don’t make it, others do. If the Fish is dead, others may survive because of it. The foundering of the Wahine makes that very clear. 

The end brings us back to what is so much a mark of Lloyd Jones’s constant questing about for how something is to be told, but not in a way that’s been used before. So often it has struck me, how his sense of the writer’s calling is the lodestar in so much of his work. Part of this is to take his readers seriously, to assume they will accept their part in this business of “fiction”.  As much as with Mr Pip, writing itself is floated as redemptive. 

On the last page of The Fish, the narrator, leaving the caravan where so much of the story has been set and where we now find out it was written, looks out to the country which is his, his family’s, ours: a place of “baffled sheep and a restless wind.” You don’t have to push symbolism too far to take that caravan as a womb, where things are put together, where mistakes happen. In the last sentence, as he comes from his writerly cocoon, “I heard a beast confined to a pen in the hills some distance away and I wondered if, in fact, it was my groaning relief that I heard. Then I began my own uncertain walk back out into the world.”

In a fiction shot through with the fellowship of other writers, one can’t help but hear, in that final sentence, Ishmael’s lift from Job in the most myth-laden of novels – “And I only am escaped to tell thee.” I imagine Janet Frame not too far from the story’s relentless demand that we look at ourselves, at what we don’t and can’t fully understand. The Fish is in the same country as her own unrelenting riffs on what we are. Only with Jones, there is so much more humanity, so little of her delight in punishing us for what can’t be helped. 

The Fish by Lloyd Jones (Penguin, $36) is available from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington

Keep going!
Two bowls of goldfish: one is big with lots of lovely plants and only one fish; the other is small and crammed with four fish. Cash is falling into the bowls – loads of notes into the big bowl, a couple of coins into the smaller.
No amount of comparing New Zealand to other places will make our problems go away Image: David Aubrey/The Image Bank via Getty Images; additional design: Archi Banal

BooksMarch 19, 2022

Danyl Mclauchlan on Too Much Money, a book about what divides us

Two bowls of goldfish: one is big with lots of lovely plants and only one fish; the other is small and crammed with four fish. Cash is falling into the bowls – loads of notes into the big bowl, a couple of coins into the smaller.
No amount of comparing New Zealand to other places will make our problems go away Image: David Aubrey/The Image Bank via Getty Images; additional design: Archi Banal

Max Rashbrooke’s latest book examines the way inequality is flourishing in Aotearoa – and how we might pull it up by the roots.

Class is a problem again. Way back in the mid 19th century Marx and Engels declared that the history of the world was the history of class struggles, and for a long time the left – in all its liberal, revolutionary and social democratic guises – was primarily concerned with economic class and economic inequality. Then the 1960s saw the rise of the New Left, which pointed out that the traditional left’s victories in the class struggle were mostly benefiting white men. What about women? Disability rights? The environment? The threat of nuclear war? Gay rights? What about racism? Did unions and left-wing parties really represent “the working class” if most low-income workers were non-white and were systematically excluded from those movements? 

The advocates for economic and class egalitarianism never went away, they were just drowned out for a while. But they’ve grown louder again in recent years. There was the global financial crisis; Thomas Piketty’s argument that increasing inequality is built into the structure of capitalism; the blatant unfairness of the impact of the Covid pandemic. The stimulus measures by central banks around the world that inflated property and share prices, and have led to dramatic increases in the cost of living. Added to which, traditional working class electorates around the world are starting to abandon left-wing parties, switching their support to conservative or anti-immigrant politicians. So left-wing strategists and intellectuals are paying more attention to class. 

Max Rashbrooke is a New Zealand-based researcher focusing on economic inequality, and his new book Too Much Money argues that we need to refocus on the new/old subjects of wealth, class and wellbeing. His book is filled with graphs and tables and they’re the easiest way to communicate what Rashbrooke is saying, and also to agree and/or disagree with his conclusions. Let’s start with this one, which breaks New Zealand’s wealth distribution down into five main groups. 

Table showing the wealthiest 1% sitting on $274 billion with the bottom 50% on $24 billion.

At first this looks really bad. Grounds for a revolution, even. The middle-class wealth share is roughly proportionate to its size: 40% of the population, 39% of the wealth. The poorest 50% have only 2%! The greedy 10% are stealing almost all of their money! And, Rashbrooke explains, the actual distribution of wealth is probably worse than this. The very rich are “shy”, in the sense that they conceal their wealth so they can’t be taxed on it. If you factor that in, he writes: 

On this estimate, some 38,000 individuals own a startling one dollar in every four of this country’s wealth – a quarter share of the entire stock of property, household effects, cash and financial investments.

That’s a dollar in every four of the country’s private wealth, btw, excluding the assets owned by the state, which are vast. The other caveat – and Rashbrooke does point this out and gives us another chart – is that a lot of our wealth inequality is predicated on age: 

Bar graph showing income shooting up higher as people get older.

Which changes the picture a bit. Instead of a greedy super-rich elite robbing the poor, we seem to see most people entering the job market carrying debt from study, getting a mortgage, slowly paying it off and saving for retirement. Which is less of a grounds for a revolution and more like a functional economic system. But, Rashbrooke counter argues, there’s also wealth inequality within those age groups. Look at this, which shows wealth inequality by age groups. 

Bar graph showing inequality spiking up high among young people, then dropping back down to a plateau.

For older New Zealanders wealth distribution is actually pretty egalitarian; younger New Zealanders less so. Why is that youngest age group so unequal? Because age is not the defining driver of inequality. That would be ethnicity. 

Table showing "European" streaks ahead of the other four categories (Māori, Pacific peoples, Asian, other) on various measures of wealth/income.

This helps explain the increases in inequality as you move down the age cohorts: Pākehā are the oldest ethnicity group, partly because of lower birth rates; partly because Māori and Pasifika die earlier than white people. And it’s a powerful reminder that talking about class is not a pivot to avoiding race: they’re two perspectives on the same bleak subject. 

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The second chapter of Too Much Money gives a brief history of inequality in New Zealand. It describes an early 19th century system in which Māori were successful participants of an emerging capitalist economy, but Pākehā society – especially in the South Island, was extremely inegalitarian. It was dominated by the “Great Sheep Lords”, a landed gentry who built large estates and kept the price of labour low by ensuring the price of land was high, so that “lower-class” settlers would have to work for a long time before accumulating enough wealth to acquire property. Then there’s a depression in the 1880s and a liberal government gets voted in. It compulsorily acquires the great estates and breaks them up, selling off smaller parcels of land. But it also acquires millions of acres of Māori land, reselling it to Pākehā. 

This is a trend that continues with the first Labour government in the 1930s, and the establishment of the famous “cradle to grave” welfare system, which the sociologist Francis Castles called a “wage earner’s welfare state”. The government built state houses and loaned mortgages at low interest, but excluded Māori from receiving the loans until the 1950s. There’s often a tradeoff in our history, Rashbrooke indicates, of Pākehā building a more egalitarian society for themselves but doing so by disenfranchising Māori. 

We can see the consequences in that last table. And Rashbrooke doesn’t make this point, but I think you can see it in the more recent data he presents: after the neoliberal reforms of the ’80s and ’90s, and the partial dismantlement of the systems that delivered egalitarianish outcomes to wage earners, we see a switch to residential property ownership as the primary means of wealth creation. And this leads to a fairly egalitarian outcome for people who own or can buy residential property, who are mostly Pākehā. 

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What Rashbrooke is worried about is the breakdown of even the tepid egalitarianism of the recent past. Instead of breaching those existing wealth divides we’re moving in the wrong direction. The gap is widening. He even quotes Hugh Fletcher, scion of one of New Zealand’s wealthiest families and former CE of Fletcher Challenge, who warns: 

My generation [the baby boomers] and maybe the next one or two has basically stolen the financial wealth of the younger generations. It’s impossible for a young person to buy a house without support from their parents … Which means it’s only certain families who have access to housing. The ability to own homes has now become completely unequal.

Left panel is a book cover showing coins and notes floating down over the title. Right panel is a portrait photo of a middle-aged white man, wearing a suit, arms crossed.
Max Rashbrooke is a journalist and academic, based in Wellington (Photo: Supplied)

Rashbrooke is concerned about the emergence of an upper-middle class elite, who he describes as “opportunity hoarders”. They dominate both the public and private sectors. Their children are given extraordinary advantages to excel in the education system, then enjoy access to well-paid, secure work, while almost everyone born into less fortunate circumstances is held back by a complex tangle of obstacles; poorer health, fewer choices, less social and cultural capital. He draws on Thomas Piketty’s recent findings describing political cleavages in western democracies, which argues that their politics are dominated by technocratic elite divided into two factions: “the brahmin left” and “the merchant right”. Rashbrooke sketches out their New Zealand forms as:

A “Kelburn left” and a “Remuera right”. The former would be a traditional, discreet upper-middle class, located in hilltop suburbs such as Kelburn, Khandallah and Karori. Its members would be largely professionals: senior public servants, academics, high-ranking doctors and lawyers, high-paid consultants and heads of government departments, public agencies and regulatory bodies. Speculatively, we could say that the resources they mobilise include human capital (high levels of education) and social capital (public-sector and professional networks). They might also manifest cultural capital through attendance at “legitimate” artistic events (such as New Zealand Symphony Orchestra concerts), furnishings like Persian rugs and old wooden tables and chairs, and an easy familiarity with (pre-coronavirus) foreign holidays.

The Remuera right, by contrast, would draw from the world of commerce: entrepreneurs, property developers, senior executives, corporate consultants and a whole suite of other businesspeople, from modestly wealthy sole traders through to Rich Listers. Their main form of capital would probably be financial. This would include ownership of housing in the zones that enable access to prestigious state schools, although they might also send their children to private establishments like King’s. They would manifest their own forms of cultural capital, especially through their houses, which might feature swimming pools, multi-car garages, steel-and-chrome furniture and expensive contemporary New Zealand art.

These groups now live highly segregated lives, Rashbrooke warns. They’re mostly white, and primarily an urban elite – Auckland and Wellington contain 76% of the nation’s most affluent areas despite representing only 40% of the population. In a functioning democracy citizens “share a common life”, but our wealthy are increasingly disassociated from the less fortunate, which makes it hard to appreciate the challenges they face: 

Physically separated, people of different status slowly lose their understanding of how the other half lives. Their sense of those other people being “like” them, their feeling of having something in common with them, and consequently their empathy for and trust in them, all dwindle. In Auckland, for instance, people have become less likely to volunteer in other communities, to share their skills across social and economic boundaries, as those communities have become more segregated. 

And they dominate our politics. Rashbrooke cites research comparing the makeup of the 1972 and 2017 New Zealand parliaments. Our politicians in 2017 are far more diverse in terms of gender and ethnicity; but far richer than the rest of us, and: 

In 1972, one MP in five had done blue-collar work – in clerical, service-sector or labouring jobs – immediately before entering Parliament. That was still unrepresentative of the population at large (of whom 71% did such work), but ensured a modicum of socio-economic diversity. By 2017, there were literally no MPs of whom that was true (although some, like Labour’s Willie Jackson, had held blue-collar jobs earlier in their working lives). 

Unbelievably he fails to mention Jacinda Ardern’s famous stint at the Morrinsville Fish and Chip shop. 

Every social sciences book faces the notorious “last chapter problem”, in which the author offers up suggestions of how to solve the many intractable problems they’ve raised. Rashbrooke offers up not a graph, but a picture:

Image showing two ladders representing social mobility, one is vertical with little up and down movement, the other horizontal with heaps of crossover.

We need to become a less individualistic nation, he argues, and transition to a more egalitarian, less competitive people. More like Denmark, or Amyarta Sen’s “capability society”, in which people are not just theoretically free to live the lives they want, but actually capable of doing so. And I think Rashbrooke is genuinely optimistic that this might happen. But I’ve been writing about New Zealand politics for about the same length of time as he  has, and I’ve never seen much evidence that any of this could come true. Or, that even if we tried to move in that direction, that it’d be anything more than a redirection of money and power from the Remuera Right to the Kelburn Left. But I agree that there’s value in the conversation. Who knows, maybe if enough people promote these arguments we’ll hit an inflection point in which real change becomes possible. The pleasure of pessimism is that if you’re proved wrong it’s because something good happens. 

I published my own take on class in New Zealand last year, also drawing on the Piketty model. Rashbrooke’s book is more measured and deeper, more data-driven; it looks back over our history to make sense of where we are. And it reveals the falsity of that Old Left/New Left debate, that there’s a conflict between talking about wealth inequality or racial justice. In New Zealand, at least, it makes very little sense to talk about one struggle without the other. 

Too Much Money, by Max Rashbrooke (Bridget Williams Books, $39.99) is available from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington. 

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