rev. of Shark Dialogues by Kiana Davenport
Shark Dialogues
A novel by Kiana Davenport. Atheneum, $22.00 cloth. Reviewed by Katherine Min.
Hawaiian-born writer Kiana Davenport’s new novel,
Shark Dialogues, resembles a myriad of dreams, each of them urgent and vivid, some dark with destruction and heartbreak, others bright with triumph, all shimmering with sensual beauty. Davenport manages to create a world that seems both real and mythological, a place of concrete history and pure magic.
The novel concerns an extraordinary family, descendants of a nineteenth-century shipwrecked Yankee sailor and the runaway daughter of a Tahitian chieftain. Their great-granddaughter, Pono, one of the most powerful female characters in recent fiction, is the story’s compelling center. A beautiful, pure-blooded Polynesian Hawaiian, Pono is a
kahuna, or seer, who dreams the future and walks with a cane made from the spine of a man she murdered. Her fierce strength and almost terrible dignity dominate the book and bind its characters. “She was
kahuna, creating more life around her than was actually there, heightening the momentousness of each living thing by simply gazing upon it.”
When she is eighty years old, Pono summons her four granddaughters, Ming, Vanya, Rachel, and Jess, each of “mix blood” parentage, to her coffee plantation on the Big Island. Having driven their mothers from her life almost willfully, Pono is ready now to tell her granddaughters the incredible secrets of their family history, secrets that include her all-consuming love affair with a man kept hidden from the world.
Pono’s story is the story of Hawaii, and the islands become the novel’s real central characters. The prose is as lush and sensual as the land it conjures — from the dense jungles and rain forests that retain the natural wildness of Hawaii to the greasy alleyways of the opium dens in Honolulu, from the desolate peninsula of the leper colony at Moloka’i to the black moonscape of hardened lava below Mauna Loa. And always, everywhere, is the ocean, the water which surrounds them.
Land and water abide, land and water heal. “In physically rejuvenating the land, he renewed something spiritual and intellectual within himself,” Davenport writes of Pono’s lover — a process of renewal shared by all of her characters.
It would be impossible to sum up the many stories
Shark Dialogues contains, but the history of this family, of this island, burgeons with life: whale hunts, shipwrecks, volcanic eruptions, wars, terrorist bombings, murders, rapes, suicides, the slow, sickening waste of diseases. People die in horrible agony, in body and in spirit; they fall in love and lose one another, couple in fierceness and desperation. And many, against all the odds, survive.
Shark Dialogues is also the story of a paradise lost, of a once strong and proud people overrun by outside exploitation, by development and its attendant ills, the West literally rotting native flesh, sapping its will and strength. The excesses of the novel are the excesses of the epic — the prose sometimes purple, the plot galloping from tidal wave to Pearl Harbor — but it is the nature of Davenport’s achievement that we admire her sheer ambition, her determination to work on as large a canvas as possible, to include everything, and to spend it all.
Katherine Min’s fiction has appeared in Ploughshares,TriQuarterly,
and other magazines. A new story is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner.
