The Beaded Curtain
by Lloyd Jones

This powerful, unusual book defies description, or rather, could be defined in many ways – poetic, philosophical, alarming, informative, nostalgic, melancholic, joyful – and none would be fully effective. The reader is taken on an exuberant ride through aspects of Jones’ life. The Beaded Curtain is not an autobiography in the strictest sense, and neither is it really a memoir, since details of his personal life are relatively sparse. It is more a record of moments, presented as vivid snapshots of scenes from childhood and adulthood, here in New Zealand and in many other countries, in his life as a writer. Jones is the author of fourteen books, variously novels, collections of short stories and poetry. There is also an earlier memoir, A History of Silence, written after the 2012 Christchurch earthquake, in which Jones solves a family mystery. His most famous book, perhaps, is the 2007 novel Mister Pip, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and reached the shortlist of the Man Booker Prize.

It is not often that non-fiction can be seen as filmic. Of course, biographical movies are inspired by the central character’s life, but the reader of The Beaded Curtain may often have the sense that they are already watching a film, with one scene following on from another, and linked either strongly or esoterically. The title is an intentional metaphor for this method – the shifting view through a bead curtain from the interior of a house, when aspects may be brought into focus, and just as easily obscured. Bead curtains at the kitchen door, which often lead onto the back porch, were once a common feature in New Zealand homes, to keep the flies out.

Jones begins the book with a quote from nineteenth century ornithologist Walter Buller:

In a few seconds, without sound or warning of any kind, a huia came bounding along almost tumbling, through the close foliage of the pukapuka, and presented himself to view at such close range that it was impossible to fire. This gave me an opportunity of watching this beautiful bird and marking his noble bearing, if I may so express it, before I shot him.

Encapsulated here is the treatment of much of Jones’ material. Buller is bearing witness to a creature rare and precious, and in a manner that seems schizoid to us now, takes the next opportunity to deprive it of life. Jones also is bearing witness, but without the gun. This chapter, titled ‘Huia’, has glimpses of Jones’ sister. He does not name her, but as she reappears now and again throughout, we learn that she was a traveller also, like her brother, and that she died tragically as a young woman.

Most New Zealanders over a certain age will know that Lloyd Jones is not the only famous member of his family. His brother Bob, a neoliberal enthusiast, started the short-lived New Zealand Party in the 1980s. He was a property developer and millionaire, famously had nine children to four different women, and was known to respond violently to uninvited attention from cameramen. Bob is also unnamed, but he is introduced early in the book. ‘I am nine years old when my older brother brings a sheep home for me,’ Jones tells us. Lloyd walked it to school on a leash and recalls: ‘Mum says she has never seen anything so ridiculous in her life. But the sheep does not look ridiculous or appear to feel that way at all.’

Bob passes on shirts that looked good on him but bad on Lloyd, drives fast cars and is likely not a close sibling; he is around fourteen years older. Later in the book, Jones pays him a kind of tribute: ‘My older brother is hardworking, clever, sometimes devious, often bold. He has found a way through commercial property to escape our cave and its humble furnishings.’

The younger brother does not want to hang around and endure life in the Street of Lawnmowers, as he calls it. He is living in London at twenty-two, and in New York not long after. Throughout his life he travels – sometimes independently, sometimes on fellowships to France and to Berlin, and sometimes as a guest at writers’ festivals. It is in Vancouver that he views an exhibition that haunts him for many years, that of the clothes and personal belongings of people killed in Hiroshima by the nuclear bomb, in 1945. Later, in Japan, he visits the Hiroshima Peace Museum. Before he arrives he worries about ‘failing the experience. I will not have seen enough or noticed the right thing or felt sufficiently deeply – and that is before I have found the language to describe all those failings.’

This is very much the writers’ anxiety. In order to write compellingly about anything, especially the first use of the horrific bomb, a writer must feel it to the bone. Jones’ writing about the museum is affecting, as are the sections describing the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

Much of The Beaded Curtain reads as notebook entries, because that is most often the genesis. Everywhere he goes, Jones has pockets full of notebooks and pens, so that he may make quick sketches, vivid and immediate. Shaped into this book and interspersed with images and thoughts both from his own experience and from reading and film-going, they are heightened. This passage perhaps goes some way to explaining how.

I thrust the shovel head in and pull the buried material to the surface, then dig it over. Its value depends on it being mixed up together…When all is said and done, I have an idea it is me I am raking over. That my experience and prejudices and general disposition and character are in the way of any attempt to describe things on their own terms.

Two poets claim intense attention: James K. Baxter and Gu Cheng, although it is Baxter’s father who commands more of the story than his son. Archibald Baxter was a well-known conscientious objector treated appallingly here and in Britain for refusing to fight. Gu Cheng was a poet, enormously famous in his homeland of China, who washed up on Waiheke Island in the 1980s with his wife and mistress. Gu first murdered his wife before killing himself. Jones provides us with a photograph of the small bach where he lived. Oddly, it is on the market as I write this, in October 2026. Perhaps one of Gu’s many fans who make pilgrimages to the island will buy it.

Bob’s gift of the sheep seems to have left Jones with a life-time affinity with the species. There are many references to sheep, some literal, some metaphorical. The first sheep is set free in a paddock by the child Lloyd and Bob. Many years later, when Bob is standing for parliament and urging people to vote for him, Jones recalls:

I saw them wonder, where the fuck did he come from and that’s when I remembered the response of the mob to the sheep we released into the paddock. There was the same bunching, the same stiffening of the neck as the impertinent sheep trotted towards them.

There is more ovine elision in a chapter describing his sisters’ voyage to Europe with exploitative Italian stewards, intercut with pieces on the cruelty of live exports. When a farmer home-kills a sheep with Jones observing, he weaves in the story of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Enola Grey, the plane that carried it.

Like many of us, Jones is full of loathing for Trump. ‘They say I should forget Trump,’ he writes. ‘When they say I shouldn’t judge all Americans this way, I agree – I  shouldn’t. But I do. This is what it’s like to have an enemy. You lose all reason.’ Even though it presents as a throw-away comment, with so much of the book about warfare and the misery that surrounds it, this is a statement that approaches an understanding of why men (and women) are compelled to don uniforms, take up arms and murder. Jones’s fury bubbles through the chapter ‘A History of Indifference’, unabashed and erudite.

In his account of visiting Anne Frank’s apartment in Amsterdam, Jones contends that the ‘market for experience has never been so hungry. People want to feel something. The pressing question is this: what is truly our own, and what belongs to us all?’ The Beaded Curtain is an experience worth making one’s own. There are lovely images that linger, for example: ‘The head of a giraffe loomed above the zoo walls with the baleful stare of a child standing in its cot.’ It is a book that can be read either cover to cover, or kept at hand to dip into now and again. Inevitably, the reader will find passages to read more than once. This is a work with a long gestation, demonstrated by its breadth and depth, and one that will find readers around the world.