Deep Beyond the Reef

Owen Scott
Deep Beyond the Reef
(Penguin)

What would your reaction be if a close member of your family were murdered? And if the authorities and the media then spread what amounted to malicious rumour about their lifestyle? Owen Scott dealt with it by writing Deep Beyond the Reef, an extremely personal and moving account not only of the murder of his brother John in Fiji, but of his experiences growing up in that South Pacific colonial outpost.

John Scott was a headliner internationally in 2000, when as director of Red Cross in Fiji he negotiated on behalf of hostages during the coup. The following year he and his partner, Greg Scrivener were viciously murdered by a young paranoid schizophrenic Fijian, Apete Kaisau. Subsequent media reports mentioned murky stories of drugs and pornography, as if the couple's sexuality made them fair game.

"Here were two people who died pretty nasty deaths they didn't deserve to die, and I just wondered what they would have said if they'd been given the chance to say it," says Owen Scott.

Like Martin Amis' incredible memoir Experience, this book is a multilayered tale of loss, family, memory and redemption. It uncovers how all these dimensions are irrevocably linked, how one strand cannot be pulled without something else being revealed.

Having lived in Europe for years, and following a period in Fiji at the trial of Kaisau and working on this book, Scott is now back in New Zealand. "Living out of my car," he laughs. Deep Beyond the Reef encompasses three books he explains. Written separately, these were a diary of the six weeks he spent in Fiji directly after the murders with John's son Piers, the story of the brothers upbringing under their despotic, alcoholic lawyer father Maurice, and an account of Kaisau's trial.

"Then I sewed it all together," he explains. "There were different reasons for writing each part of the book. I realised that everything in life is so circular, and so many things in the past mirror what is happening in the present. There were parallels everywhere."

While the portion dealing with the murders makes emotional reading, the story of familial troubles is equally compelling. "The stuff on my father was the hardest to write. He was a very complex character, he reads like fiction. It's unfortunate that my perception of him was arrested really at the age of 17. So he's an historical character to me really."

The trial also makes for extraordinary reading, and is particularly revealing of Fijian culture. "We had an extraordinary meeting between the families," says Scott. "They brought Apete Kaisau into our midst and we were holding his hand and talking to him. The prosecutor, Gregor Allan, who became a good friend of mine, said 'Mate, I've never seen the like of this in my life'. That says something good about Fiji, it's a very forgiving society."

Gavin Bertram.