The new novel by LLoyd Jones concerns a baby who is both boy and fish. What's the point of it?
In Lloyd Jones’ first novel since his 2018 allegory The Cage, a baby who is both boy and fish is born to an unmarried teenage mother “on this long puzzling sandbar we call home.” We’re close to the sea and close to Wellington, with a story that unfolds largely in the 1950s and 60s: the climax of the novel is the Wahine disaster of 1968 and its sad aftermath, described in riveting and original detail.
Like the young, nameless narrator of The Cage, our narrator here is an observer. A teenager when his nephew—the eponymous Fish—is born, he’s writing this story down only when he is “into late middle age”. In this he resembles other first-person narrators in novels that Jones references more than once in the book: Ishmael from Moby-Dick, and the eponymous Robinson Crusoe.
Ostensibly this is a novel about how a family living in the provincial, narrow-minded New Zealand of days gone by cope with this strange arrival, a child shunned by his peers and abandoned by his troubled young mother. Unlike Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, the Fish—given his grandfather’s name, Colin Montgomery—is loved and protected by his grandparents, young uncle and, later in the novel, his aunt who flies in from Australia to lavish him with attention and gifts.
He may repulse them, with his gills, bulging eyes and gulping mouth; they may hurry to open windows because “the fish smell is stuck to the sheets”, just as in “Metamorphosis” Samsa’s sister sticks her head out the window to avoid the stench. Although the narrator rarely refers to the Fish as Colin, and sometimes calls him “it”, the family doesn’t reject the baby, and feel a loving anxiety for him:
On the one hand, we defend Colin Montgomery’s fishiness. But then we wish Colin was not so wholeheartedly a fish—but a bit more like us. Of course, he cannot stop being a fish any more than any of us can resist the person we grow into.
The book’s epigraph is the famous statement by Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz, that when “a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” This complicates a reading of the novel as an artful exploration of how a family—and society—deal with difference in their midst. The act of writing down the story seems increasingly central, as the narrator swaps writing aerograms to Carla for taking notes:
This time Carla is critical, sterner—‘I see you’ve been making your notes. You still haven’t read them to me.’
I can hear the heave of grievance in her, fuelled by a sense of a broken promise.
Broken promises have a history, of course.
She asks, ‘Do your notes concern me? Will a stranger one day discover me through your notes? I have a right to know. I have a right to represent myself, surely?’
‘Yes, of course. You can make your own notes.’
This exchange occurs late in the novel, after three other members of the family seem to have been lost to the sea in some way. The grievance our narrator nurses is of a visit to Sydney, when an AWOL Carla has forgotten he’s coming. His revenge, of sorts, is to write the Wahine disaster as though he was present, interpreting her point of view.
A fitting epigraph for the novel would be “when the women of a family have sex, the family is finished”
The narrator’s most egregious act of revenge on Carla is to frame her in the story as a beautiful young woman debased by sexuality. In fact, a more fitting epigraph for the novel would be “when the women of a family have sex, the family is finished.” Young beauty Carla is dispatched to Sydney after a local lout “knocked her up.” She gives up the baby and tells the family she’s become a model, but the narrator thinks her “agency” has other business, and that she has paid for her “stucco palace behind Surfers” with money from “professional girlfriending.”
Carla is not the only woman in the novel to be defined and judged by her sexuality, though at least she is permitted her own name. The narrator’s other sister is called simply “the Fish’s mother”, even when she’s 14 and the Fish’s birth is five years away. The novel’s first section is a parade of women behaving badly. Carla admits to the narrator that she doesn’t love her boyfriend, then is sent away to have her baby in secret shame. The younger sister urges the narrator to swim naked with her in the river, taunting him (“Don’t tell me you’ve never seen hair on a pussy”) when he stares. On the way home, he comes across a couple having sex in a car, and the woman asks if she can grip his arm to steady herself. He obliges, standing by the open door and “growing hard” himself, “just as scared as I am curious and excited.” He is 10 years old.
The Fish’s mother doesn’t get Sydney for her teen pregnancy: she’s holed up in a caravan park by the sea, where a neighbour complains about the “rough trade” visiting. She is promiscuous and self-destructive—pills, alcohol, benders. Her father and brother drive to Wellington to pick her up from “the kerb, outside a nightclub, with her knees up, and her skirt around her thighs”, or the wharves, during “her ship-girl phase”. After the Fish is born, her parents take the baby in and she spends time in an institution, longing for a return to her seedy caravan near the water’s edge.
The allegory of The Cage is traded here for engagement with fairytale, fable and parable. After the Fish’s mother absconds, her family return to the park by the dunes. “The caravan has a history and that is what we’ve come to rub against—also, you never know, a genie might appear.” The mystery of the Fish’s paternity encourages the family in its fabulous speculations; they even worry that the Fish may have devoured its own mother. (“This is the crazy place grief takes you,” says the narrator. “To wondering if my sister is trapped inside the wrap of the Fish?”) At play in the novel: Jonah in the Bible—Yunus in the Koran—who is swallowed by a fish; the Mesopotamian myth of Oannes, who was both man and fish; Grimm stories like “The Fisherman and his Wife”, in which an enchanted fish offers both reward and punishment; and “The Fisherman and the Jinni” in A Thousand and One Nights, where a man who also has two daughters and a son is permitted to choose the manner of his own death. And of course, there’s Christ himself, who Jung noted was a “God who was born a fish”, who chose fishermen as his disciples and talked to them about becoming “fishers of men”.
Greek mythology is another lurker here, emphasised when the narrator’s depressed mother (another woman without a name) seeks solace on the Greek island of Paros. Is Suze, the narrator’s university-years girlfriend, a Penelope, patiently waiting for him while he refuses to see her, instead dreaming and fuming his way through various sea adventures? Is her unnamed sister (a “dark pond”) who seduces our narrator in the shower—a letter-to-Penthouse moment—a version of Circe, who bathes and seduces Odysseus?
In Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Circe desires fisherman-turned-sea god Glaucus, whose fish-like appearance frightens Scylla, the nymph he fancies. Jealous Circe poisons the sea water where Scylla bathes, turning her into a monster who guards one side of a strait. Another female sea monster, Charybdis, guards the other side. Greek dramatist Aeschylus— name-checked in The Fish—wrote a play, now lost, about Glaucus. This may seem an imaginative stretch in reading, but think of the novel’s destination: a deadly storm whisked up in Cook Strait, and the sinking of a boat named Wahine.
We must wonder if the narrator is unreliable, or the book
The only sea legends that the novel appears to avoid are Māori. The fatherless Fish could be one of the children of Tangaroa. Maui, born at the edge of the sea, was thrown into the waves and washed onto a beach; he survives to fish up the North Island. Patricia Grace re-writes this in her novel Potiki, where the child with a young mother and no known father is born on the beach and saved from the waves. Like Jones’ fish boy, Toko is not like other kids: he has a “humpy” back and a “turned wispiness” to his legs. Is the reference to a passionfruit vine in The Fish an authorial shout-out to Potiki, where the head and entrail of Toko’s big catch are buried? In a novel so thick with allusions, with a writer (and reader) as narrator, it’s possible, though the explicit references in The Fish are to Western literature and lore.
For all the fine lyricism and clarity of its prose, the novel asks us to suspend disbelief in too many ways. A child who is both fish and boy is persuasive on the page, but less so is a family in the 60s whose scrapyard can fund flights to Disneyland, a flight back from Seoul for the wayward daughter and a helicopter to airlift a caravan. The Wahine grounds one key part of the story in 1968; before that the family have visited Norman Kirk, then leader of the Opposition. But because so many other details are confused or anachronistic, we must wonder if the narrator is unreliable, or the book.
By 1968, the narrator is a university student. But his memories of childhood in the 50s include getting pay for an odd job in decimal currency, not introduced until 1967. Not long after her baby is born, the Fish’s mother tells the narrator to see the 1965 film Doctor Zhivago. But the Fish is an adolescent, maybe even 15 by 1968, when “it wants to leave school and run the yard on a full-time basis”. The narrator’s mother “sings old favourites—a couple of Beatles songs” after the Fish’s mother leaves: one of them is “Blackbird”, not released until the end of 1968.
With pop-culture references so all over the place, why include them at all? Is the narrator no longer able to remember things correctly or place them in the right order? Are they red herrings to confuse us about the “truth” of the past he evokes, or are they careless authorial mistakes? (When the narrator describes a “jogger in a pizza-delivery kind of rush” in a 1968 scene, it’s a jarring moment). In “writing the story of our Fish”, the narrator denies his nephew dialogue, though we know the Fish can both write and speak. In this, and the way the narrator’s solipsistic lists, notes and dreams take over the story, he also denies him humanity. The Fish feels like a novel about the art of writing, not the act of understanding or the embrace of mystery, or the finishing of a family both blessed and cursed by the sea.
The Fish by Lloyd Jones (Penguin, $35) is available in bookstores nationwide. Tomorrow in ReadingRoom: a critique of influential UK economist and author Mariana Mazzucato, ahead of her Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts online event on Thursday with Shamubeel Eaqub.
