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Eccentric antics in Golden Bay
A Hum of exploration
Humming along
Bad vibrations
Quintessential Kiwi gem
Healing and happiness
Self-absorbed characters
Ageing hippies are fair game for writers to take the mickey, especially when they start wrestling with the meaning of life.
McAlpine's latest novel, set in Golden Bay, houses a collection of quirky characters living a quiet existence in an idyllic setting. The book was largely inspired by the author's experience living in Puponga, Farewell Spit, where whale strandings, native land snails and the laid-back lifestyle, all featured, were part of the way of life.
Despite the humour, McAlpine is gentle and indulgent with her characters, who flounder, dither and delude themselves. There's local cafe owner Jane who puts up with the moods and posturing of her self-centred partner, Ivan. He sees himself as the local expert on all matters cerebral and artistic and irresistible to women.
However, life is becoming increasingly frustrating for Ivan because he is plagued by an underground humming that he tries to disguise with an increasingly bizarre array of devices. The ever-patient Jane suggests maybe the humming is the voice of God, but Ivan favours it being a collection of whale sounds, trapped in the sandhills and struggling to get out.
Activities in the small town of Petitport centre around the local tai chi group run by the tough-minded Xania. She is plotting to bring her Argentinian lover and his wife to New Zealand to set up a tai chi studio to surpass all others in the country. To achieve her ends, she's prepared to toss local environmental concerns and greenie views to the wind, selling the local powelliphanta snail shells and stranded whale-meat to the Japanese. Who cares about PC when money can be made?
While the Argentinian connection is necessary to the plot, it is a somewhat irritating device as it takes the form of one-sided emails from Xania to her lover, and involves an account of Argentinian politics that seems to have little connection with the rest of the book.
As Ivan lurches from woman to woman, attracted yet appalled by their demands, the scales slowly fall from Jane's eyes as she looks at their relationship and finds what it really entails.
It's a quirky read, with plenty of sly humour but with an underlying seriousness about matters spiritual and a person's discovery of a connection with the world around them.
Kristi Gray, The Press, Christchurch, 24 September 2005
Rachel McAlpine is a remarkable New Zealand author; although she is not a household name, her work is well known and liked in New Zealand. I caught up with her about her new novel Humming and her writing in general.
Humming is an outstanding book, set in Golden Bay, New Zealand. The novel is centred on the lives of Jane and Ivan. Jane is a sensible woman who runs the local Saltwater Café, and generally believes she is happy with life. Ivan is an eccentric but famous artist who has recently become aware of an irritating hum. Jane and Ivan are secretly married and enjoy an unusual relationship…but there is a problem…Ivan is bored. At a loose end with his art, he joins the local Tai Chi club for inspiration. Quiet life in the fictional little town of Petitport is thrown upside down and turned inside out when Xania returns home from Argentina. She is fiercely devoted to Tai Chi and has plans to make the world a better place by devoting her life to helping people. Xania is determined to raise enough money to establish a Tai Chi Institute in Auckland, even if it means going to extreme lengths to do it. While Jane searches for the cure to Ivan's hum, Ivan searches for inspiration, and Xania's zealous personality is exposed through via a series of emails with soul mate and ex-lover Pio who is back in Argentina. The novel ends with a twist and a general feeling of acceptance.
The story of Ivan, Jane and Xania, is told simply and beautifully. Humming is a light and amusing read, but it is still told in a very real way. The characters are not perfect they have their faults. For me, the characters were very reachable, and I found myself sharing their feelings at times. The book has a lot of laugh-out-loud moments, as the author Rachel McAlpine will tell you, "I don't suppose you are supposed to laugh at your own book…but I can remember a lot of really loud cackles as I was writing this one."
The book is very clearly NZ fiction. Rachel based the fictional town of Petitport on Puponga, and the beautiful Golden Bay scenery is of course real. She drew inspiration for the underlying hum of the book from the strange Humming noise that some Golden Bay residents could hear. I found this book so delightfully, New Zealand and I enjoyed every mention of Wellington, Auckland, Nelson, it just brought that book alive to know and have visited the places written about, maybe it is just me, but it made the book seem magical!
As with all her novels, Rachel went through phases with Humming, at times she would be as "high as a kite" and then at times she would think "this is the worst thing ever, what have I done this for?" The process was "very much a rollercoaster". Although "you can't actually help reflecting on real life" you have to "actually invent the people", so Humming is both real and fictional, poised in a balancing game. Rachel McAlpine is an amazing author and her work has a very distinctive quality to it, which she believes comes from the combination of being a poet, and being a web content expert, "I let my hair down…but at the same time I can't help being pretty concise."
Humming explores life and spirituality from all angles. It is a mature novel, but approaches issues with a childish purity at times. One can't help but wonder whether this reflects the author's views of the world, "I often feel how immature I am. I haven't figured out the meaning of life yet." Humming is a beautiful, funny, and generally just appealing book, with an underlying hum of exploration. A deliciously filling read!
- Brie Jessen, Nexus 12 September 2005
Nelson's Golden Bay provides an idyllic setting for local crystal gazers' earnest hypocrisies in Rachel McAlpine's Humming (Hazard Press, pb $29.99). At the heart of the story is the ruffled relationship between Ivan, a shaggy, insufferable artist plagued by a constant hum, and his co-dependent parner, Jane. But when Tai Chi instructor Xania arrives from Argentina, trouble comes to paradise. Carefully structured and tuned to a sustained note of mild irony, Humming moves almost imperceptibly from light to dark as the sub-plot defines the story with an undercurrent of corruption and cultish manipulation. Though the upbeat ending is a little laboured, it doesn't diminish the mounting tension in this finely crafted novel.
- Mark Peters, Dominion Post Saturday 1 October 2005
A recent TV documentary showed tinnitus sufferers learning to combat the perpetual ringing in their ears by identifying the pitch and making sounds of a similar frequency. In the small rural community of Petitport near Takaka (based on real-life Puponga), Ivan the artist tries other techniques. Fuelled by the dogged support of his occasional wife Jane, by the body of pretty young Jing and the manipulative attention of Xania, Ivan lassoes tension into sagging electrical wires. He makes papier mâché helmets and aluminium suits. He tapes cans of Coca-Cola onto his ears.
He stalks the tidal flats for spots of silence. Demanding, egotistical, self-absorbed, with a cat-like disposition for disloyalty, he is an easy contender for the high-farce, low-scheme plots of Tom Sharpe as he fights the Hum and any notion of responsibility.
Ivan meets his nemesis in Xania, fresh from Argentina, herself humming with the spiritual drive of the questionable Master Shan. Equally devoid of conscience, she will commit any crime against nature – note the bag full of protected giant snails, the Powelliphanta, on the book's very fine front cover – to raise money for a new Tai Chi institute in Auckland.
So farcical, so good. In Humming, Rachel McAlpine paints with easy humour a small town, a beautiful bay, an eccentric group of self-absorbed characters driven to spectacular silliness, aided and abetted by the occasional city character rushing onstage to put things right. Outside the humour, however, things get a little lost. The plot hangs on a systematic sorting out of belief systems. There is Tai Chi, good in a casual day-to-day scenario, bad when driven by blind ambition. There is Christianity, good in a loose friendly way like a worn cardigan (each chapter is headed by only slightly relevant lines from Pilgrim's Progress), bad when steeped in Catholic guilt. And then there is the all-round favourite – an extraordinary moment of pantheistic revelation experienced by Jane as she lies in a borrowed sleeping bag deep in Powelliphanta country. Straight-talking, true-blue, generous, guileless and waistless, Jane is a perfect stooge for villainous Xania and self-centred Ivan. But on her own, she wears thin.
"Over here," Xania writes to her mad Argentinean soulmate, "the only fanatics are safely tucked away in corporate cults." Not so. In this, McAlpine's first novel since Farewell Speech in 1990, small-town fanaticism is familiar and friendly and, if overly cloying at times, sensible enough to mix cult activities with wild parsley scones and samphire salsa.
- Sally Blundell, New Zealand Listener, September 24-30 2005
Yaay for the continued maturing of New Zealand fiction. Humming, by Rachel McAlpine is a gem: quintessentially Kiwi and beautifully written.
Billed as comic, it is very funny, while also managing to be poignant, sad and very real, with well-drawn barbs that tickle. McAlpine's style is light but deft, with atmosphere and mood all the more enjoyable for not having been underscored.
Set in Golden Bay, the story revolves around Jane and Ivan, the latter
suffering from a humming only he can hear, leading to all manner of
contraptions invented to cover his ears. Jane is, in equal measures,
determined to be happy and keep her man, even if it means pretending to hear
his hum, and ignoring his self-importance and subtly mean selfishness.
Around them swell and ebb a crowd of friends who richly fill their places.
The mad Xania, with her splendid but illegal plans for raising money, is
especially delightful.
- Diane Joyce, Editor, Kapiti Observer, 23 August 2005
Welcome to beautiful, isolated Golden Bay, ably rendered in this novel in poetic prose. Welcome to the fictional village of Petitport, where our sensible, contented protagonist Jane runs a successful cafe. In a nearby caravan lives Ivan, Jane's partner, a self-obsessed eccentric artist, who is beset by a constant humming noise. Ivan is in a rut with his art, and bored with his predictable, cosy life with Jane.
The entrance of Xania, returned home from Argentina, sets the cat among the pigeons. She is an intense woman whose life is devoted to teaching tai chi, expanding the membership of the Nelson-Golden Bay classes, and raising money by sometimes drastic means to establish a club in Auckland and bring the shadowy Master Shan to New Zealand.
Through a series of emails to her erstwhile lover Pio in Argentina, Xania reveals her obsessive personality, and one must read between the lines to guess what Pio's replies must be. At times this device felt forced when the emails were over-explanatory and didn't come across as natural. The emails also referred to social and financial instability in Argentina, which, while, interesting, was not linked in with the rest of the story.
Rachel McAlpine combines a good mix of ingredients: there is humour, mystery, sex, and a cast of endearing and exasperating characters, including jane's Uncle Harper, a retired vicar, and the nubile Jing, who poses for Ivan. The author makes good use of Golden Bay as a setting, bringing in the ecological issues of stranded pilot whales and the rare native Powelliphanta snail species, and gently poking fun at the New Age hippy community.
The pace crackles along, studded with subplots, and the persistent humming of Ivan's mid-life crisis always in the background. Jane and Ivan's co-dependent relationship, past and present, unfolds and evolves with the story. Jane rises to the challenges in her personal life, and also emerges as a brave environmental crusader.
Humming is a fun read, comic and light-hearted, but with enough depth to be meaningful, and a surprise twist is part of the satisfying ending.
- Philippa Jamieson, Weekend Herald, 23 July 2005
How does one review a well-written book when one dislikes the main characters? This is exactly the problem I have with Rachel McAlpine's novel Humming.
Set in the small Golden Bay community of Petitport, the story centres around three distinct and contrasting individuals. Ivan is a successful artist int he best tradition of the prima donna, and, at the age of 50 going on 2, considers the world exists only for his benefit. Unfortunately, something seems to be conspiring against him - he is plagued by an inexplicable, low-frequency humming. Possible explanations range from electromagnetic radiation to God speaking very slowly, but whatever the cause, nothing seems to stop it. And to top it all off, he is bored in both his work and his relationship with Jane, the owner of the Saltwater Cafe.
Jane, by contrast, has an innnocent joy in life and people that borders on naivety (to the extent it is hard to believe she runs a very successful cafe) and panders unquestioningly to Ivan's constant demands.
And then there is Xania, who has just returned from studying Tay Chi at the Inner Harmony Institute in Argentina. She is on a mission to help others - whether they want it or not, but, unlike Jane (whose selflessness seems entirely instinctual), Xania is driven by a constant hunger for love and reverence from those around her. He arrives in Petiport determined to make improvements to the sppiritual health of the country, and sets about reinvigorating the local Tai Chi club and raising funds to establish a New zealand branch of Inner Harmony. Not all her money-making schemes are legal, and she has no scruples when it comes to manipulating other people to achieve her own ends. When she decides Ivan could be very useful both emotionally and financially, the disruption she creates changes everybody's lives, and not always in a good way.
All three are drawn in bold, primary colours, and their child-like, almost archetypal personalities lend Humming an air of fairytale. This allows the author to address issues surrounding spiritual fulfilment and what it means to choose to be (or not to be) happy without becoming didactic.
Unfortunately, this quality also left me frustrated. I lost patience with the self-absorption of both Ivan and Xania, although Jane (the only likeable one of them) does develop an insight and maturity that fleshes out her character in a relatively satisfying way.
This probably reflects McAlpine's skills as a writer - after all, I believed in and cared about Ivan and Xania enough to find them irritating - and I don't want to be unfairly critical. The narrative voice is light and witty, many of the situations genuinely funny (particularly Ivan's attempts to stop the hum), and the Golden Bay setting richly evocative. I finished strangely dissatisfied, however, as if I'd had a snack when I wanted a feast.
Cushla McKinney, Otago Daily Times. Cushla McKinney describes herself as a scientist and a dreamer.
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