Gardening in Eden: Mahy's Postcolonial Ghosts and the New Zealand Landscape
Margaret Mahy’s 1986 young adult novel, The Tricksters, takes place during the Hamilton family’s annual beach holiday at their summer house, Carnival’s Hide. This year, their festivities are disturbed by a number of troubling visitors: Emma, the friend of one of the daughters, and her own daughter—who is also the child of the Hamilton pater familias; a curious forestry student, visiting from England to research Carnival’s Hide’s founder (and who turns out to be descended from the man); and three strangers who wash up on the beach, and appear to—collectively—be the ghost of that founder’s son. Weaving connections among these three sets of visitors, I argue that the novel presents a scenario of haunting that extends far beyond individual ghosts, whether they be literal spirits or metaphorical “ghosts of the past.” The true impact of The Tricksters’ ghosts lies in the way they link past and present not only through the physical haunted house and the characters who inhabit it, but also through the trope of colonialism. Upon examination, in fact, Carnival’s Hide can be seen to be not so much haunted as colonized—and the novel’s chief ghost could be said to be New Zealand’s colonial past.
Carnival’s Hide’s founder, Edward Carnival, was a “pioneer of forestry,” who came to New Zealand from England with plans to found his own model world, free of the sins that beset mankind. He failed in his mission, and ended up killing his own son before returning to England, leaving his tree plantations to gradually merge back in to the native bush. In his ambitions, as well as in his failures, Edward is linked to both Shakespeare’s Prospero and Milton’s deity: a “universe-creator,” he sees his children turn against him and his Paradise irrevocably marred. Moreover, as a planter of trees and creator of gardens, his character evokes not only these literary forbears, but a long line of British colonists determined to gain mastery over the landscape of their new domains.
The Hamiltons and their visitors, in turn, reawaken memories of this experiment in colonialism gone wrong. Their conflicts play out in a highly charged spatial and temporal setting, one that inevitably forces questions of national identity, guilt, and belonging to the fore. The Tricksters is set at Christmastime, and much is made of the family’s attempt to explain the logic of a summery, southern hemisphere Christmas to Anthony, the forestry student; at times, they don’t seem very convinced themselves, sure that the English model is the normative one. This Christmas, moreover, is one that’s celebrated on the beach, and the role of New Zealand’s distinctive landscape—both beach, and the surrounding vegetation—becomes a focal point of the novel’s subtle contest between English and Kiwi identities.
The Hamilton family’s personal history is linked to their national one through the motif of patriarchal misconduct: just as Teddy Carnival’s ghost(s) point a finger at his father’s crime, so Emma’s daughter personifies Jack Hamilton’s misdeeds. Ultimately, the Hamiltons must come to terms not only with their own immediate past, but with their identity as Kiwis descended from settlers. Aware of their English roots, yet moving past them to firmly claim the mantle of New Zealand identity, the Hamilton family succeeds in exorcising its ghosts, both literal and metaphorical.
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