Review: Green Sea, by John Summers

You may never have heard of him, but John Summers is one of our best non-fiction writers.

The Commercial Hotel, his 2021 book of essays, looked at our club rooms, freezing works, night trains and hotel pubs, while his 2015 debut The Mermaid Boy explored the exotic and mundane from Christchurch to China; a book marketed as a collection of 'non-fiction stories'. These true-but-weird stories, or more often those that might appear too ordinary to interest a writer, are Summers’ sweet spot.

But Green Sea: Lost in the New Zealand Bush is a more serious outing. The stories he’s gathered here - a mix of personal reflection, history, research and one on one interviews - are about those (mostly men) who lose their way in Aotearoa’s five million hectares of native bush and forest. They are full of loss and suffering but sometimes also speak of redemption and revelation. Summers tracks down inveterate trampers like The Yeti - now in his 60s - who was lost in the bush on the upper West Coast of the South Island for a record 29 days in 1980. More recently there’s a young Indian man who began to hallucinate after being lost in a similar patch of West Coast bush. He says he saw houses and snakes and sensed the presence of someone guiding him in his darkest moments - a common occurrence in those who are lost for any length of time.

Summers cites Ernest Shackleton who said after his tragic Antarctic expedition that 'there are some things which can never be spoken of…almost to hint about them becomes perilously close to sacrilege' when referring to the sense he had of a figure directing him. Throughout Green Sea one senses Summers’ need to understand these intense existential experiences through the act of writing - as if an answer might present itself if he works hard enough. Yet most of the interviewees are taciturn and guarded (the aforementioned Yeti for example) or simply lack the words to describe their ordeal - and so some of the best parts of Green Sea are the memoir elements, as Summers himself wrestles with what it means to be lost, not in the bush, but in the midst of life.

He writes about a panic attack he suffered that saw him on an emergency room table. Despite leading an outwardly successful life, full of family chores, young kids and the grind of nine-to- five office work, he senses there should be something more. It’s a fascinating thread but one henever really follows through.

Early on in Green Sea he describes one of his first forays into the bush when he was a student:

'All around were grey peaks, grey scree slopes, and vast areas of dull tussocky hillside, on a scale like nothing else I’d seen. It is the only landscape I have known to make me feel I understood the sublime, a concept I previously knew only from the classroom, the notion that nature can possess a beauty that is overwhelming and can hold a sense of horror, too.”

The book comes alive when Summers lowers his guard and lets us in. That said, there’s a fascinating chapter on keen tramper (on occasion he liked to tramp in the nude) and later suspected Russian spy Bill Sutch, who was lost in the Tararua Range in the 1930s. After being found he claimed with typical arrogance that he was never lost in the first place, causing a public outcry.

The bush has long fascinated New Zealanders - from John Mulgan’s Man Alone through Barry Crump and right up to the global fascination with the outlaw tropes of fugitive Tom Phillips’ case. Green Sea is a compelling glimpse into the almost fugue state those who have been lost, and near death, experience. It’s an experience many struggle to articulate even decades after the event. Summers gives us an engaging examination of what it means to be 'lost', both in the bush and in life, that will appeal to a wide readership.