Book Review: Sharks in the Time of Saviours by Kawai Strong Washburn

Illustration by Sophie Kenelm

Joe Kenelm reviews Kawai Strong Washburn’s debut novel.

“The shark was holding you gently, do you understand?” Malia asks her son, Nainoa, in the opening chapter of Sharks in the Time of Saviours. He has fallen overboard during a pleasure cruise in Hawai‘i. As the boat circles round to rescue the seven-year-old, Malia jumps desperately into the ocean after him. She feels the sharks pass beneath her. They are heading for Nainoa, and Malia knows what is coming, “pink and chummy ropes” in the water. Instead, the sharks carry him safely back to the boat. By ensuring Nainoa grasps fully the miraculousness of his survival, Malia’s question does the same work as the sharks, holding him up alongside her in the narrative. This is an impulse that is also true of Washburn’s novel; a story that offers interconnectedness as a hope in a profoundly-troubled time.

Malia Flores and her family live on the east coast of Hawai‘i’s Big Island. After the sugarcane plantation Malia’s husband Augie works at is shut down, the family are forced to move to another island to find work. They are helped along by Nainoa’s startling rescue. News of it spreads far and wide; hearing about the family’s poverty, people start to send them money, clothes, and food. Nainoa discusses the experience in his application to Hawai‘i’s most prestigious preparatory school, they award him a full scholarship. Academically, he excels his classmates; and he is also a “prodigy” at the ‘ukulele. What happens next surpasses it all: at a New Year’s Eve party, Nainoa somehow heals a boy’s firework-blasted hand. His parents believe he is blessed by the islands’ old gods; destined likewise to heal the “broken” kingdom of Hawai‘i.

Meanwhile, Nainoa’s siblings, Dean and Kaui, feel overshadowed by their brother and overlooked by their parents. Kaui scathingly recalls how she and Dean would have to take on Nainoa’s household chores, because he “needed rest”. (Nainoa and his mother sometimes go out for a drive over dinner to “talk things over”. Dean and Kaui are “treated” to their father’s cooking; Malia and Nainoa return smelling like Rainbow Drive-In or Leonard’s Bakery.) Later, when Nainoa is at Stanford and Kaui is studying in San Diego, Kaui calls her parents. Her mother asks her some perfunctory questions, but Kaui knows already where the conversation is going: “You talk to Noa lately?” The novel plots the consequent, traumatic experiences of the Flores: mental illness, incarceration, and deep tragedy. But the turbulent relationships within in the family also give rise to some of the novel’s most powerful moments. Dean is a rising basketball star; all the same, he feels eclipsed by his brother in Hawai‘i: “all everyone wanted was for me to believe in Noa, to raise him up.” Now in mainland USA, one of the country’s most-prized freshmen recruits, Dean figures himself as a Polynesian ancient:

some of the strongest looked at the stars and saw a map to a future they could take for themselves. Broke their backs making themselves canoes to cut through forty-foot swells … Nights on the water when they seen the white light of the moon over the new land of Hawai‘i and they was like: This. This is ours. All us, all now.

So Dean reckons it: “all me. All now. King me”. In moments like this, the distinction between Nainoa and his siblings is dissolved. They feel Hawai‘i as deeply as him. In an early university game, Dean experiences “something in the air. Something green and fresh and blooming.” It echoes his arrival on the mainland, “that same king feeling in my chest, ancient and big.” By contrast, the theme of the evening’s game is “Hawaiian Night”: polyester aloha-print shirts, straw hats, and kahlua. Similarly, after long days of rock climbing, Kaui dreams about women “as large and distant as volcanoes … their hair tangled and tumbled down into the trees”. And as she dreams, she dances the hula in her sleep. Nainoa slowly realises that the sharks were not just for him. Later, Dean finally understands: “Noa wasn’t the only one.”

This is inherent to Washburn’s Hawai‘i itself. After Nainoa’s post-Stanford work ends in disaster, he returns home. Since his rescue, he has been profoundly connected to the life of the island. Now, that connection is gone: “I ended at the tips of my fingers and toes.” During a hike along the coast of O‘ahu, Nainoa gets into the water and lets the currents take him out into the sea. Four grey reef sharks are waiting. They circle him. He holds out a hand and touches each shark as it passes; their bodies are “ice-slick”. In that contact, he feels the rivers, paddies, valleys, and trees of the Big Island, as well as his family: “we are made of the same water, beating into the current with the same motion the sharks are making now, everything blending into the other”.

Washburn beats into this current. With the same motion of the sharks, the novel pivots between each member of the family; each chapter is given over to a different character’s voice and coloured with its narrator’s own idiom. Like the landscape, “green and blue and gold”, the overall effect is an articulate canvas of distinct tones. The prose too, equal parts lyrical and muscular, blends everything into the other: the sound of crumpling newspaper is ‘“a flock of birds taking flight”; the nighttime heat of a tent is like “something large was sleeping just about the crowd”; memory, distant but beautiful, “might as well be a spill of stars outside a window at twilight”. Nainoa alone, then, cannot change all the things that “hurt” in the islands. Mali and Augie visit a farm on the Big Island which Kaui is helping to set up, making use of her prodigious skill in engineering. She has recreated in-miniature the old Hawaiian system of ahupua‘a: 

When the island was split into stripes top to bottom and everything produced was given to everything else: fish from the sea traded for sweet potato from the plains grown from the water from the ridges.

It is giving and taking, the deepest connection between each and everything, “aloha in the rawest form”. Nainoa understands and embodies this. Like Kaui, Washburn’s mighty story of family and land realises it.