Books
David Herkt talks with Wellington author David Coventry about his new novel, Dance Prone
ONE, TWO — ONE, TWO! WHYUMP !!!! The band Neues Bauen is on stage — post-punk, posthardcore — and the ruins of it all, the disintegrating roster of gigs in small-town venues across the American Midwest, tour dates dissolving, group dynamics exploding with exhaustion and alcohol, speaker-stacks framing stages, rape and fireworks joining blood and violence and desert cacti caught in car headlights ...
“Music is its own language. It doesn’t need words to exist and to communicate,” says Wellington novelist David Coventry. “It doesn’t need writing. In fact, it completely resists it.” Coventry’s second novel, Dance Prone, defies this and begins as a rich recreation of the music scene of the mid-tolate-1980s. A profound novel about the changes of a lifetime, Dance Prone is also a story of consequences, flipping between past and present as the members of Neues Bauen attempt to discover what happened then — and what happens now.
“This music, this era, the post-hardcore moment as such, was a massive thing for my development as a human in my late teens,” explains Coventry. “The dissonance and dislocated anger were fascinating and I could no longer engage in music passively.”
It is a novel that comes from lived experience. While his award-winning first novel, The Invisible Mile, focused on a New Zealander participating in the 1929 Tour de France, Dance Prone has its origins in Coventry’s time as a guitarist and vocalist in Clay, an early 1990s band in Wellington.
“We were a complete failure — we never released a complete album or anything — although we do have a collection of recordings that would make a pretty good album. The things that we were trying to do — the things that were in my head — are the things I put on the band in Dance Prone.”
When Coventry’s novel begins, Neues Bauen is playing the town of Burstyn, “in the killer cold”. Frontman Conrad Wells and guitarist Tones Seberg rule the melee. But then in the stoned and exhausted aftermath, Con wakes up in the back of the band’s van, being raped by an unseen man while Tones is found shot in the mouth on the gravel outside. It will take 35 years to explore the reverberations, in locations that include North Africa and Wellington’s Wairarapa coast.
Despite its glorious physicality, Dance Prone is a novel that ultimately deals with growing up and recollection. It’s pitch-perfect and nuanced, with carefully delineated characters confronting the onrush of events.
“The thing about memory is that it is not static.
It is not a series of photographs or recordings or movies or whatever,” Coventry says. “It is something that every time we access it, it is altered through the process of bringing it up, from wherever it comes from.”
Dance Prone took five years to write because Coventry has Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS).
After a period of time where he lost his sister to cancer and had a heart attack himself, Coventry became ill with this disease that largely resists cure.
“I was just plain sick. I couldn’t read, I couldn’t follow a basic movie plotline. I just had this battle with this book. The intensity came directly out of that battle, the fight to keep the consciousness of the book alive. In fact, it was a war, really — beyond a battle — and that was how the plots eventually came together, tying together all these intense events in a 34-year timeline. The cognitive effects of ME/CFS are horrific and they are quite present in the book, I think.”
Coventry describes going to his desk every day and trying to write. “I’d open up the file and there would be some writing there and I’d have no idea what it related to ... I couldn’t understand what the book was doing or anything — and this was most of the time. Then I’d have these odd lucid moments and my health would improve enough for me to see it and I’d go and rush and make all these connections and the next day, again, I’d have no memory of what had occurred and I’d screw it up. It was hellish to write.”
The fight has resulted in an extraordinary novel. As Dance Prone proves, Coventry’s work is some of the finest in recent New Zealand literature. His explorations of music and art are remarkable. His characters live and resound. The American Midwest, the city square of Jemaa el-fna in Marrakech, and the coast near Red Rocks in Wellington are all landscapes evoked with clarity.
But there is another unexpected layer. Coventry’s mother is a minister. His father worked on a PHD about the Anglican Church in New Zealand. “The whole problem of religion is that it tries to commodify the ecstatic and it uses the ecstatic to suck people in. But then you can’t step outside of that — this is holy, this is not — it is the whole trick of religion.”
Beneath the surface of the novel are ancient patterns coming together, of music and silence, rite and ceremony, celebration and mourning, agony and ecstasy, death and rebirth. “We are ritualising the destruction of old memory and the consecration of the new,” Coventry explains when he is asked. “And that is the ‘greater thing’.”