"The Pākehā was Mr Nasty and the Māori Mr Nice": a lockdown novel that tests the rules Bad-arse Joleen McAnulty, the central character in Stephanie Johnson’s riotously engaging new novel, Kind, is not a woman to play by the rules. As a teen, she falsely accused her foster father of improper touching, to get back at him for not letting her go to a party and – though we never get details – wreaked havoc for years in the family home. By 2022, nearly forty and writing to her foster sister and best childhood friend Kerry-Anne (K.A) from prison, her defiance is reduced to forgetting the macrons on Māori vowels (otherwise present in the book) in her epistolary confessions, which, along with several other sideshow characters and storylines, detail the recent domino run of rule breaking that has landed her behind bars.
Johnson says in her author’s note that she wrote Kind as "entertainment", both for herself during the lockdowns, and also for future readers to enjoy "when the early 2020s are consigned to memory" which, even though it’s only 2023, it seems they have been. One of New Zealand’s most unusual lockdown directives was Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s plea to people to "be kind" to each other – a rule, of sorts, that was mocked but also, I think, made a difference to our attitudes. The title alludes to this, and the book refers to and explores kindness in many ways.
The book is a virtual theme park of twisting turning rides, some terrifying, some hilarious, some a house of mirrors, and all of them page-turning. With at least five storylines and, I think, 11 different points of view, all with their own intricate tensions and cliff-hangers, it’s a spectacular feat of plotting.
There’s Lyall, National MP and very short man, who decides he’s fed up with staying at home in Level 4, now that wife Kerry-Anne and daughter Mamie have left him, and so goes for a bike ride in Arthur’s Pass. The rules don’t apply to him – or do they? In a boat somewhere between Australia and New Zealand, having paid large sums of money to be smuggled into Aotearoa, a small handful of privileged people are biding their time. The rules don’t apply to them either, although the virus doesn’t know that.
In Christchurch, a former mate of Lyall’s, private investigator Mick, gets a phone call – "are you essential services?" – and goes on a search for a missing boy, getting uncomfortably close to the dark past that led his wife and children to go into hiding in Australia several years ago. Soon, he’s also looking for Lyall, who has now disappeared.
Meanwhile, in Russell, "the bloodied and booze-sodden birthplace of the nation", good girl Kerry-Anne has returned to her parents’ home, along with her young daughter Mamie, and is painting a picture of the foster twin brothers who were whāngai’d years ago – which broke her dad’s heart, though "he didn’t question it intellectually" – when bad-arse Joleen, the family’s "proper foster", arrives to stay – or does she? It seems from her clandestine visits to another house in the neighbourhood, that the lockdown curfew is not the only rule Jolie is breaking, which of course, is nothing new. The whole country knows she had an affair with the boss and is standing trial for company embezzlement, the first tumbles in her domino cascade.
Elsewhere, a pair of insane illegal immigrant American lesbian preppers with a shotgun and a lot of dandelion coffee catch a man and keep him in a cage in their doomsday bunker in the Southern Alps. A fresh take on Man Alone, perhaps, that also (curiously) shares several similarities to a plotline in that other 2023 New Zealand thriller, Birnam Wood, suggesting that maybe on the whole we’re not too comfortable with rich Americans, or our mountains, or rich Americans in our mountains.
All of the storylines are a thrilling ride, and their ultimate collision produces the kind of ending that leaves a reader grinning, putting down the book with a satisfied sigh, and wanting another one. Some points of view are better inhabited than others. Mick, despite his broodiness, and Lyall, despite his dimwittedness and all the dumb shit he thinks and says and does, are immediately authentic and empathetic, as are Kerry-Anne and her father, Hugo, both of whom keep their feet (and the novel) on the ground with their quiet, reflective thinking. George – gay, part-Balinese son of Joleen’s ex-lover and nanny to his dad’s other kids – and four-year-old Mamie I could have done without. Neither of their points of view is very interesting, or adds much to the plot, and Mamie reads like an adult playing a child; she has some very deterministic views for her age. Joleen, the boat passenger on the Iconic and the barnie bunker dwellers, at times border on caricature, while some plot points, like the twins’ reappearance, are a bit of a stretch, but then the whole novel is a bit of a caricatured stretch, which is what makes it fun to read. To wit, that moment when the enormous zombie-eyed lesbian chomps down on a little man’s balls and shoves him back into his cage.
I was surprised, reading Kind, how long ago the lockdowns seem now, and how much I’ve forgotten about the feel of them. Johnson takes us back. To those first days, or even hours, when it all got quite apocalyptic, and we talked in a way that now seems a bit embarrassing: ‘The virus is bad. It’s like nothing we’ve seen before and it’s coming our way.’
Then that pristine quiet, because people were staying at home and also because people were staying out of the country. Here’s Lyall, arriving in the DOC carpark in Arthur’s Pass: "Over five million tourists expected this year, more than the population of the whole country. Now there were none. The air smelt clean, so clean it squeaked and pinged in his sinuses. No car exhaust, no wood smoke, no hint of particulate. There would hardly be a person alive who had experienced air so clean. It was a benchmark for the future. It was a blessing. He was himself cleansed by it, sanitised, made pure, like a member of the Green Party."
And the tiresome repetitiveness of the weeks, the days, the hours. Driving up to the mountains in search of Lyall, Mick turns the radio on to catch the news: "Covid, Covid, Covid, Trump, Covid, Trump, Covid. People were going to tire of it if they hadn’t already. They’d want to party, dance, give one another bone-crushing hugs. For now mortal fear and the desire to do the right thing seemed to be keeping them indoors. In half an hour the only vehicle he’d seen was a rubbish truck."
And, finally, that brief sparkly euphoria when the rules started to loosen. Mitch, flying north, "every second seat on his flights . . . empty", then being invited to stay at the McAnulty’s for morning tea on the deck. "It was special – festive, strange, wonderful – to be sitting high above the sea, listening to the birds, drinking coffee and having an amiable conversation, even though he had to speak louder than normal across the necessary distance."
The Americans are dumb, rich and crazy and want to live in New Zealand. The Arabs have multiple wives and money. The Chinese are fraudsters. The National MP is a private-schooled idiot
Johnson also reminds us that the pandemic was real, and really bad, that the rules and restrictions had a point; they stopped people dying in droves, as was happening elsewhere, where the rules were different. Early on in 2020, Hugo reminds us that Spain is a mess – over seventeen thousand deaths. Twenty-three thousand fatalities in the United States", and later, as restrictions ease that "while Covid was nowhere as bad as the Black Death in medieval Europe, one in four in some places, a true plague, it had the potential to be so unless a vaccine was found and soon." Remember – when we didn’t have one?
Johnson’s short story "The Sensitivity Reader", published recently at this outlet, caused a ruckus for its overt, angry commentary on the rules and expectations contemporary writers are asked to follow in fiction so as to be inclusive and not offend. It was fiction as a mouthpiece; wrangled to make a point, rather than left alone to do so. Kind is by default inclusive. With its multiple viewpoints, and their variations in age, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation, it can’t help but present as diverse. But is this deliberate – almost forceful – inclusiveness, evidence of the writer playing by the rules, or testing them, or both?
Some racial stereotypes are certainly upended in the book, and questions raised re the assumptions we make about others, most pointedly through the physical appearance of Kerry-Anne’s twin foster brothers; one pale-skinned and ginger-haired, the other clearly Māori. Is Johnson suggesting we’re all connected? Or just reminding us not to judge a book by its cover? Stereotypes still abound though. The Americans are dumb, rich and crazy and want to live in New Zealand. The Arabs have multiple wives and money. The Chinese are fraudsters. The gay guy is a sweetheart. The National MP is a private-schooled idiot. Some of this might have been unconscious, but for the most part Johnson knows what she’s doing. One character’s internal monologue while being questioned by the police towards the end of the book could be a sly commentary on the book itself, and perhaps its sensitive readers: "The Pākehā was Mr Nasty and the Māori Mr Nice, like some dumb-arse cop show. Handing out all the stereotypes, down to the inscrutable Oriental. One of them should be a woman."
Is this interesting, or does it start to feel too much like a point is being made?
Toward the end of her confessional letter writing, Joleen writes to K.A that "In our country the class war is forgotten – all we talk about is race. Race race race race. I want to shout it from the roof tops: Don’t forget the class war!!!" I’m genuinely interested in why we don’t talk much about class in Aotearoa, and Kind does a good job of illuminating how massive the class barrier has become, how it determines from the get-go where a person will wind up. But I drew back at this outburst. I just wanted to return to the theme park.
Fortunately, the one seriously criminal rule-breaker in the book – a side-character, and one of those genuine sociopathic bad-arses, incapable of even the intention of kindness – turned up a few pages later, bringing with him several unresolved plot points. Like the murdered man. And the mysterious artist in China. And the women in the bunker in Arthur’s Pass who have not yet been found. And that sequinned sweater. All of which seem to suggest that a sequel might be forthcoming. If so, I’m in for the ride. Kind by Stephanie Johnson (Penguin, $37) is available in bookstores nationwide.
