Becky Manawatu’s debut novel Auē won two Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and Best Crime Novel at the Ngaio Marsh Awards. She is of Māori and Pākehā* background, as are Keri Hulme and Alan Duff with whose novels, The bone people and Once were warriors, Auē has been compared. These books address the intergenerational trauma and violence, within Māori and Pākehā communities, that are the legacy of colonisation and marginalisation.

Now, when I first saw the title – and the covers don’t help here – I assumed it referred to a local New Zealand/Aotearoa bird. But no, as the back cover of my Scribe edition explains, auē is a verb meaning “to cry, howl, groan, wail, bawl” and an interjection expressing “astonishment or distress”. Now you know it, you can hear it, can’t you – and it’s perfect for this book.

However, Auē is not all grim. There is warmth and some humour, but I’m jumping ahead. First, the story. Centred around two brothers, 17-year-old Taukiri (Tauk) and 8-year-old Ārama (Ari), Auē looks back to why Tauk deposits Ari with their aunt Kat and husband Stu at the novel’s opening, and forward to what happens after that. These two timelines, are told in three main strands, two in the brothers’ first person voices, and the other, third person, focusing on Tauk’s mother Jade and her husband Toko. The italicised voice of Ari’s mother, Aroha, appears partway through the novel. Now dead, she offers a knowing, wiser perspective on what we are seeing:

We roar, we shake at the world, we weep, but most of the time roaring and shaking and weeping only makes everything much worse. (p. 174)

Auē is not an easy read, and not just because of the subject matter. It has many characters and several locations, so it takes some concentration to keep track of where we are and, more significantly, who is related to whom.

“the bottomlessness to my life was dizzying” (Tauk)

But, it is well worth persevering because things do fall into place, and because, for all the auē we feel throughout Auē, this is a story about human beings, the messes they get into and, significantly, why. Some are of their own making while some are out of their control, but even those of their own making – aimlessness, drug taking, and some of the violence – can be seen to have origins in dysfunction, in poverty, in lack of opportunity. There are awful scenes of violence, the worst being those where you can see people are trapped in something they can’t easily escape, such as Aunty Kat in her marriage to the violent Stu, and Jade and her cousin living in the violence-ridden, drug-fuelled “House” before she meets the gentle Toko.

Jade’s story is complex, starting with parents who loved her but who had their own demons meaning hers was an erratic, risky and sometimes violent upbringing, only to be followed by a possessive violent lover (one of many men who had owned her over time). As a result, when she meets the decent Toko, his mother, Colleen, is concerned. She likes Jade but fears what she brings with her, and the risk it means for her son.

Meanwhile, troubled Tauk, who had abandoned Ari to Kat, believing it’s right thing because Ari “didn’t know I was trouble and that bad things happened to the people I loved”, heads to the North Island. He wants to get a job, but eventually falls in with a group of young people, where a caring young woman struggles to keep him away from the drug culture – the old cycle – he is being pulled into.

Set against these scenes focusing on adults are those involving Ari and his friend and neighbour, Beth, the daughter of widower, Tom Aiken. Beth is a confident, no-nonsense young girl who has also suffered loss but who, under her father’s care, has developed a decent moral compass (albeit, due to his inattention, she has also developed a toughness that might be her undoing. After all, who lets an 8-year-old watch Quentin Tarantino’s Django unchained). Ari and Beth’s friendship offers a lovely antidote to the other relationships in the novel. They observe and talk about what they see, and role-play different ways of being.

Tom is the adult-breath-of-fresh-air in the novel. He quietly offers Ari safety and security, food and nurture when violence erupts next-door, and he slowly works on getting Kat to leave Stu, though as we know leaving domestic violence is far easier said than done. The novel builds to a shocking climax.

As readers we follow these characters with hope in our hearts but knots in our stomachs. Manawatu beautifully captures the precarity of lives lived on the edge – economically, physically, emotionally.

So, the characters, in all their messiness, engage our attention, but it’s the writing that keeps us interested. Manawatu does what Walton did much later in I am Nannertgarrook (my review) which is to pepper her story with Māori language (explained in a glossary at the back). We learn about whakamā, the sense of shame many characters feel, and the beautiful whenua, a word for land but also, pointedly, placenta. We experience more than one tangi (funeral), and so on. As in Walton’s novel, these are mostly clear from the context.

Besides the language, many motifs – positive (such as a guitar, birds and the sea) and ominous (Bones Bay, paradoxically, also the sea) – thread through the novel, connecting the various chronologies and characters. Ultimately, Auē is both deeply tragic and quietly hopeful. Like the best novels, Manawatu does not judge her characters but lets us see them in all their reality, encouraging us to think about what made them, why they are where they are, and what might be needed for them to escape the destructive cycles they find themselves in.

Last year Becky Manawatu published a sequel to this novel, Kataraina, which takes up Aunty Kat’s story. The idea of stories and storytelling crops up frequently in Auē, with suggestions that stories, even broken ones, can comfort or heal or redeem. I would love to see where she goes in her sequel – and thank Brother Gums for giving me this book.

* Local term for European New Zealander.

Becky Manawatu
Auē
Melbourne: Scribe, 2022 (Orig. ed. 2019)
326pp.
ISBN: 9781922585295