Blame is part of the problem ...

The novel is full of ellipses, images, words and phrases repeated at distances, elaborate echoes and parentheses. Almost nothing is assertive. Almost all is contingent, partial, suggestive.

Near the beginning, paragraphs trail off and wash in again past such phrases as “wait on …” “wait, listen …” “hang on …” In this patient and enduring flow, there’s an attention to the material conditions which constitute the characters’ reality that makes equally immediate a ship’s deck or a nocturnal car park, a headless corpse thrashing in the ocean or the equally unnerving sight of a dead baby whale in a fish shop owner’s freezer.

The book is ambitious but also achieved; it is compulsive, and at times horrific but also finely humorous. Its vision is almost surreal but its language is wonderfully rolling, delightedly articulate, its movement leisured and certain, masterfully paced, sardonic and poignant by slow turns. And if the dialogue is overtly poised, it is never merely arch.

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The introduction by a certain Dr Keehua Roa of the University of West Hawai’i is cleverly informative but is it reliable? There is no “University of West Hawai’i”. “Keehua Roa” are Maori words suggesting a name for Herman Melville’s fictional character the Long Ghost John Troy, from Omoo (but he wasn’t fictional).

The novel’s narrative counterpoints the stories of Melville’s contemporary, James Heberley, a 19th-century blow-in castaway mariner, and a 1980s Researcher in Wellington.

As the Researcher sits in a McDonald’s bar, there’s a feast of inversion. The letters M c D appear in reverse order mirrored on the plateglass window, and no ghostly Doctor but a Phantom Rollerskater outside glides through them. The Researcher hopelessly explains to his small audience of mocking young Rastas that more than half the world’s forests have been destroyed since about 1960, mainly, it seems, in order to make “ways in”: facilitating the consumption of this garbage: cardboard packages for quick takeaways.

His mouth full of disgusting mush, he comments: “the besht organished genoshide you ever…” and is instantly answered, “We never did it!” But there’s no exemption in innocence or ignorance and when he finds momentary refuge and relief minutes later in a public urinal, he can’t help but gasp at the freshly-scribed graffito: “THE MEEK DON’T WANT IT”

The concerns of the novel are global and even more pressing now than they were in 1986 – McDonald’s is as global a concern as nuclear fission.

Another New Zealand poet, Leigh Davis, once wrote: “… a McDonald’s hamburger is… a highly evolved type of product, it hasn’t got there overnight … it has come about as a result of a lot of R&D and a lot of decision-making of a rich kind and McDonald’s hamburgers are rich in implications.”

The time between Heberley and Melville and the Researcher and ourselves has gone in very quickly. What most frightened Heberley on his first voyage to the Pacific was the idea of cannibalism. Cannibalism is our present condition. The forests, the burgers – “his finger that had poked through the clammy burger smelled faintly of onion and arsehole”.

(Melville too was interested in the odorous. Chapter 92 of Moby-Dick finds him referring to the learned Fogo von Slack, his great work on Smells, a text book on that subject) – bonemarrow, thyroids, the nucleii: we human beings are eating ourselves. Full circle. Short circuit. And the ante upped with the scale.

Ed Dorn noted decades ago: “One of the increasingly urgent searches in writing today is to find an adequate exclamation.” But Wedde seems well aware that that search can extend too long for its own usefulness, can take up too many vital energies and may reach nowhere anyway. If you can find no exclamation adequate, does pessimism follow?

Bleakness and despair extend beyond tragedy or the hope of release; and past the farce that follows that, as Wedde acknowledges the Marxian analysis. In 1851, Moby-Dick was published and in the same year Louis Bonaparte seized power in France by a coup d’état: “… Karl Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, with some difficulty analyses the paradoxical means by which authority, prejudice, power, vested interests, corruption and closed minds can successfully place a complete clown at the head of a state power in total domination of civil society … Ronald McDonald …”

Send in the Clowns since then. What a long parade of the truly ghastly. Well, “we are all late / in a slow time” Charles Olson wrote as long ago as 1953. We’ve been taking an awfully a long time to catch up.

In the 19th century, Robert Louis Stevenson (below) projected an epic novel about the impact of Westerners on a Polynesian community but we were denied that by his early death in 1894, only three years after Melville’s, nearly half a century after Edgar Allan Poe’s, who also wrote about the hollow earth.

With all his resources and invention, his zestful and expansive energy, his deep sense of the sour taste of superficiality, Wedde’s novel is a contemporary version of what that might have been: the impact of Westerners on the Pacific, which is to say, the Earth. But the novel is also eloquent witness to the fact that the forces which lie at the creation of the universe are never entirely omnipotent. It’s salutary to find John Berger’s words in reference to Leopardi so closely applicable here. “The production of reality has never been finished, its outcome has never been made decisive. Something is always in the balance. Reality is always in need. Even of us, damned and marginal as we may be.”

HOW haunting and pertinent Wedde’s novel remains returned to me when visiting New Zealand last December. I was recollecting the protests that had been going on since the 1980s, with Greenpeace, the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, the French nuclear tests in the Pacific.

When I was invited to contribute to a book entitled Below The Surface: Words And Images In Protest At French Testing On Moruroa, edited by Aubrey Hall (Auckland: Vintage New Zealand/Random House, 1995), I sent in the following poem.

The Coral Island “Even the dead will not be safe from this enemy, if he wins.” – Walter Benjamin The border was there. We had been protected.

Today the shield is broken. Nothing but waves, and rocks, And Empire’s bleak intention to englut: an ocean breaking past us, on our sense of what should be.

Justice is for everyone, and anyone to see; but judgement’s always singular, and all last things are lonely.

The ocean that surrounds our isolation is unpredicted element.

We trust to its encircling, and resounding; we are committed to it, in the end.

The fleet is our example: set sail, set keel to current cross-wise with wreckage to fear, brave hearted, women and men with knowledge of the consequence most likely: Casualties of war, the wrong end of empire, stupidity of suits, the fluency of lies.

A struggle that always continues, in words and in these human lives.

This is what prevails, day after day, night after night, calling out for freedom from the wrong that is as one with empire’s name.

These people are pledged: their grasp is all the world, and they are strange, for they will attack the poor as violently as the rich.

“Theft, destruction, rape, these are their Empire. They make a desert and then call it peace.”

In spite of their kind, “some elements of worth with difficulty persist, here and there on the earth.”

Like everything we have been saying in these columns for years now, the truth is partial, always complementary, never absolute.

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We learn about belonging as we go. All languages – literally, languages, but then also the languages of arts, genres, distinctive ways of approaching, and expressing, what truth is, where it can be found – all and each and every one is and are parts of this infinite rehearsal, always only practised in fact in the process, delivering, when discovered, those moments of perception and then of understanding, the vinegar of seeing sharp, the honey of acknowledgement, of deepening knowledge, experience’s wealth.

These are perennial questions. How pertinent they are, in Scotland, or in Palestine! Not to compare and not to compete in atrocity, but to approach from the other side, in the search for value.

Palestine’s great poet, Mahmoud Darwish, puts it like this, in his book Journal Of An Ordinary Grief (1973; New York: archipelago books, English translation Brahim Muhawi, 2010): “…rocks possess the power of living language…”

(Image: Getty)

The first part of this book is a dialogue between Mahmoud as a child and the adult Mahmoud. When the adult says the words above, and adds, “This is my homeland” the child asks a question and is given the necessary reply.

– Is it the lost paradise then?

– Beware of this expression, because to believe it would be to surrender to a state of being that has reached its legal and existential limits. The difference between a lost paradise in its absolute sense and the lost paradise in its Palestinian meaning is that the former understanding would keep the condition of longing, and psychological and rightful belonging, out of the sphere of the conflict.

As long as the struggle continues, the paradise is not lost but remains occupied and subject to being regained ... This is how my homeland surpasses Paradise: it is like Paradise, but it is also attainable.

This is how I think of Scotland. Imagine a political circumstance in which the government of a powerful nation takes the initiative to completely disestablish its neighbouring nation. This means eradicating its language or languages, history and culture.

It means killing or clearing its people away, over a long period of time. It means forcing those people into the service of the more powerful county, indoctrinating them in the belief that this is the right and only thing to do and ensuring that that then becomes a self-indoctrination that can be passed on across generations and become self-sustaining.

Imagine that this powerful nation has enlisted the neighbouring nation as a willing and eager partner in a centuries-long project of global domination and exploitation of wealth and resources, but that is now receding as an increasing number of countries around the world cut themselves off from the once so powerful empire.

Imagine now that the powerful nation discovers that the neighbouring nation has great material resources of its own, which the powerful nation can take, almost at will, with very little objection and none that is very effective.

Land, oil, water, and a small and containable and largely controllable population.

Now here’s the question: What would that powerful nation do to keep control?

There’s an American crime writer I go back to sometimes named Ross Macdonald. He’s in the line of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and his best work comes from the 1950s, 60s and 70s. You might have seen the actor Paul Newman play his main character, Lew Archer, in two films, Harper – based on the novel The Moving Target – and The Drowning Pool.

Macdonald’s work is increasingly concerned not simply with putting the bad guys out of business but rather in trying to find out where responsibility lies. Bad things are done by people whose potential is worked up to bring out the worst in them by a whole set of circumstances. How can we change this? Start by understanding it.

We know it’s true. We know very well how screen technology, online “social” media, promotes trolling, misogyny, vicious hostility to languages like Scots and Gaelic. We know that sensationalising mass media exploit this for commercial priorities and thus insult themselves and demean their readers.

In an article in the Los Angeles Review of Books, from April 22, 2011 (lareviewofbooks.org/article/black-blood-ross-macdonald-and-the-oil-spill/), the author says Macdonald can help us understand a sense of what that “larger responsibility” is.

“For a detective novelist, he was remarkably uninterested in assigning blame; his alter ego Archer often talks more like a probation officer, psychiatrist, or even defense attorney, than like a cop or judge. ‘I think blame is one of the things we have to get rid of,’ Archer says in The Wycherly Woman (1961).

“‘When children blame their parents for what’s happened to them, or parents blame their children for what they’ve done, it’s part of the problem, and it makes the problem worse. People should take a close look at themselves. Blaming is the opposite of doing that’.”

In Macdonald’s books, “The murderers whom he identifies have brought their dark passions into the present from the past, where they themselves were betrayed or corrupted; guilt is a web of relationships and needs; it is sometimes hard to tell the victims from the victimizers.”

That’s as true today as it was then. It’s true of what’s happening in different parts of the globe today, and not least in Scotland.

There’s more than one way to get rid of the bad guys.

Ten years on from 2014, maybe that is something we should reflect upon.