One salient chapter is constructed entirely in a dialogue between members of the community and the interloping “Dollarman” – the Pākehā tasked with securing the purchase of their land. But the experience is rewarding, serving for those uneducated in Māori life as a window into another culture, and the collision between its ‘different importances’ and the whim and decision making of external powers. Neither, thankfully, does Grace suffer to anglicise her language beyond what’s required. The style is heavily resonant of an oral tradition, its narrators insistently contextualising events in the present within the deeper tradition of the community – and as such, reading it requires work. Told from the perspective of a few of its Māori characters, passages heavy-laden with description paint an intimate portrait of an indigenous people and the mythological ties that bind them to their ancestral land. Set “at the curve that binds land and sea”, it is a searching examination of human nature, and of the ends that a community will pursue to preserve its way of life. Grace’s second novel, Potiki (1986), winner of the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction and now re-released after thirty-four years, is an anguished account of a small family living on a remote stretch of New Zealand’s coastline.
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