\u201cThere\u2019s this irreducible responsibility of the author to put the words down and stand by them. You\u2019re in this position of being a thoughtful filter between the source and what gets presented, and trying to do right for them and the reader. It\u2019s complicated, and I don\u2019t want to be glib. These are real people\u2019s lives, and they go on outside of the book.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Valley: Crime and Punishment in a New Zealand City was named Book of the Year by Newsroom. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s been two weeks since punters were turned away at the door of St Andrew\u2019s on the Terrace church in Wellington, where defence lawyers, prosecutors, judges and counsellors joined the literary set for the packed-out launch of The Valley. A fortnight beforehand, he\u2019d appeared on stage at the Auckland Writers Festival alongside literary non-fiction heavy-hitters Patrick Radden Keefe and Barbara Demick, and had The Valley named Book of the Year by Newsroom. Better than all that, people are reading the book: it\u2019s a nationwide best-seller, has 152 holds at the Lower Hutt library, and my kid\u2019s friend\u2019s mum asked me courtside at Miniball if I\u2019d read it (a true sign of a breakout hit).<\/p>\n
It\u2019s enough to turn this previously low-profile lawyer and journalist into a reluctant main character. If everyone wants a piece of him, it\u2019s because, somehow, Emanuel has done the impossible: he\u2019s taken the mundanity, the dark humour, the Groundhog Day-ness, and the heartbreaking hope that\u2019s at the heart of the everyday grind of the district courtroom and held it to the light in a way that makes you actually look at it. <\/p>\n
New Zealand Geographic\u2019s Naomi Arnold called it a \u201cremarkable\u201d book. \u201cEmanuel\u2019s broader work \u2026 is in showing his readers that the main drivers of crime are not individuals themselves but poverty, housing instability, lack of education, addiction and racism.\u201d<\/p>\n
Conceived eight years ago out of frustration with what he witnessed in court as a junior barrister, and how the justice system was presented to the public, the book follows two Lower Hutt men, Nathan and Rikihana, and their tireless public defence lawyer Lewis \u2013 all the names in the book have been changed \u2013 over 18 months. Their stories cycle through courtrooms, rehab, probation, welfare and drug counselling appointments, boarding houses and the street to show how a system focused on punishment \u2013 in a country where rates of imprisonment have rocketed since the 1980s, to twice that of Canada \u2013 ultimately fails them. The two men are jailed and trespassed, bailed and remanded in a kind of Kafkaesque nightmare for crimes that range from stealing $8 of baked goods from Countdown to lodging an axe in a car windscreen during a bender, in lives fuelled by drugs, alcohol and trauma. <\/p>\n
Although the courtroom is the apparatus of the state, most New Zealanders won\u2019t have seen the inside of one; the latest Crime and Victims Survey, Emanuel says as we walk past the Countdown where Rikihana was trespassed, shows most people\u2019s involvement with the system stops at a roadside breath test. The public learns about what\u2019s happening through crime reporting, which often highlights the juicy or most shocking elements.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn a way, I was writing against that,\u201d Emanuel says. \u201cThe reality as shown by the news media is systemically inaccurate; the criminal justice system doesn\u2019t stop. It\u2019s so tied up with what happens at Winz [Work and Income], what happens with housing.\u201d <\/p>\n
And so, every day for more than a year, Emanuel became so well known to security staff at Hutt Valley District Court that they waved him through screening. He stood when the judge entered the courtroom, and he listened. Eventually, the book coalesced around three main characters who allowed him to tell the story of the system in what he felt was the most representative way, even as this railed against conventional modes of storytelling. <\/p>\n
\u201cI was cautious about being misled by \u2018narrative\u2019 or by all of these different frames that can in some ways get us further away from the truth. This whole \u2018If it bleeds, it leads\u2019; this desire to impose the hero\u2019s journey or the recovery narrative onto what we\u2019re observing and tell that story.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are no big flashpoint incidents in the book, and that reflected the experience of researching it. Instead, there\u2019s the repetition, the grind, the churn of the process. For these guys, the normalcy is being in the criminal justice system. <\/p>\n
\u201cAnd it turns out, that\u2019s quite sad.\u201d<\/p>\n
Emanuel’s book shows how closely crime is linked to poverty, housing instability, lack of education, addiction and racism. Photo \/ Ebony Lamb<\/p>\n
Emanuel was raised in Westmere, Auckland, by a mother who was a psychiatric nurse, and a father who was a gardener and handyman. He went to Saint Kentigern College, a prestigious private school, on a scholarship, and says he was aware of class differences growing up.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a child going around town with [mum] in Auckland in the 90s, we would see men on the street who knew her, because they\u2019d been patients in hospitals where she had been a nurse, prior to the deinstitutionalisation of the 80s and 90s, which saw many people moved from a medical setting to either a correctional setting or homeless.\u201d <\/p>\n
He admired his mother\u2019s compassion and the \u201cequanimity\u201d that she managed to hold in the face of people\u2019s crises. <\/p>\n
His thinking about inequality shaped the way he approached The Valley. \u201cIf you have a big mental health crisis, you start suffering from addiction, you commit a crime, you lose your house; if you\u2019re part of a family and a group of friends who have stability and resources, there are ways that people are able to be helped back up. With Nathan and Rikihana, these things are not there, and stuff spirals because of that.\u201d<\/p>\n