Books

Flying Fox In A Freedom Tree,

by Albert Wendt. Published by Longman Paul: $4.95 hardback; $2.50 paperback. Reviewed by George Clarkson.

In his first novel Sons For The Return Home, Albert Wendt used the story of the Love between a man and a woman of different races to expose the reality of racial problems in New Zealand. He expressed the views that many Samoan people have about New Zealand society and told of their attempts to adjust to a society with different social and cultural values to their own.

Flying Fox In A Freedom Tree, his second book, deals with another area of Samoan experience — with those people who remain in Samoa, or who return to Samoa after living in New Zealand. In this collection of eight short stories and a novella, Wendt tells the story of these 'strangers in a strange land' which happens to be their own. In doing so he provides a 'brilliant study of a traditional island community caught up in the rapid changes of the twentieth century'.

He does this in an extremely effective way. Wendt's deceptively simple style of writing deals with events in a direct and straightforward manner which identifies the reader with a central character in the story — many of the stories (short) are written in the first-person and appear to relate events from Wendt's own life.

In this manner Wendt depicts modern Samoan life as he saw it and leaves the reader to draw his or her own moral judgements: the story of a man whose young wife is killed by an influenza epidemic brought by the 'papalagis' (Europeans); of a young boy visiting a prison; of Peilua who returned from NZ bearing a wondrous suitcase which contained many fine clothes which made him look like a 'papalagi', and of other Samoans who go overseas and return 'with degrees in such things as education, drinking, revolutions, themselves and more themselves etc., and who wave before you the rounded 'r' and the long 'e' and the short 't' in just about everything, especially their own importance.