Finding his voice
His books have garnered international success but writing is still a hard slog, Lloyd Jones tells Bess Manson.
The stench of human misery hit Lloyd Jones like a freight train as he emerged from the subway to Keleti Railway Station, Budapest. Even for a writer with a knack for setting a vivid scene, this was one he could never have imagined: three and a half thousand Syrian refugees who had fled civil war camped out on the concourse of the railway station, largely ignored by a public going about their business.
The indignation he felt at the miserable scene lit the fuse for his latest book, The Cage, an allegory on what it is to witness and do nothing; what it is to see ghastliness normalised.
It was late in the summer of 2015 and Jones and his partner, Australian writer Carrie Tiffany, had come to meet Jones’ daughter, Sophia Duckor-Jones, for a holiday.
“The smell as we rose up that series of escalators was extraordinary. In the West we have gone from the point where we can smell each other. We are always disguising it. But here was the smell of humanity camped out in the station. Three and a half thousand people. The scale of it was bewildering.”
The planned holiday was shelved as they stayed to help where they could.
The authorities did little. A few portable toilets rendered unusable after an hour, a so-called migrant service station that handed out water and yoghurt for half an hour or two a day, Jones says.
“A baby was born in that station; there were people in wheelchairs, for God’s sake. And what did the local people do? Nothing.
“The ones I saw were picking their way through encampments of people, shaking their heads, some of them spitting. At night-time people threw firecrackers down on these people – people already traumatised by war. It was incredibly distressing.”
The Cage brings two strangers fleeing an unknown but greatly feared catastrophe to a hotel, where they are observed by a young man charged with noting their every move. Their suffering is both perpetuated and pitied by those who see fit to cage them.
It was written out of a sense of indignation of this and other world events were people have become “the other”, where suffering has been witnessed but ignored. It’s a harrowing read, but a compelling one.
How do people go from being part of our tribe to being outside of it? That’s the question Jones is asking.
You don’t have to look far for examples of injustice, of mass exodus by those fleeing persecution and civil war: Syria, Myanmar, Manus Island.
“All the political rhetoric these days, here and in Europe, the United States, the stigmatisation of other, the talk of building walls – it’s a disgraceful moment in our history.”
THE ANTI-CELEBRITY
Walking around the perimeter of his 22 acre farm, we are a long way from that day at Keleti Station. His book is about to be launched into the world. He has had his say on the matter. Now it’s the reader’s turn.
Jones, 62, likes his privacy. The remoteness of his home is evidence of that. After some uphill, down dale and past the woolshed kind of directions, his eco off-grid house comes into sight. It’s an urban pad in a rural idyll backed by two humble
The ones I saw were picking their way through encampments of people, shaking their heads, some of them spitting. At night-time people threw firecrackers down on these people – people already traumatised by war. It was incredibly distressing.
corrugated-roofed writing huts – one his, the other Tiffany’s. It feels pretty isolated, despite being just 20 minutes from the wine-producing town of Martinborough.
Jones is no farmer though. Despite the sheep grazing on his hilly paddocks, those hands don’t get too dirty. But country life is written all over him. A kitchen garden is a source of personal pride; gumboots are his footwear of choice; his stocky arms and creased face are tanned by a month of 30 degree days, many of which have been spent playing “Old Bastards” cricket this summer.
He does this walk around his land most days. It gets the juices flowing. Towards the end of the trail through the pine forest (“those damn things”) Jones picks up the pace – a horse bolting for home. A city man lurks within.
He divides his time between here and Melbourne, where Tiffany lives.
Before the house took shape, Jones stayed in his tiny writing hut, sleeping on the rudimentary mezzanine floor at night, bashing away at the keyboard by day. He washed in the nearby river and cooked on a barbecue. Quite the rustic scene for a Wellington city slicker.
Home is a term loosely used by Jones in recent years. In 2015 he spent a year in Australia as a resident writer at the JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide. A DAAD fellowship from the German Embassy took him to Berlin for 2016/17 – his second foray there after a Creative New Zealand fellowship in 2007.
He looks settled now. The house is inviting. Despite the misty but warm morning, a wood burner flickers.
From a wall of mostly hardback books, he reaches for a copy of his latest. “Here,” he says, “have this. I’ve got to get rid of them somehow.”
This is the part he’s least comfortable with: peddling the damn thing.
You are expected to stand beside your book in the public arena, he says. “If you have a performative gene it’s OK, but I don’t. Some other ambassadorial version of Lloyd Jones emerges. Some people enjoy being in the limelight. I’m just not one of them.”
He is completely derisive of the notion of fame and celebrity culture. Here in New Zealand it’s alive and well and wholly pathetic, he says.
“Everything has been dumbed down. It’s the lowest common denominator leading the show now.”
He has a lot to say about this. When he stops for air, he mentions that it’s a Jones trait to lead with opinion. The facts come later.
With his take on celebrity culture it’s difficult to avoid mentioning his elder son Avi’s participation in the reality series Survivor New Zealand – which, incidentally, he won.
A wry smile deepens the map of lines on his face. It was all a bit of a mystery to Jones, who also has a younger son, Sam.
He wrote about Avi after his win and while curious and mystified at his participation, his pride is palpable.
A LACK OF INTIMACY
Jones was a Lower Hutt lad.
He wasn’t a big scholar; lived through his body, he says.
“I didn’t know I had an intellect. Physical expression, sport, that’s how I interacted with the world.”
That said, books were always present in his life. His mother was an avid reader and the path to the Lower Hutt Memorial Library was a well trodden one.
He recalls reading Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives, Ian Serraillier’s The Silver Sword. He loved Oscar Wilde.
He was often sick as a child and read himself to recovery. His siblings – three sisters and brother –