fiction – Page 44

Quest for the Middle Ground

March 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Henry Feltham

The Desolation Angel, by Tim Wilson (Victoria University Press, 2011) 189 pp. $35

A piece of wisdom common to the music industry holds that your best song should never come first. Shoving the strongest track to the front of an album suggests the rest isn’t worth listening to. Dozens of internet threads debate the pros and cons of this notion; scarcely any make the argument for short stories. The arrangement of a collection is no less arcane than the ordering of a record. Some stories demand a position at the front, some at the rear. Some may not make the grade at all, once the logic of the collection becomes apparent (if it ever does). It may – in the final reckoning – prove impossible to astonish a reader picking the book up and not disappoint them a little further down the line. Not only is there no right answer, but the contest may be unwinnable.

There is a fulcrum at the centre of Tim Wilson’s new collection Desolation Angel, a story entitled ‘Suits’. It is the longest work in the book and seems to stabilise it. Yet this could be an accident: a parallel piece of publishing wisdom almost certainly states that it’s foolish to start a collection with the longest piece. Implicit is a vague sense of embarrassment about longer works — a doubt for their respect of short-story doctrine. ‘Suits’, though, is an extraordinary piece of writing following the disintegration of a freshly re-structured gaggle of business people as they pursue a trans-continental commute. Over forty pages, Wilson’s writing has the chance to spread out, gather pace. The disco cadence and projectile prose – which in the shorter pieces feels occasionally forced, or jammed-in-there – shimmers, darting between the crushing here-and-now of serial flight-catching and the more promising, elastic past.

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Holding up a Mirror to Empire

February 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Michael O’Leary

The Parihaka Woman, by Witi Ihimaera (Vintage Books, Auckland, 2011) 318 pp., $39.00

Discussing ‘Romance Fiction’ in The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, Professor Terry Sturm writes of the novelist Edith Lyttleton [aka G.B. Lancaster] that: ‘In the second phase of her career [she] turned more directly to one of the major forms of romance – the historical romance – organizing her epic treatments of colonial history in New Zealand, Australia and Canada around the perspectives of a series of highly intelligent, independent and rebellious female protagonists. The image of Empire which emerges, despite the colouring of romance, is distinctly critical’.

To refer to Ihimaera’s latest novel, The Parihaka Woman as ‘historical romance’ is not meant to be disparaging, for while it is definitely a ‘page turner’, it is by no means a ‘bodice ripper’ — if anything it is discreet, almost coy, in its dealing with sexual matters. Yet Sturm’s description of Edith Lyttleton’s writing does serve as an apt summary of The Parihaka Woman, the significant difference being that in Ihimaera’s tale of colonial history the ‘highly intelligent, independent and rebellious female protagonist’ is a Māori woman, Erenora, and the ‘image of Empire’ comes from the Māori mirror held up to that of the Pākehā settlers and Government so as to reflect from another angle the land greed and the murderous behaviour which took place in Taranaki in the 1860s to the 1880s.

It is against the story of late nineteenth-century holocaust and hardship that the main conceit of this novel is set. And just to make sure we understand that there is no mistake in the use of the word holocaust, Ihimaera quotes from a contemporary newspaper the feelings being expressed immediately preceding the attack on the Parihaka township: ‘The time has come, in our minds, when New Zealand must strike for freedom, and this means the death-blow to the Maori race!’ Also quoted is ex-premier Harry Atkinson who was reported as saying at a public meeting that he hoped: ‘if war did come, the natives would be exterminated.’ Following the aftermath of the racist rhetoric through, Ihimaera quotes from the 1996 Waitangi Tribunal Taranaki Report: ‘The graphic muru of most of Taranaki and the raupatu without ending describe the holocaust of Taranaki history and the denigration of the founding peoples in a continuum from 1840 to the present’.
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You Can’t Tinker with Human Beings

February 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Azure Rissetto

Dark Jelly, by Alice Tawhai (Huia Books, Wellington, 2011) 237 pp., $30.00

With an epigraph by the French existentialist Albert Camus, Dark Jelly by Alice Tawhai promises to challenge readers from the very first page, as she introduces us to a world of nocturnal lives and daytime dreams, paranoia and superstition, skewed enemies and chemical friends, and the stains of ink and time.

Across the stories we meet people incarcerated through crime, bad luck, or choice; although the reasons vary, names are always significant. In the opening tale, ‘Big Y, little y’, Yolanda sits in a sanatorium battling a trio of voices, Once, Twoce and Threece, which emanate from electrical sockets; but even their abuse is easier for her to deal with than her husband, Ty, and the painful history of which his presence speaks. Meanwhile, the jail narrative ‘Roses are Red’ hinges on the disparity between the prisoner’s perception of himself as ‘Caesar’ and the wardens’ view of him as ‘Johns’. He invites danger by carelessly conflating the red-headed female ‘screw’ in his thoughts with his girlfriend, Rose. In ‘Ice’, a woman’s husband briefly returns home from jail with an all-white dog, Ice, and a declaration of alcoholism. Although the only time the wife spent in prison was visiting her husband, we can see that she was just as incapacitated as he was during his time inside: her life froze. Since neither characters are identified for readers beyond the prosaic ‘he’ and ‘she’, we are given to understand that their shared history with ‘Ice’ is all that links them, now.

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Strange Juxtapositions

February 1, 2012 1 Comment

Raewyn Alexander

Rangatira,by Paula Morris (Penguin, Auckland, 2011) 296 pp., $30.00

The title of Rangatira, or Chief, has such grand connotations that I expected a magnificent tale, and in many ways this novel satisfied that expectation. Ngati Wai Rangatira Paratene Te Manu mulls his past over while he sits for the painting of his portrait by the artist, Lindauer. The painter’s planned trip to England has jogged the chief’s prodigious memory. Elderly Paratene appears calm, but twenty years before, with fourteen northern rangatira he travelled to England, and their trials were many. We learn Paratene prefers quiet reflection to excessive socialising, or to arguments at the Native Land Court where proceedings have dragged on.

Difficult events pile up against each other; strange juxtapositions occur. I empathised, wanted to somehow make things easier. The ridiculous get-up Paratene describes having to put on when a studio photographer prepares to take the Maori chief’s photograph serves to illustrate general misunderstandings between cultures. Then dubious agreements and arguments intrude in other ways: events go awry or are badly played out. The trials and tribulations experienced in England made me gasp: so many grubby and devious situations upset matters and offend against good manners and decency, let alone diplomacy and protocol, while these Maori are supposed to be honoured guests.

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Half-way House of the Soul

February 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Jodie Dalgleish

Travesty, by Mike Johnson with illustrations by Darren Sheehan (Titus Books, Auckland, 2010), 243 pp., $35.00

After finishing Mike Johnson’s Travesty, and re-reading his previous novels and poetry, I have come to the conclusion that, with it, he has achieved the epitome or culmination of something. He has achieved a kind of ‘worldmaking’ — to borrow American philosopher Nelson Goodman’s famous term — that confirms his position as one of New Zealand’s most important fiction writers.

Travesty is an unusual work of fiction. For 204 of its 244 pages Johnson creates an unknown world, the imaginative space of an unknown place. It is a world related to known concepts, and to literary genres such as science fiction and fantasy — and yet it is foreign. The writer’s characters are bizarre and involved in irrational quests. His material world is recognisable, but also thrown into some indeterminable time and place. Reading Travesty is like trying to make out a mirage that is always shifting before your eyes: you are unable to quite grasp it, but somehow you seem to know enough to read and understand it. This, I am certain, is the writer’s intention, and evidence of considerable skill.

Johnson’s characters live in Travesty’s Rathouse, each engrossed in their broken yet richly personal lives. Over the course of the book, the writer takes each of them, including a baby rat, out into Travesty’s wider world to face or to make their fate. It is this seemingly-simple movement that shapes the work and allows the novelist to weave his characters’ realities around each other and thus create the dark, glistening and many-threaded world of Travesty.

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