Output details

Kehua!

Kehua! supposed that the spirits of the Maori dead, the Kehua of the title, (now globalised) turned up in modern Highgate, in pursuit of a New Zealand family that they, like the Furies, pursued. My research questions were as follows.:1 Older cultures live with the spirits of the past, see the dead all around and call on the witch doctor or the shaman to cure neuroses. Do we of the present merely use a different terminology, using therapists to recreate the past, digging up family traumas in the hope of curing depressions and compulsions? 2 Does what once happened in family or tribe, in the form of our inherited genes, continue to dictate how we as individuals act, think and feel? 3 How can the modern, literal reader be persuaded into crediting the improbable, even as a metaphor? 4 Was there a place in this fantastic array for the metafictional, examining the propositions by using myself as a writer, if increasingly haunted and therefore increasingly fictionalised, to provide a commentary on the novel as it went along? The pill was very well sugared. On the first line I offered the readers incest, murder, adultery, remorse and redemption, but followed quickly by an account of the life cycle of the daffodil, so they knew what they were in for. The three strands had to converge: the Kehua’s narrative, the family’s narrative, the writer’s instructive narrative.