Tina Shaw

Loop Tracks by Sue Orr (Victoria University Press, 2021), 336pp, $35

Attending a Catholic girls’ high school during the 70s, I vividly remember the shame, scurrilous gossip and fascination surrounding teen pregnancy. One girl in my year left school at sixteen because she was pregnant. There were whispers about girls ‘going to Sydney’ or being sent down country to stay with relatives and have the baby—in effect, exiled. The opening section of Sue Orr’s latest novel Loop Tracks captures this aspect of the times. [Read more…]

Catherine Robertson

Fake Baby by Amy McDaid (Penguin, 2020), 304 pp, $36

Last year was a good one for New Zealand novels that used humour to deepen our understanding of mental health. They included Pip Adam’s Nothing to See, Eamonn Marra’s 2000ft Above Worry Level (both VUP), and Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss (Harper Collins). And from Penguin Random House in June came Amy McDaid’s debut, Fake Baby. 

An early draft of this novel won the Sir James Wallace prize, awarded to the top student in the creative writing master’s programme at the University of Auckland. This is a hugely ambitious novel for a debut writer, and instinct says that first draft underwent numerous rounds of editing on its way to becoming the final version. The effort was worth it. With Fake Baby, McDaid pulls off a bravura balancing act of near-farcical comic delivery and intensely moving content. Occasionally it teeters but mostly it holds, its primary support being McDaid’s compassion and empathy for her three main characters, Stephen, Jaanvi and Lucas, who are all in varying states of mental distress. [Read more…]

This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 241

Rachel O’Connor

Remote Sympathy by Catherine Chidgey (Victoria University Press, 2020), 528pp, $35

Even in the idle days of early January I struggled to finish Catherine Chidgey’s Remote Sympathy. It is 528 pages long, and I was unable to read it at night; sleep afterwards proved impossible. The novel is set almost entirely in Buchenwald, one of Germany’s largest and most infamous concentration camps of the Second World War. Accordingly, even the most ignorant reader must know they will enter a world of unmitigated horror. The early optimism offered by protagonist Doktor Lenard Weber’s joyful marriage to Jewess Anna, and his invention of the Sympathetic Vitaliser, a machine he hopes will cure cancer through electrotherapy, is necessarily short-lived. There can be no happy ending to a Holocaust story, even if it is fiction, even if the hero, by some miracle, survives.  [Read more…]

Vaughan Rapatahana

Bluffworld by Patrick Evans (Victoria University Press, 2021), 371 pp., $35

Bluffworld is a fable of fractious friction, a different kettle of fish to the typical shoal of Kiwi fiction. Yes, I deliberately cast cliché here, for Evan’s wordy novel is like playing a flashy computer game where the reader is constantly grasping at several streams of multicoloured aquatic life all at once: generally, with some success, but not always snaring the prime catch, if indeed there is such in this multi-layered novel. The saga is heavily embedded in Evans’ own experiences of academic life, where there is an endemic requirement to be as obscure and oblique, as pretentious and pedantic as possible regarding the involuted literary pursuits prevailing. I am not certain that the ‘author(s)’ quite know where to complete this fuliginous frolic, but eventually their ‘scriptor’, Patrick Evans, does end the volume with a satirical ‘Author’s Note’. [Read more…]