Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

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Helen Watson White 

A Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington 1888–1903 by Redmer Yska (Otago University Press, 2017), 271 pp., $39.95

In his prologue to A Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington 1888–1903, Redmer Yska recalls Graham Greene’s idea that childhood is ‘the fiction writer’s credit balance’. In this regard, he says, Mansfield as daughter of a millionaire businessman ‘would leverage [her] stock to the maximum’. Wellington with its ‘ridgy, clasped terrain, its mobile weather’, and the ‘frontier’ experiences that shaped the girl Kathleen, were – in a different metaphor – ‘the seedbed, the blood and bone fertiliser of everything that came later’. Wellington-born himself, and growing up in Karori, Yska is well qualified to describe the streets walked by the writer in her time, the atmosphere she sensed, the world she knew.  [Read more…]

The Nation-Building Dutch

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Redmer Yska

Astride a Fierce Wind by Huberta Hellendoorn (Mākaro Press, 2017), 360 pp., $38

There’s a moment in Astride a Fierce Wind when Dutch migrant Huberta Hellendoorn, finally, mostly, settled in Dunedin, opens a telegram from home. Her mother is dead. She cries: ‘I can’t even go to the funeral.’ The cohort of Dutch washing up on these shores in the postwar era came to know such sudden wrenches out of a blue sky. In an era before jet travel, flights to Europe were measured in days, not hours. Even in 1960 when Huberta arrived by sea at Port Chalmers, flights to Europe took three or four days, with endless stopovers. And that was all before the prohibitive fares.  [Read more…]

Three Men Who Defied Authority 

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Andrew Paul Wood

Breaking Ranks by James McNeish (HarperCollins, 2017), 304 pp., $35

When James McNeish passed away last year he left behind a significant body of prose, specialising in historical novels and (in the modern parlance) ‘creative non-fiction’. In practice, his books are impossible to categorise, which is entirely part of their charm. His persistent theme was the salvage and apotheosis of the romantic, larger-than-life individual directly or indirectly shaping the course of world around him (and it was usually a ‘him’), preferably doomed or otherwise frustrated in their potential.

The form and feel will be familiar from McNeish’s 2003 book The Dance of the Peacocks, ultimately owing much to Sebastian Faulks’ 1996 The Fatal Englishman and the likes of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) and G.K. Chesterton’s literary biographies: that is to say, they owe as much to whimsy as they do to cold fact. [Read more…]

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…]

Bringing Katherine Mansfield to Life

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Claire Mabey

Mansfield & Me: A graphic memoir by Sarah Laing (Victoria University Press, 2016), 336pp, $35

There is something to be said for judging a book by its cover. Particularly a book within which the images are as important, as lively and revealing, as the text. The cover of Sarah Laing’s graphic memoir Mansfield & Me is striking in its intensity. At each glance, it is alive with the skill of the artist: the hand-coloured faces of Laing and Mansfield face off. Mansfield’s brown eyes and Laing’s blue are locked, while the vivid geometry of the wallpaper behind them is concealed by smokey smudges or shadows. Katherine’s stare is challenging and bold, while Laing’s is less certain, almost pleading. This cover is at once crisp and present, ambiguous and dreamlike – a perfectly concise indication of the life stories and the relationship to come.  [Read more…]