Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review
Bronwyn Wylie-Gibb
Kind by Stephanie Johnson (RHNZ Vintage, 2023), 336pp, $37
At the Auckland Writers Festival in 2021, Stephanie Johnson predicted that there were going to be many works examining the coronavirus and the unusual world of 2020. Kind is her contribution to this diverse and interesting field. It’s a novel that sits somewhere between domestic noir, thriller and satire—a bit like those lockdown days in 2020. [Read more…]
Gill South
Golden Days by Caroline Barron (Affirm Press, 2023), 288pp, $38
The novel Golden Days by Caroline Barron, which combines a coming-of-age story with the tale of a woman in the throes of a mid-life crisis, is a very assured debut. Barron, whose memoir Ripiro Beach won the 2020 New Zealand Heritage Literary Award for Best Non-fiction Book, is a writer interested in memory, and remembering and misremembering. Golden Days explores this central preoccupation through a number of conceits and tropes: the intoxication of a new creative friendship; the damaging effect of the male gaze in mid-1990s culture; how we rewrite history to live with ourselves; and the importance of facing the truth after trauma. [Read more…]
Denys Trussell
Love & Money: The writer’s cut by Greg McGee (Upstart Press, 2023), 252pp, $37.99
This novel is serious in its social and political insights, but it lays them out with a comic and satiric vision. Now in its third incarnation, the work was born as a screenplay and became a novel in 2012. It is here published as a rewrite, with the author-as-editor acting as ‘the brute wielding the scalpel’ to make a text that, in this case, is shorter than the original. This is ‘The Writer’s Cut’. [Read more…]
Nicholas Reid
Chevalier & Gawayn: The ballad of the dreamer by Phillip Mann (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2022), 472pp, $37.99
Imagine a very dystopian regime somewhere in the future and presumably somewhere on Earth. A few cultural hints suggest it could be a future Britain, but maybe not. Technology means nearly everybody can be spied on. It is mandatory to wear a ‘helmask’—a combination of helmet and mask, but packed with technological systems for instant communication and surveillance. There is an overriding Council that rules, but there is also a severe class hierarchy. Bureaucrats live in high-rise buildings, with all the latest gadgets and mod cons far from the hoi polloi. The impoverished and desperate classes live in the lower depths, the slums prettily called Primrose Valley but in fact crumbling unsanitary buildings overshadowed by skyscrapers and rarely seeing the sun. Among them are many ‘Morbids’ and ‘Dismals’, meaning people so unhappy they often choose suicide. The super-rich live, with their mansions and yachts, in a walled-off place called Elysian Fields. It is rare for the classes to meet. [Read more…]
Max Oettli
A Message for Nasty by Roderick Fry (Awa Press, 2022), 282pp, $40
World War II created some 20 million displaced people in Europe; Asian figures are harder to find. One Chinese historian mentions a million Chinese leaving Hong Kong out of a population of about 2.5 million after the Japanese conquest of 1941. There are no readily available statistics for the Europeans living in Hong Kong at the time of the Japanese army’s invasion, nor many details about what happened to them. [Read more…]
David Eggleton
Katherine Mansfield’s Europe: Station to Station by Redmer Yska (Otago University Press, 2023), 272pp, $50
Was Katherine Mansfield a poster child for every kind of wild? If each generation seeks to define Mansfield anew, and every interpreter has their own Mansfield in mind, Redmer Yska in Katherine Mansfield’s Europe: Station to Station chooses to emphasise Mansfield as a wild colonial girl, a bohemian, an instinctive rebel—a proto-punk who dabbled in drugs, carried a pistol for self-protection and spent her last days on a commune guided by a Russian guru, all the while writing the incandescent prose that has made her a literary immortal. [Read more…]