Landfall Review Online

Elizabeth Heritage

Scented by Laurence Fearnley (Penguin Random House, 2019), 256 pp., $38

This pukapuka made me feel really hard done by. The core premise of Laurence Fearnley’s novel Scented is that the smellscape of the world we live in is as rich, complex and omnipresent as that which we experience by any other sense. I kept stopping to sniff the air while reading and could rarely smell anything at all – let alone analyse the different layers, tones and ingredients of scent. I started to feel that either I was lacking, or was being duped. [Read more…]

Stephanie Johnson

Waterline by Chris Else (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2019), 311 pp., $34.99

Chris Else’s new novel fits neatly into the zeitgeist of current speculative fiction. Around the world, not surprisingly, writers are meditating on the environmental ruin of our planet, the precariousness of our personal freedoms, the perilous health of democracies and the encroaching all-powerful reach of corporate-owned artificial intelligence. From these depressing influences spring story after story of not too distant imagined futures. In some cases, such as in Ian McEwan’s recent Machines Like Me, the chronological setting is in the past but presents us with an alternative history – i.e. fiction that speculates on how life might have been had certain major technological advances and/or catastrophes taken place earlier. [Read more…]

Majella Cullinane 

The Unreliable People by Rosetta Allan (Penguin Random House, 2019), 352 pp., $38

In the last two decades New Zealand writers who have explored settings outside New Zealand include Elizabeth Knox with her 1998 The Vintner’s Luck set in France, Lloyd Jones’ Mr Pip, set in Papua New Guinea and, more recently, Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize-winning novel The Wish Child by Catherine Chidgey, which takes place in Nazi Germany. Rosetta Allan’s second novel, The Unreliable People, immerses the reader in the world of 1930s Soviet Russia and, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, in 1990s St Petersburg.  [Read more…]