Review: GUARDIANS

GUARDIANS by Alan Titchall (Devonmedia, 2024)

Reviewed by Vaughan Rapatahana (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Te Whiti) 

Guardians is a book of three parts that follows Robert Smith’s journey through life after he finds an injured white fantail as a young boy, which opens up a spiritual dimension. Written as a mystery-thriller, it follows him from the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 as an eleven-year-old boy through to life in 1995 as an adult.

An interesting book this. A real imbroglio, which largely succeeds as a continuing stream of interest, given a reader will have to suspend belief in some of the plot machinations and coincidences, as well as the incredible character interactions, whereby everyone is somehow interrelated on some level over more than one generation. It is almost as if the author had constructed an intricate  prior template where all his protagonists and antagonists – if we can actually differentiate them – are convolutedly connected and that he has to adhere to this networking whether it rings true or not. As summarised via the pātai enunciated by lead actor Robert Smith, namely, ‘Was the entire village of my childhood connected?’ It certainly seems so, after all, ‘It’s New Zealand. One degree of separation between us all, mate,’ as one of these characters remarks late in the piece. And many of them end up, rather incredibly, in Tāmaki Makaurau.

Then again, it is fiction. Actually, it is a polyglottal action comic in words – from several languages..

Guardians is manifestly not PC (see pages 300-301 for a manifestation of two distinctly disparate political stances), while most women seem somewhat secondary throughout. And did I mention the weird sex scenes? It is macho male mates meeting personified and – given that the settings range from earlier last century up until Y2K late in the 1990s - much comes across as dated in places. Indeed, ngā whaakaro throughout resonate like the reminiscences of an old man who grew up in the 1950s.

Indeed, ngā tāngata Māori in this novel are also portrayed in a somewhat dated fashion, as through the lens of a seasoned non-Māori who wants to include and to appreciate their tikanga, but does not have the existential inheritance to do so. Cultural appropriation? Probably. Concomitantly, the attempt at te reo Māori is incorrect much of the time (‘angry white lady’, for example, should be te wahine mā riri, and not ‘riri wahine ma’ and ‘We are one’ is Kotahi tātou, not ‘Ko tētahi tātou’ and so on and so forth throughout) while there is absolutely no macronisation. Kāore ngā tohutō. 

Despite my critique above, and despite several typos (‘kai pai’ should be ka pai, ‘salvia’ should be saliva, ‘affect’ should be effect, as just a trifecta of examples) Guardians remains an intriguing read. 

Especially the first section, whereby the central North Island setting rings true for this reviewer who lives in an old dam settlement surrounded by ngā paina. There is tension, there is impetus, there is intrigue, not all of which is resolved by the end of the entire volume, as for example, we never do learn who the American Frank was in the early pages. Despite a hell of a lot of people dying, especially later in the book, when the author seems impelled to speed everything up by eliminating them all, including Smith, the key boy/man throughout. Northern Ireland, Sydney, Canada, Singapore, Vietnam, World War Two, Vietnam, Tasmania, Dunedin, all have bit parts to play. They are all as inevitably interlinked as all the continuing intermix of their residents. Then there is a continued fixation with food. The number of hākari throughout is rather staggering, the lists of multinational foodstuffs deserve an almanack of their own.

More, we never do quite grab hold of what the gun-toting villains want of Robert, why they want to expunge him, and – more bizzarely – why they don’t wipe him out when they had several opportunities to do so throughout the texts. What, in fact, do they want, whoever they ‘really are’? Are they Irish/Russian ‘terrorists’ or drug-dealing tyrants? Or both? Why, as one early example, does Volkov wish to kill the young Smith boy? Why does his (supposed) daughter seem to have the same morbid motivation, decades later, and only – it would seem – after having had a threesome with him? Kāore ahau he mōhio. 

Again, the book does – somehow – work. It has its own peculiar ambience. Given my earlier remarks, the author does capture something of the simultaneous interworlds that constitute ngā ao Māori, namely the sentient ‘everyday’, and the ever-present, generally invisible, otherness of ngā kaitiaki, as often symbolised by ngā manu, especially te pīwakawaka mā. It is this distinctive unusualness that sets Guardians apart, that glues together the disparate topoi, into a whole that surpasses them. Mā te huruhuru ka rere te manu, nē rā. Rather well-done, actually. And, I reckon, rather a lot of fun for its writer, as he flagrantly flings out his own idiosyncratic insights, just as he did some years earlier online in a piece titled Kaua e whakatauira Maori tena koe. Engari, kāore ngā tohutō anō.... 

This review was first published in FlaxFlower reviews, which focuses on in-depth reviews of New Zealand books of all kinds, and is reprinted here with the kind permission of Flaxflower founder and editor Bronwyn Elsmore.