Tu

The novel Tu opens and closes with a letter. New Zealander Tu Hokowhitu-a-Tu owes an explanation to his niece and nephew, Rimini and Benedict. Sandwiched between the letters there are Tu's journals interspersed with third person flashbacks. In his journals Tu tries to tackle the war in his own words. The war everyone is signing up for. World War II. In flashbacks we learn Big Brother Pita thought he should stay home to care for his family until the fighting pulls him in and seesm to be the only way out. Pita follows feisty Brother Rangi, already wild with battle. Left behind is little Te Hokowhitu-a-Tu. Too-young-to-go-to-war Tu, but there's no place he would rather be. Maybe because of his brothers? He wants to be useful. He wants to get away. Through his journals he implies enlistment means freedom and despite being underage he signs up for the Maori Battalion.I found it interesting that all three brothers would want to go into battle after seeing what war did to their father. Coming back from World War I and wracked by post traumatic stress disorder, their father at times was a wild and raging man; given to fits of insanity and violence.

Three brothers a long way from home. Rangi, Pita and Tu are fighting with the 28th Maori Battalion in Italy during World War II. The novel moves back and forth through time and place, from their childhood, their move and integration into Wellington society in the early 1940s, and the mud-caked rubble of Cassino, Italy. Only Tu will live and return to New Zealand, his brothers take care of that. But he is not the same boy that went away. I didn't enjoy this novel as much as I had hoped to.

I know, I know.....another war novel. No it is not. This is a story set during WWII, featuring the Maori Battalion of New Zealand. This is more than a war story. This story is told via the protagonist's journal kept during the war and afterwards. This is the story of brothers and cousins bound together by blood and culture. This is the story of loves found and lost. This is the story of the cost of war. This is the story of a culture which was used and manipulated. This is the story of a proud culture with rich, joyful traditions. This story is about being a Maori warrior, a Maori man, a lover, a son, a brother, a cousin, an uncle, and ultimately about being a human being whose life is battered and broken and then tries to heal.The author's prose is lyrical, joyful and profoundly moving. The narrator for the audiobook was fantastic!! I learned a lot and loved Tu's courage, joy, and attitude. READ THIS!

It's been a while since I read Patricia Grace. I had forgotten her ability to weave great themes of human existence in and out amongst themes of national identity and themes of Maori identity and themes of the individual identities of her characters. Or maybe that is just the magnificence of this novel. More even than in Potiki, which I read more years ago than I care to remember, and in a further off place than I care to recall, these authorial skills are inspirational. In Tu, injustices dealt by pakeha to maori are presented, not laboured. The sheer stark bloodiness of an infantry war is acknowledged, but not dramatized. The complexity of family relations, especially as truncated by cataclysm (in this case not just one, but two brutal conflicts), of love, of loneliness and post traumatic dysfunctionality, are all presented, explored, and left for the reader to comprehend. And the reader must confront these themes from the moment she or he drifts back to check the placement of a strategic apostrophe. As with Potiki, there is, here, salvation, rebirth. This salvation dwells somewhere in the blank lines after the final, absent full-stop. It is an eschatological salvation. But it is the salvific moment to which the entire narrative strains.

It's been a while since I read Patricia Grace. I had forgotten her ability to weave great themes of human existence in and out amongst themes of national identity and themes of Maori identity and themes of the individual identities of her characters. Or maybe that is just the magnificence of this novel. More even than in Potiki, which I read more years ago than I care to remember, and in a further off place than I care to recall, these authorial skills are inspirational. In Tu, injustices dealt by pakeha to maori are presented, not laboured. The sheer stark bloodiness of an infantry war is acknowledged, but not dramatized. The complexity of family relations, especially as truncated by cataclysm (in this case not just one, but two brutal conflicts), of love, of loneliness and post traumatic dysfunctionality, are all presented, explored, and left for the reader to comprehend. And the reader must confront these themes from the moment she or he drifts back to check the placement of a strategic apostrophe. As with Potiki, there is, here, salvation, rebirth. This salvation dwells somewhere in the blank lines after the final, absent full-stop. It is an eschatological salvation. But it is the salvific moment to which the entire narrative strains.