Dark tale of people behaving badly
Nicholas Reid finds Lloyd Jones’ new book to be something of a conundrum.
Most of Lloyd Jones’ novels are written in the first person, and you always have to ask yourself what sort of person the narrator is.
There was the young indigenous woman who narrated Jones’ best novel
Mister Pip. There were the multiple, and rather confusing, narrators in the less successful Hand Me Down World.
Of course A History of Silence was written in the first person because it was a memoir. But even then, we had to ask what sort of image of himself Jones intended to convey.
His latest, The Cage, presents us with a conundrum. The narrator is an adolescent male, but neither he nor his country is clearly defined. Somehow the kid’s family has disintegrated and, thanks to relatives, he is living in a country hotel. But what country is this?
At one stage children are heard singing Pokarekare Ana, there’s a reference to Young Nick’s Head, and when the kid sees the landscape from a plane, it looks like New Zealand. Despite ths, we are in the non-specific world of fable, maybe with a soupcon of the post-apocalyptic.
Two strange, tramp-like figures come to town. Usually referred to as ‘‘the strangers’’, they seem to have survived some huge disaster, which they are unable to explain. They are at first treated as curiosities, then as figures of suspicion. Are they a danger? Why won’t they say what has happened to them?
Soon they are locked in a cage out the back of the hotel. A group of ‘‘Trustees’’ monitors them, and the young male narrator has to observe them and make regular reports on them. Tourists come to gawk.
If you thought you were in for a realist novel, you will by now realise that The Cage is more like a parable by Franz Kafka. In Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a man was turned into an insect. In
The Cage, two men are brutalised (in the real sense of the word) by other human beings. Though they protest sometimes, though they sometimes ask for things, they are gradually turned into brutes.
The ‘‘strangers’’ are nicknamed ‘‘the Doctor’’ and ‘‘Mole’’ by the people who have incarcerated them. Their cage is placed over a septic tank, or ‘‘sewage pit’’ as it is usually called in the novel. They have to live in their own excremental filth, so there are many allusions to the stench that surrounds them. They are fed food through the wire mesh of fences. And the narrator remains oddly inert. Occasionally he feels twinges of pity, but he doesn’t intervene.
No worthwhile novel can be reduced to a series of neat ‘‘messages’’. But it is clear that in The Cage, Jones aims to say something about the human capacity to inflict pain on others; to get used to seeing others as inferior; to categorise others as ‘‘alien’’ because they do not come from the same background and especially to move into seeing others as things to be manipulated.
And from the prisoners’ perspective, there is a hint of the Stockholm syndrome, where captives see their captors as potentially benevolent. Whether the novel conveys these things dramatically and convincingly is another problem.