A tale of love and exploration

Personal, historical blend in memoir of New Zealand

Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story
By Christina Thompson
Bloomsbury, 270 pp., illustrated, $24.99

Christina Thompson grew up privileged in the upscale Boston suburb of Lincoln. If she had fulfilled the destiny that seemingly awaited her, she might "have stayed home and married a radiologist," she says.

But in the late 1980s, when she was a graduate student in Australia, she flew home for Christmas vacation. On her way back to Australia, she detoured to New Zealand on a lark. She wandered into a bar on a Saturday evening, met a Maori man with a trade-school education, and spent the night with him. Eventually, she married him.

Her choice of a mate from a radically different background defined Thompson's life and now has inspired a memoir, "Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All."

Thompson is the editor of Harvard Review, a literary magazine published by the Harvard College Library, the kind of credential that appeals to publishers. Above all, however, publishers crave memoirs by celebrities or ordinary people who have lurid, pulse-throbbing stories to tell.

Despite her book's bloodcurdling title (a reference to Maori warriors' purported greeting of Captain James Cook in the 18th century), Thompson fits neither category. Her book is a patchwork of prosaic stories and pensive observations, yet much is absorbing.

She has taken some questionable liberties. To protect the privacy of her Maori in-laws, she has altered some facts about them, which diminishes the book's authenticity. But Thompson's personal odyssey into a forbidding world is a compelling story.

Unraveling the mysteries of that world was Thompson's intent all along, a goal that often frustrated her. "This feeling of not quite getting what was going on would dog me whenever I was in New Zealand," she writes.

Thompson's husband, whose Maori name is Tauwhitu, is known as Seven because he is the seventh of 10 children. A member of the Ngapuhi tribe, he lived in a bedraggled fishing village in northern New Zealand.

Physically, the contrast between Thompson and her husband could scarcely have been greater. Seven is 6 foot 2, "heavily muscled," and "dark," Thompson says, while she is "small and blonde."

She and Thompson had drastically different pedigrees and divergent interests. Thompson's father was a professor at Harvard Business School. His father worked packing meat, picking vegetables, or laboring at other manual jobs. She enjoys opera; he prefers motor sports.

Why Thompson fell for Seven is a question that she obviously has pondered at length. Lightning may have struck on their first fateful night together, but the details of that encounter are sketchy. She liked his looks, summing up her opinion this way: "Impossibly handsome."

But Thompson does not dwell on body chemistry. With a bow to the cliché that opposites attract, she says, "Part of what I loved about Seven was how utterly different he was from me."

He was her opposite in many ways. She comes to see him as superstitious and irresponsible (in the sense that he was incapable of planning for the future). She is a Type A, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Dartmouth who earned a PhD from the University of Melbourne. Yet she values antithetical qualities in Seven. She extols his "lack of striving" and "imperturbability," which she calls "curious but magnetic."

It was not only the opposite traits in Seven that she found magnetic. She was powerfully drawn to her husband's Maori world precisely because it was a realm so utterly different from her own.

If all that sounds hopelessly romantic, there's another side to Thompson's purpose. Much of her impetus to understand her husband's culture is powerfully intellectual. On one level, her memoir amounts to a series of scholarly, and sometimes tedious, digressions into Polynesian - and specifically, Maori - history, mythology, and anthropology.

There's the matter of cannibalism, for example. The Maoris practiced it, but the aim was not to add a source of protein to their diet. Thompson recaps the accepted notion: Cannibalism for the Maoris was a symbol of conquest, a means by which they degraded their enemies.

Thompson did not live for long among the Maoris, nor does she speak their language. She nonetheless does not shy away from portraying them as bellicose (though affectionate with children), loyal, and contemptuous of selfishness. Her observations may be true, but they are not surprising. They merely conform to the prevailing view of what one should expect to find in a tribal people with a warrior tradition, such as the Maoris.

As Thompson pursued her work in academia, she and Seven bounced back and forth between Australia and the United States. Seven held a series of jobs, including stints as a foundry worker, bicycle messenger, and vacuum cleaner salesman. They lived simply, scraping along financially. Along the way, they produced three sons.

If the couple's nomadic life on a shoestring was a source of pride to Thompson for years because it defied the conventions of her upbringing, pragmatism won out. She and her family moved to her parents' house on 3 acres in Lincoln, where her mother cooked and her father paid the bills.

Thompson and her husband appear set to live happily forever. There's more: Seven has adjusted well to life in suburbia. He has taken up tennis and plays the game well.

Joseph Rosenbloom is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect.