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…]

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…]