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Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

The Tragic Sense of Life 

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Denys Trussell 

Notes from the Margins: The West Coast’s Peter Hooper by Pat White (Frontiers Press,

2017), 202 pp., $40

Peter Hooper (1919–1991) spent most his life in Westland, but travelled far by means of literature. His adult life was lived alone, but he was not a loner. He embedded himself (with reservations) in the community of the Greymouth district and had a professional life as a conscientious and imaginative secondary teacher. In this role he mentored many students, nudging them in the direction of literature and ideas. One of these was Pat White, the author of this portrait.

White has done us a favour by placing Hooper before us. Despite having lived (almost literally) to one side of the main literary developments here, Hooper was and still is of interest and relevance. To the generations born after 1945 he might seem a bit prim, even conservative in personal style, and definitely not up with the game of postmodern critical theory. As a writer he was in the main a Modernist with Romantic antecedents, and he was happy to acknowledge the prophetic American, Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), as the most powerful influence on him philosophically. [Read more…]

Custom-made for the Stage

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Helen Watson White

Best Playwriting Book Ever by Roger Hall (Playmarket, 2016), 108 pp., $22; Shift: Three plays by Alison Quigan, Vivienne Plumb and Lynda Chanwai-Earle (Playmarket, 2016), 280 pp., $35

When Roger Hall set out on what he didn’t know would be a long and fruitful theatre career, he knew only one rule (‘one of the few useful rules there are’): ‘Write about what you know.’ Like all aspiring writers, he was also reading – at the beginning – Neil Simon, to see what made him ‘the most successful playwright in the world’. You read, you write, and the characters arrive … but slowly. From its genesis in his Public Service experience, through five or six drafts and read-throughs to first production, it took his first hit, Glide Time, 15 years. You almost certainly don’t have to wait that long now, if you follow his rules-that-aren’t-rules. [Read more…]

Private Admissions Between Friends

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David Herkt

Jay To Bee: Janet Frame’s letters to William Theophilus Brown, edited by Denis Harold (Counterpoint, Berkley, California, 2016), 464 pp., $45.20

All letters are performances. There is a writer and there is an audience. The relationship between the two is never static, but it turns in line with time and circumstance. Jay to Bee: Janet Frame’s letters to William Theophilius Brown is, very simply, a unique and continuous revelation. It is a correspondence which provides an intimate, extended perspective on Frame that exists nowhere else. There are opinions, descriptions, comments and perceptions that illuminate both her life and her work. [Read more…]

Tracing One Iwi’s Carving Style

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a_whakapapa_of_tradition_ellisAndrew Paul Wood

A Whakapapa of Tradition: One hundred years of Ngāti Porou carving, 1830–1930 by Ngarino Ellis with new photography by Natalie Robertson (Auckland University Press, 2016), 304 pp., $69.99

The arrival of Pākehā in Aotearoa was not a good thing for Māori whakairo taonga; vide the denuded whare of Ngāpuhi, their carved ancestors deemed pagan and too sensual by prudish missionaries. The more discerning Victorians castrated such carvings with hammer and chisel, which echoes down the ages as recently as 2010 when a local became distressed on a visit with his four children to Te Parapara Garden at the renowned Hamilton Gardens, when confronted by the symbolically heroic scale of the graven genitalia on display. Oh dear. Even carvings in the nation’s museums as late as the mid-twentieth century weren’t safe, and were given a generous coating of red enamel paint in the run-up to special occasions like royal visits. [Read more…]

Invitations to a Fantastic Voyage

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coral-route-barton-heathDavid Eggleton

Coral Route: Tasman Empire Airways Ltd, flying boats and the South Pacific by Gerry Barton and Philip Heath (Steele Roberts, 2015) 209 pp., $45; Real Modern: Everyday New Zealand in the 1950s and 1960s by Bronwyn Labrum (Te Papa Press, 2015), 429 pp., $75

Skywatchers in Auckland in the early 1950s would have seen a remarkable sight on a regular basis: a giant winged boat flying low above the city. Mythic and portentous, an airborne waka swanning beneath the clouds before disappearing over the ocean horizon, the Solent flying boat – in various classes and makes – was New Zealand’s distinctive contribution to the romance of aviation in the South Pacific in the 1940s and 1950s. This flying boat apparition finally vanished from the skies in September 1960 with the discontinuation of the Coral Route. [Read more…]

The Missing Intellectuals

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Roger Horrocks Re-inventing New ZealandScott Hamilton

Re-inventing New Zealand: Essays on the arts and media by Roger Horrocks (Atuanui Books, 2016), 444 pp, $45

Re-inventing New Zealand is a big, rich, provocative book. Roger Horrocks has collected 21 of his essays, reviews and talks, and given each a short introduction. Horrocks is a veteran and versatile part of New Zealand culture. As a young member of the University of Auckland’s English Department in the 1970s and 1980s, he helped bring the American counterculture to Kiwi shores. The paper he taught on modern American poetry became legendary, serving to bring innovators like Charles Olson and Allen Ginsberg to local audiences. Later, he was instrumental in setting up the Film, Television, and Drama Department at Auckland, before retiring and running a successful film production company. Horrocks co-founded the Auckland Film Festival and New Zealand on Screen. A poet, shortlisted this year for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for his poetry book Song of the Ghost in the Machine, he’s  also known for his definitive biography of Len Lye.  [Read more…]