As reported on the blog earlier this week Greg McGee's new novel The Antipodeans was launched by actor/movie maker Chris Hampson at Dear Reader Bookshop in Auckland's Grey Lynn on Tuesday last.
I was impressed by Hampson's address and have managed to track it down. Here it is for your interest.
"I started life as a publishing editor – and though the
business has changed a lot since the seventies, it still manages to surprise me
in its ability to place art on a commercial pedestal. And thus the efforts of
its best practitioners are to be admired. So congratulations Kevin on making
this splendid book, and for recognizing what is, without doubt, a significant
contribution to our canon.
It struck me a long time ago that writing is a kind of
alchemy. Alchemists summon up gold from base metals – they transmute the base
into the noble. Writers perform a similar art, turning the dross of the day to
day into the spun gold of literary experience. It’s transmutation of personal experience,
certainly. It’s transmutation of events, of relationships, of the everyday into
Neverland. It’s a magical alchemical process.
I mention this because THE ANTIPODEANS references a
good deal of actual experience. Greg’s father was in Northern Italy in the
second world war; Greg was a player coach in the Veneto in the seventies; Greg
has a daughter whose age mirrors that of Clare in the book; I watched that
reunion in the Veneto village that Clare describes, which saw a red headed Celt
from the South Island assume the mantle of the funniest, dirtiest speech maker in
the Veneto dialect that the town of Casale Sul Sile had seen as he presented
the club his Junior All Black blazer. It
was deeply, appropriately filthy. But out of the everyday dross of those facts,
this old alchemist has spun this wonderful multigenerational multilayered work
of fiction that is THE ANTIPODEANS. I’ve been in it for over a week. I’m a slow
reader, but I didn’t want to leave these three interwoven love stories whose
legacy, spanning some seventy-five years, is pain and despair. And finally, hope.
It started life about a decade ago as a treatment for
a film called Lo Straniero. That film was the Clare/Bruce story that in the
novel has become the vehicle for telling the far larger story that THE
ANTIPODEANS is. I’ve always loved the idea, and now that stalled film project has
become what is, quite simply, this fantastic novel. This is a great read – all
three of its stories are great reads and the complex interweaving of the three
will have you hanging in there – I promise – until the very last page, to wring
the most out of what this remarkable set of characters have to offer.
Greg’s fascinations intrigue me – he’s always had the
most wide-ranging curiousities (many quite dodgy) and I know that the Arch
Scott material about the northern Italian partigiani has fascinated him
forever. So to see it become the substance and fabric of that other story is to
see the process of alchemical creation in action. It is sublime.
And while we’re on the subject of fascinations – I drink
with this man very regularly. We stand in bars and drink red wine and exchange
opinion and intimacy on every subject and yet – yet there is a character in The
Antipodeans whole subject is molecular physics. Now McGee is a Luddite who
handles a screwdriver badly – yet here he is discoursing on molecular physics,
indeed using the subject as a tool of seduction, and I am gobsmacked. Molecular
bloody physics – where does he get this stuff! Mind you, the molecular
physicist is, naturally, also a rugby player…
So physics, rugby, the war, family, love – you only
have to pick it up to see that this is a book of substance. The book has heft.
And it does – true heft – it deals with substance, weight, history, loss and
life. And it’s about us – my generation and Greg’s – and our relationship with
our fathers. I’ve been waiting most of my life for someone to engage with that
troubled generation of men who went before us, the generation that lived
through the depression and the second world war, and to engage with that bleak
incomprehension that lay in the gulf between us, fueled by our blind arrogance
in the sixties, our complete failure to understand where these men had been
twenty years earlier and never really come back from. Well, here it is. Greg
has climbed under the skin of those men, somehow, he’s seen what made them
tick, and I can tell you he had me in tears by the book’s end – tears of pain
and sadness, but also tears of recognition, delight, and a kind of hope. And a
wish that, in my case, I could wind the clock back thirty eight years and –
with this book in my hand – have one more natter with my dad.
It’s taken more than a decade, Greg, of such hard slog
that much of what’s in The Antipodeans has been literally wrung out of you –
and it was no coincidence that the completion of the draft coincided with your
being hospitalized in Hong Kong with a suspected heart attack (we both knew
they were wrong, there’s no bloody heart in there). But congratulations you old
alchemist – you’ve cracked it. For which, thank you ".
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