What is it that holds these people (any people) together? What role does does cultural conflict (devastation) play?Some of the topics and questions we had:
Why don’t we want these people not lose each other?
Simon is called an “aura-watcher,” this book brings in a lot of spirituality.
All three characters brought out hope in each other.
The power of aikido – it doesn’t work unless someone else throws the first blow.
The culture conflict/loss discussed on the book jacket refers to these three people who are struggling with the results of Maori/Euro contact from long ago. How have the kept their traditions and which ones?
After I typed the quotes (below), I noticed how much the earlier quotes foretold what would happen in the story.
p. 36
Between waking and being awake there is a moment full of doubt and dream, when you struggle to remember what the place and when the time and whether you really are.
Interesting if the whole lot had caught fire, eh. Immolated Holmes in more ways than one… what would burn through? me; the cupboards; o precious guitars – and then the stone walls would stop it going further. But a fine contained inferno. A private introductory malbowge. What a mental inventory to make – the worldly goods to accompany the cremation to Valhalla – and at the hellish time of”
p. 37
“to unearth anything, we begin by digging”
p. 102
“They only make music when someone is listening.”
p. 192
“All morning the feeling had grown, start a fight and stop the illwill between his father and Kerewin. Get rid of the anger round the woman, stop the rift with blows, with pain, then pity, then repair, then good humour again. It works that way… it always did. There isn’t much time left for anything to grow anymore…”
- Simon about Kerewin and Joe
p. 206
“he doesn’t seem to have thought about the boy in any deep fashion, why Sim does strange or wild or bad things… he either kicks or kisses the brat, and hope things’ll work out. Like if he hits him enough, Sim’il stop stealing, without finding out what started him stealing in the first place, or maybe the spiderchild has always been light fingered?”
- Kerewin about Joe (she is 1/8 Maori “the best part of me has gotten lost in the way I live”
p. 231
“She stays up rearranging the picture she had built in her mind of what Joe is until it is daylight.”
p. 250
“There’s no compass for my disoriented soul, only ever beckoning ghost lights.”
“You’re involved with two strangers, different and difficult people. You’re different and difficult yourself, but strangely enough, you all get on well together. To the extent that there can be a real fight, and forgiveness and renewed friendship after”
- Kerewin
p. 297
Lightning blasted the tree,
the birds are fled;
Death hovers here for me,
Yet not all hope is dead…
O when I was young and tree was full,
Of sweetly singing birds,
then full of heart was I with song,
O’erpowering great for words…
“Little caches of verse, the hidden hoarded hopes of yesterday, things to sing and savour, saviour verses s’hope.”
p. 313
“A hook to his jaw and a hook in his thumb and a kind of a hook in my heart, by God…”
p. 315
“You were a strange child, Simon gargoyle, an unknown quantity in so many ways. I wonder what you would have turned out like, had you been left to grow up whole?”
p. 317
“And what sound do I make when the memories come crowding in too close? I don’t know, and I care even less.”
“She feels no remorse. All her feelings are dulled these days, as though life is already going, slowly leaking out and ebbing away.
Maybe it will make my dying that much easier… when I come to die, there will be little left to die”
p. 322
“Some of it she had known to be missing. Except for the knife Seafire she didn’t miss any of it.”
p. 323
“The traveled lightly, the Gillayleys, not loaded down with trivia. But then, in the end we all travel very lightly indeed. Nothing to carry more substantial than memories… and maybe that’s the heaviest baggage of all…”
p. 325
“The pity of it all is that they’re wrong… I’ve been fascinated by you two these past few months. You’ve got, you had genuine love between you. You’ve given him a solid base of love to grow from, for all the hardship you’ve put him through. You’ve been mother and father and home to him. And probably tomorrow they’ll read you a smug little homily, castigating you for ill treatment and neglect. And they’ll congratulate themselves quite publicly for rescuing the poor urchin from this callous ogre, their nightmare of a parent… you got your lawyer clued up on all the background? The real background, the one that counts? Being both parents to him, helping him over his bad dreams, picking him up from all round the countryside, going along to school to find out what the matter is this time… it all shows you cared deeply. In a negative way, so does the fact that you beat him. At least, you worried enough about what you considered was his wrongdoing to try and correct it.”
p. 331
“Wherever I go, however I go, I carry this earth for memory. And should I die in a strange land, there is a little more than just my flesh to make a friend and sanctuary of alien ground.”
p. 352
“When the dead are dead, you cannot bring them back. Not by memory, or desire, or love.”
p. 364
“By accident or design, when the old people arrived here, they induced, or maybe it arrived of itself, the spirit of the islands, part of the spirit of the earth herself, it rested in the godholder they had brought. O it isn’t able to go now. It is both safe, it is vulnerable.”
p. 395
“Whatever they did to him, and however long it was going to take, he could endure it. Provided, at the end, he went home.
And home is Joe, Joe of the hard hands but sweet love, Joe who can comfort, Joe who takes care. The strong man, the man who cries with him. And home has become Kerewin, Kerewin the distant who is so close. The woman who is wise, who doesn’t tell him lies. The strong woman, the woman of the sea and the fire.
And if he can’t go home, he might as well not be. They might as well not be, because they only make sense together. He knew that in the beginning with an elation beyond anything he had ever felt. He has worked at keeping them together whatever the cost. Not family, not whanau… maybe there aren’t words for us yet? But we have to be together. If we are not, we are nothing. We are broken. We are nothing.”
p. 404
“It is difficult to have to hit a child at all. To hit a child who is literally covered in scars from previous whippings is distasteful in the extreme. That kind of punishment doesn’t seem to bother him, however. As far as we know, no punishment bothers him. There isn’t very much you can threaten or entice a child with, who is impervious to peer group pressure, who simply refused to write lines, who regards being detained in a solitary bedroom as a pleasant relaxation, and who thinks any of the special treats we have to offer, very boring. Therefore, their curtailment is quite, quite immaterial.”
p. 436
“seven new directions for my life – Deity might as well delight in yet another odd number… imagine this a skewed compass rose, with a tempered steel needle flexing before a magnetic wind; rose and needle myself, and the wind? The wind, m dear sour other self, s that of change and change. Direction one is recovery; two, a renewed talent; three rebuilding; and four, tying up loose ends, making the net whole. Direction five is endeavouring not to dodge responsibilities, for me, or a wandering cat, or whomever. Six is related: I know I can move, can lead, can direct. Therefore, I will. No more sequestration, no more Holmes against the world. And seven is the pivot, the point of balance of the needle of my true soul – I have faced Death. I have been caught in the wild weed tangle of Her hair, seen the gleam of her jade eyes. I will go when it is time – no choice! – but now I want life.
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