fiction – Page 44

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.

[Read more…]

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.

[Read more…]

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.

[Read more…]

Please Hold

December 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Kiran Dass

Bird North and Other Stories, by Breton Dukes (Victoria University Press 2011) 191 pp., $35.00.

A quick squizz at a good deal of the latest New Zealand poetry and fiction releases reveals a deeply dismal trend in bland, uninspiring book covers in sedate and muted shades of beige, white or grey. Utterly unappealing, they tragically look like bereavement handbooks.

Northland writer Breton Dukes’ debut Birth North and Other Stories however, shakes off this fusty image, opting instead to slyly beckon the reader with a striking cartoony illustration courtesy of Dylan Horrocks. I initially thought the cover was an odd choice — perhaps a touch too lighthearted for what people keep banging on about as being stories which are concerned with pushing a masculine ‘Man Alone’ angle. But when I say this, I don’t mean in the John Mulgan or Bill Pearson tradition. After reading Dukes’ stories, the cover makes perfect sense. This book looks and reads like a collection for young adults. These are gateway stories — that is, the characters only just allude to having any shred of insight.

This is a plain, no-frills collection of seventeen stories. Dukes’ bongtastic characters drink from beer-filled V bottles, attend dull seminars to apply for call-centre jobs, work in hospitals, spy on their flatmates having sex, and chiefly struggle to relate to the people around them — and themselves.

It’s terrific that while these stories are set in recognisable locations across New Zealand such as Te Anau, the Coromandel, Johnsonville, the East Coast and Dunedin, Dukes isn’t that fixated on landscape and location. It appears that he is more interested in character. Particularly how men relate to each other and to their environment. I get the impression that Dukes is sticking to the safe confines of writing about what he knows, having worked in Government call-centres and hospitals himself. The only trouble is that his characters aren’t strong enough to pull the stories along.

However, Pontoon, a story about an art student who attends a two-day seminar to test his suitability for a position working the phones at the Emergency Services’ 111 call-centre is a terrific piece. Dukes dryly captures the pathos of employment workshops. From the man who brings his own pens (and who no doubt lines them up in front of him on the desk in an orderly fashion), a woman named Shona (for some reason, there is always a ‘Shona’ at these things, isn’t there?), to the ‘nicotine slaves’ who dash outside for a furtive tea-break puff, and a territorial soldier — the characters here are spot on. However, Pontoon ends on a baffling and woolly note about a pod of dolphins. Here, Dukes should have refrained from trying to be deep.

I know these characters are supposed to be laconic and ‘masculine’ but I don’t think Dukes gives his cast enough credit. I think that in many cases, it is stoic and quiet men who have some of the keenest insights. In these stories, any insight the characters have (whether that be internally or externally demonstrated) is entirely surface level. There’s nothing really there. I wanted these people to have a bit more oomph. More bite in the characters could have elevated these stories to a knowing greatness. Instead, the characters mostly come across as mealy-mouthed, shiftless, shaggy-brained slackers. And you just know there must be a lot more going on with them if only we could scratch below that grimy surface. On the whole, these are polite stories.

With its distinct chiaroscuro atmosphere, Racquet is a neat, moody and clear-sighted story. I loved the depressingly helpless, awkward and domestic set up.

Standout stunner for me though, is The Moon, a gentle down-the-line story which shows Dukes is not afraid of the quiet moments. Here, he shows us how the child informs what the adult becomes:

“Peter was five when his father said to him, ‘Your mum’s gone to the moon. She has some special work to do. I don’t know when she’ll be back.’”

Which Peter later counters with:

“People can’t live on the moon. Mrs Thompson told us.”

The scene is vivid, Dukes sets it up evocatively. There is: ‘a bottle of tomato sauce upside down on the table. A fly was crawling over the dried sauce around its neck.”’

Using minutiae and delicate observation, Dukes creates a story which is at once tender and sweet but also hopeless and melancholy. Don’t get me wrong, Dukes doesn’t romanticise Peter’s situation — Peter turns into a bit of a deadbeat. This is tangible stuff — we all know people like this. Dukes just offers us an insight into or angle on how people turn out the way they do. The scene where Peter sees his father leaning on a fence ‘just before Ashburton’ sent a chill through me.

It is stories like The Moon which hint that Dukes must have some greatness in him. I’d like to see him dig a bit deeper, get stuck into what is beyond the superficial surface, think a bit more about his characterisation and perhaps try his hand at some long form fiction.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

KIRAN DASS is a Wellington-based writer who has written about music, film and books for the NZ Listener, Sunday Star-Times, Metro, Pavement, Real Groove, Rip it Up, New Zealand Musician, NZ Herald, Dominion Post and Staple.

The Smell of Scorched Chickpeas

November 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Andrew Paul WoodThe Catastrophe, by Ian Wedde, (Victoria University Press, 2011) 191 pp., $35.00.

Ian Wedde’s new novel, The Catastrophe, written during his 2009 Michael King Writer’s Centre Residency, begins with Wedde’s protagonist, the fallen célèbre, middle-aged restaurant critic Christopher Hare — (whose motto, ‘food is love’, is inherited from his Italian grandmother back in Tolaga Bay, Aotearoa; his grandfather being Maori) — eating beneath his accustomed station in an infra-dig eatery. Hare writes under the obscure soubriquet ‘Rosenstein’. My first impression was of something not unlike DBC Pierre in Lights Out in Wonderland mode, taking the piss out of the books of Sarah-Cut Lunch … sorry, Sarah-Kate Lynch … and a global legion of surplus foodie novelists. Everyone, and I mean everyone, has turned a hand at the ‘Oh no, the food is just a metaphor!’ genre over the years, for better or worse, from Emile Zola’s florid Le Ventre de Paris (‘The Gut of Paris’) to Günter — ‘what did you do during the war, daddy?’ — Grass’s chewy Der Butt(‘The Flounder’). Most fail to reach the great heights of either of those novels (Eat, Pray, Love anyone?).
            Hare’s nom-de-plumed muse, the peppery Mary Pepper — (every food writer, bar A.A. Gill, seems to have one; consider Sunday Star Times restaurant reviewer Geraldine Johns’ grandiose ‘the Duke’, implying her status as ‘the Duchess’) — who is also known as Thé Glacé (‘Iced Tea’). Mary, a London photographer specialising in eroticised images of food and a former junkie, has left him. This, in a perfect storm with the economic downturn, is how Hare — an Achilles sulking in his tent — comes to be chasing mediocre rabbit poached in wine (a pun on his name, presumably) around his plate in a less-than-salubrious restaurant in Nice (where else?).
             A mysterious, intriguing woman enters (of course), executes a male diner and his female companion, and calmly departs. For no sane reason, Hare chases after this enigmatic gunwoman and throws himself into the getaway taxi to return the fake Gucci handbag she has left behind in the confusion — a Cinderella assassin with shades of Anna Karenina — as you do. The clichés are knee-deep by the end of the first chapter; but that’s deliberate, I suspect, the presentation of a vaguely noir-ish cinematic vision stirred in with keen observations on the absurd pretensions of foodie culture.
            This isn’t a long book — just shy of 200 pages, all written, apparently, over a couple of months — so it fairly cracks on, with Hare in a precarious position as a somewhat complicit, though inconvenient, hostage of his — as it turns out — Palestinian activist captors. The shooter, Dr Hawwa Habash, is a paediatrician (she suggests en passantthat Hare’s alias is a reference to Nils Rosén von Rosenstein, 1706–1773, the Swedish father of the science of modern pediatrics), radicalised by the vile profiteering of Abdul Yassou, her ex-husband, and also the man she has just killed.
            The novel’s title is a nod to the Nakbah, the ‘Catastrophe’, as the 1948 Palestinian exodus during the Arab-Israeli War and preceding civil war is known in Arabic. Much of the story consists of reminiscences: Hare’s of a long ago and far away New Zealand, and of Thé Glacé; and Hawwa’s of her experience of the Palestinian tragedy: death, betrayal, the international trade in human organs, arms dealing, assorted crimes against humanity. Genre-wise, I guess we could call this a political novel as well then. This is the thoughtful Slow Food weave — convoluted politics and characters — that counterpoints the binge-like, Kentucky-Fried-McBurger, ‘pacey thriller’ weft in this story.
            Mary’s ‘catastrophe’ was her marriage to Hare, a self-imposed punishment resulting from the suicide of her Jewish lover from art school. He killed himself in shame over Israel’s complicity in the 1982 massacres of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. (Not terribly likely, I know, but weird Palestinian synchronicities abound, though unexplained, in the novel.) This all comes out after Hare sends a coded email to her from the safe house where he is being kept, (now implicated and compromised by his strange antics), while she, as self-obsessed and about as sympathetic as Hare, is deciding what to do.
            Further Palestiniana includes the fact that Wedde dedicates the novel to the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, whom he became aware of in Jordan in the 1960s, and whose work he has translated in collaboration with the Palestinian scholar Fawwaz Tuqan. Unusually, the novel has a short bibliography, just to remind us of all the research he’s done. Robert Fisk gets big ups, which is suggestive. This isn’t propaganda, but it’s sympathetic and earnest enough to be taking a political risk in some circles: very Victoria University Press, then.
            Reminiscent of the endless lists of exclusive brands in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, Catastrophe is a ragoût (noticeably Martin Amis-ish in its self-conscious prose style), liberally slathered with haute-cuisine metaphors, menu similes, outrageous analogies: Yassou’s blood is described as resembling Tomates aux crevettes (a Belgian dish of tomatoes stuffed with shrimps, ew!). Obviously, Wedde is too good a writer to take that kind of tosh seriously, so it must be sarcasm or parody on his part. (Surely.)
            Even so, the writing’s tight as a drum; even if Hare’s self-abduction seems unlikely and counterintuitive, rash impulsiveness is not unheard of in the real world. Personally, I find the self-inflicting Hare loathsome and gross — preening, solipsistic, vain, nihilistic to the point of sociopathy — his epicurean self-indulgence repeatedly invoked by descriptions of his sensuous lips, smacking and licking (very Swinburnian) in the face of others’ starvation and misery. This is very much the point, if a heavy-handed one. Hare is fun to loathe; however even Nabokov’s self-regarding and noisome paedophile Humbert Humbert has more depth. For Hare the perfect Cappon Magro (a ridiculously elaborate Christmastide seafood salad from Liguria, no doubt included as a result of Wedde’s professed fondness for Lucio Galletto’s 2008 Lucio’s Ligurian Kitchen) is as significant an issue as the precarious predicament in which he finds himself.
            Hawwa is a much more appealing character by far – one of those stylish, polyglot, urbane and intellectual professional Palestinian women in exile – a slightly romanticised cross between Lila Abu Lughod, Nadia Hijab, Ghada Karmi, Huwaida Arraf and maybe a pinch of Edward Said in drag – who very much exist in the real world. I wish she was less of a cipher for the tribulations of the Palestinians than she is. We again experience her memories through food. Early on in the book she bitterly notes that Hare’s book on Middle Eastern cooking was unlikely to contain reference to the UN relief supplies she was forced to live off as a refugee in Lebanon, her otherness (mercifully Wedde avoids the temptation to orientalise too much) signalled by the smell of scorched chickpeas (possibly hummus, that straightforward, unfussy, but delicious staple of Levantine cuisine) pervading the safe house. She is, however, a creation Wedde can be proud of.
            While less obviously literary than Wedde’s other novels, this isn’t an easy read either. There’s no spoon-feeding going on — no narrator is reliable, the author makes no direct stands regarding geopolitical history and the personal moral choices of his characters. Wittgenstein believed that all human behaviour was conscious, and therefore a matter of ethics. Wedde (I suspect him of being a neuro-behaviourist at heart) takes the opposite view that sometimes those ethical choices are not always well-thought-through ones, that human beings lose control of themselves at times of great misery. It’s an incredibly difficult novel to review because it is a novel of human illogicality and impulsiveness, the random pointlessness of life and history; and the possibility that it can also be redeemed, made meaningful, by human actions. Wedde strongly implies that we must take personal responsibility for dealing with the outcomes of those irrational impulses. Everyone in The Catastrophe, through the breakdown of humanity and reason, seems to be thrusting themselves into impossible situations from which they cannot extricate themselves: untenable situations that must nonetheless be endured and survived – an exact parallel with the Israeli-Palestinian situation as it is today; a tense, high pressure, ultimately disintegrating stalemate.
            That’s about as close as he gets to any moral in the novel. There can be no easy resolutions, no straightforward answers for any of the characters. Hawwa survives with the conditional sympathy of the reader. Hare remains more or less an utter turd of the first water that no amount of polishing could make very endearing. Mary is more problematic, a morally ambiguous figure somewhere between the two. What kind of novel is The Catastrophe then? That’s a very difficult thing to say. The passages of hedonistic glamour, and the Middle Eastern exoticism, and the political thriller aspects belie somewhat its status as a philosophical novel of political, social and existential import. At the same time, the narrative is suffused with liberal pot-shots at the overblown, ultraviolet-lit prose of food writing, as well as plenty of the dark humour — both pure schadenfreude and a specific variety of bleak irony that flourishes in Gaza and on the West Bank. It is entirely possible to enjoy the book on both levels. An intellectually hungry reader will find pleasure in the challenge posed by this concoction from the newly appointed New Zealand Poet Laureate. All in all, I pronounce The Catastrophe one of the better home-grown literary meals I’ve enjoyed in a while.

ANDREW PAUL WOOD is a Christchurch-based writer and arts commentator who contributes regularly to a wide range of publications.