Shark Dialogues (Critical Review)
When it comes to reading a book I like to find myself intrigued from the moment I open the cover, absorbed into a completely different reality not besmirched by the typical jabbering of hipsters and glued tighter than those semi-psychotic art students who spent one too many afternoons with one hand on their copy of George Orwell’s 1984, and the other on a blunt object in anticipation of the day their deluded paranoiac fantasies finally come to fruition. Needless to say Shark Dialogues by Kiana Davenport completely skipped the lecture on intrigue.
The story itself is coming from an avenue somewhat familiar: a lengthy and opinionated novel which touches on the subjects of ancestry, old tradition, and intermixing of race. Though much more persisted on in the novel, it comes down to being a semi-historical narrative with the touch of a tall tale. That being said, it eludes me that while it doesn’t try to take itself too seriously and merge into the grey mass of textbook it still manages to run together in a slimy and somewhat malformed mess of themes and ideas which only managed to pique interest in the more unambiguous and historical sections.
Most would agree that the first impression is the lasting one and the impression I got was a scattered, fractal, repetition of the same schizophrenic semi-racist, shock and awe attempt drivel. I normally am not one to indulge in romance unless it tries to tread new ground, but I consistently had a hard time trying to identify with any of the characters in any way. The story jumped to and fro, not really trying to explain some of the more radical reactions of the parents, cousins, and relatives. The book leans on the prospect that most people will culturally identify with the sentiments of the Hawaiian struggle and while the main audience was intended to be those who could identify with it I am left alone on my corrupt mainland capitalist pig-dog society of automatons without soul or remorse for anything ever.
The the main reason I struggled to continue reading is the constant grinding that one has to go through with little reward in the end of it all.
Those summers would always be mingled in Jess’ memory with
horse-sweat man-sweat stench of furious bulls manure and fear shave-ice
wet hay pineapple spears a circus-smell excitement expectation as they
approached the grounds flying dust of bullrings catching in her eyes
aureoling fence posts the bands the paniolo turning everything into a
dream…” (Davenport 7)
There was much more included. In fact, that wasn’t even half of that single run-on abomination which sprawled an entire page and which would earn any UK published author a night in the Tower of London. This was understandably done from an artistic sense, but when the reader has eye drops on standby whilst reading a single sentence it becomes readily apparent that some form of punctuation neglect could be filed in a legal sense. There are quite a few other instances in which the full page sentence method is used but overall the practice spans into a much more prevalent problem with the novel: A whole lot of words that give us nothing in return for reading them.
Certain aspects which I actually enjoyed reading seemed only to exist for the moments in which they were used like carefully scattered caltrops of character development such as a scene in which Ming, the Asian-Islander mixed girl is reading in the garden:
Ming sat alone in her garden of blue ginger, face so pale she seemed to fade
into the white of an aging afternoon. Beyond her high hedged tiny yard,
traffic honked in potholed streets of Kalihi, outside downtown Honolulu.
She sighed, closed her eyes, the book she held sliding to the grass.
(Davenport 18)
Ming was told to have gone on in her own mind to battle alongside her story hero K’ang-hsi. From my understanding of her daydreaming and fantasizing of her adventures in her books she was indeed an avid reader. She was also described as being an individual who fled into the realm of her books to escape from the painful reality that was. To be purely honest it was quite possibly the only character I even remotely connected with, being an avid reader for pleasure and therapy myself, but the more I read this passage the more I felt the efforts taken to write this story could have been better focused on Ming, a far more interesting and less neurotic character than Pono.
Ming in fact pretty much addresses half of the questions I myself had formed throughout the reading in one simple statement saying:
Rachel, Vanya, Jess see me as mystical, a kind of martyr nailed to the
crucifix of pain, humiliation. How can I explain to them how illness brings
its twisted gifts. Privacy. And journeys. Dark hinterlands where creatures
jibber, jeer, and drool. My wolf visitations. My cousins mistake my silences
for wisdom, my intuitions for magic. O dearest women, barefoot familiars of
my youth! If I am magical it is only in the way rotting trees give off a kind of
light… (Davenport 201)
In this statement I feel as though Ming beat me to the punch on my other concern with Shark Dialogues: While being a mystical blend of history and magic it always feels as if Pono and the others might be taking the mana thing a bit too seriously. This would be good if I could be convinced through character that their efforts were indeed worth pursuing. However, after so many pages of vague mysticism intertwined with convoluted ways to describe the simplest of everyday happenings I started to feel as though the background static was turning into a more interesting story that what was being presented.
I understand the desire to stay with a certain idea once you have it. Being a writer of fiction I think I understand just how frustrating it can be to have an idea hit the grinder in the most violent and inelegant sort of way but even still one can pick through the smoldering remains and find hidden diamonds. I won’t lie about it either, I read reviews on the book and found quite a few that felt the same way: As if the focus should have been shifted at some point or the story was forged onwards out of some sort of stubbornness to refuse reform. Yet, in a more basic sense there is one thing that strikes out the most and turns me off more than anything: That the fact that despite all of this characterization that is done in the on-again off-again sort of way the book feels more like a rant. Or more than a very longwinded rant on everything wrong with the things that didn’t align with this mystical Pono woman.
Even most of the side characters go so far as to devalue themselves in comparison to Pono, described as cowering and fearful of her awesome presence, being bastard children before her as if she were some God installed monarch, and yet in the end it kind of just made me feel more distanced from the intended protagonist. Instead I became more interested in the side characters, especially Ming. I can’t wrap my head around it perfectly, but Ming is a character I can associate with quite a bit.
All the other characters strike me as something out of a strange living Hawaiian caricature ranging from selfish and ignorant to downright neurotic. Ming was a thinker, suffered for her mind and her thoughts and predicaments, was cursed and afflicted knowing that her familiars didn’t see her as she saw herself. All of this was done in a way that would make Virgil from The Divine Comedy take a few moments to admire his own sordid affiliations for a change but that is what made her interesting, wasn’t it? An identifiable human being who one might genuinely be interested to be around if non-fictional. Identification with oneself is typically what makes one enjoy a character.
Jess was tragic with the later story revealing her rape at the hands of a malicious doctor. She was a bit unexplored however, and didn’t really develop into a character one can desire to go further in depth with. Memories were scarcely made with many of the characters in a meaningful way. Most would come to have some sort of cannonball of flame shock tactic behind it such as Vanya’s inner thoughts late on in the novel which read as she reflects on her life outside of home as follows:
University… this haole wahine professor… a fondness for hugging me,
which repulses me. Can’t stand the idea of one of them touching me.
Fish-belly skin, freckles, yellow teeth, their smell. And watching the news,
violence on the mainland, a black boy charred, body parts dispersed.
Sometimes in class, I’m the only dark-skin in a room of whites. I panic. Will I
get out alive? Sometimes hating my Hawaiian mother, Filipino father.
Sometimes hatred of myself. Men saying I’m beautiful who only want to fuck
me. Maybe afterwards they will shit on me. (Davenport 193)
In one fell swoop I lost all sympathy for this character and then some for the book, but this is mainly because it really didn’t seem warranted as little conflict seemed to stem from anything but herself and her family rather than haoles. If any white author had written this I could almost guarantee you there would be some seriously upset human rights activists shooting out of their wingtips and out for blood. Not only that but it turned a character I had a modicum of pity for into a brooding and ignorant preteen. I understand from personal familiar experiences that past events can lead to future hurt. However, I feel at this point in her life she should be striking out against such prejudices or perhaps question them a bit more thoroughly but she continues on after this rant with another equally vehement one when she describes smarmily her way of survival when she is destined to travel to Chicago:
BY WEARING IMAGINARY WHITE SKIN. By working part-time, full-time,
anything. And getting off that Chicago plane terrified, so terrified. Knowing
if I didn’t freeze to death, the next three years would bleed me dry. And
mainland classmates “nicing” me to death. “Where exactly is Hawai’i?”
“What language do you people speak?” And townies with their bloodshot
eyes, yelling from their pickups. “Hey, Nigger. Wetback. Bitch.” Serving
burgers at a fast-food. Switch-board operator. Two jobs, six days a week.
Walking home at night, razor blades taped to my fingers. Scissors up my
sleeves. Studying alone, eating-living-crying alone. Wanting so badly to make
it, to be adequate to my dreams… (Davenport 194)
At this point I set the book down and made a scowl that would have made Batman proud and set off to read The Langoliers again because that was without a doubt one of the most bigoted and self-righteous things I have ever heard a character spew. It wasn’t even one of those passages that is really necessary in my opinion to develop a character, it was just ranting. Partly I felt it was a bit self-righteous because of the double-standard stereotyping of mainland Americans because they stereotyped her. The quality of the novel fell pretty sharply from there onwards, literally forcing me to slog through the last two-hundred pages or so, just to have enough principle to write on it.
Some things I had already been tired of reading were later vaguely rectified with further character development in the novel but by then I didn’t want to read it anymore. For the effort I was putting in to read it I wasn’t getting positive returns. In conclusion, I guess Shark Dialogues could be compared to a poorly made soufflé: It started out alright with some better parts in the history and more thoughtful character arcs, but in the end turned out flat and bland as a whole.
Bibliography:
Davenport, Kiana. Shark Dialogues. New York: Atheneum, 1994. Print.
