Word: ashton
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GREENSTONE, by Sylvia Ashton-Warner. Maori and British-descended New Zealanders come together in a graceful parable of age and childhood, mysticism and reality, told with talent enough to create a subtle celebration of life...
GREENSTONE by Sylvia Ashton-Warner. 217 pages. Simon & Schuster...
Nothing is more boring and embarrassing than an amateur conjurer. Magic must be perfect; real rabbits must emerge from the trick hat. The reader, noting that Sylvia Ashton-Warner's novel is dedicated to a river (New Zealand's Whanganui), that among the chief characters are 13 darling children, most of them under one tin roof, and that various Maori gods and spirits are freely invoked, may suspect that he is being conjured into accepting a crock of anthropological whimsy. Not so; the magic here is real...
...Polynesian Maori, who came to New Zealand from their legendary oceanic island homeland in the 14th century, and the Scotch-English, who arrived in the 19th with the usual guns, Bibles and technological superiority. This, however, is no sad, simple story of savage innocence overwhelmed by progress. Miss Ashton-Warner grinds no stone axes against the bad white man. She does something a great deal more complicated and valuable; she sets in motion a sort of dance of language and imagery in which the childhood of the sophisticated race meets the stubborn memories of the aborigines in a celebration...
...rule. Here the device becomes a knob opening a door to the trancelike continuum of childhood-particularly that of the magic child Huia, with her ancestral talisman, a carved greenstone, and the grace of an imagination that has been touched by the best in two worlds. Sylvia Ashton-Warner does other things easily that most current writers would not attempt to contrive. Huia watches a fight between a brown-skin Maori and a white boy. They are not fighting for status, or out of racial bitterness. The boys are fighting over something real-her, a princess...