fiction – Page 46

Everthing Merged and Became Whole

May 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Elizabeth Smither

The Kindness of Your Nature, by Linda Olsson (Penguin, 2011), 216 pp., $40

‘If we could see ourselves from above,’ thinks Marion Flint, the narrator of Linda Olsson’s third novel, The Kindness of Your Nature, ‘we would observe an intricate pattern emerging: a chain of minute incidents and developments, seemingly random, but all part of a coherent process with an ultimate goal’. This reflectiveness might exclude a lot of lives: children, for instance, though the seeing-from-above might begin in childhood, or those whose lives are abbreviated by illness or violence before there is time or leisure to reflect. Just recently I was discussing with a friend the idea of ‘the examined life’ which is supposed to be the only kind worth having. I wondered if there was something indulgent or luxurious about it, with its implications of introversion or narcissism. And yet this desire for coherence and comprehension is very strong, whether in seeking out friends from the past or revisiting significant landscapes.

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Land Bought in the Colonies, Sight Unseen

April 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Jenny Powell

La Rochelle’s Road, by Tanya Moir (Random House, Auckland, 2011), 272 pp., $39.99.

As the end of La Rochelle’s Road began to near for me, a collision of worlds ensured that this would be a novel I would remember for the most earthbound of reasons. Largely set in Canterbury’s Banks Peninsula during the 1860’s, La Rochelle’s Road lures the Peterson family from London, with the prospect of rolling fields and the charm of a furnished cottage. Upon arrival they confront a wilderness of scrub and a cottage full of filth and vermin.

While parents Daniel and Letitia begin the long and drawn-out taming of their property, 15-year-old son Robbie is forced to abandon further schooling to work with his father. With no revenue from their land the two men decide to join a gang of scrub cutters. In the exchanges between the workers, and in their enduring routines, Moir constructs a raft of cultural differences between the Petersons (and no doubt many other settlers), and the more established residents around them. Daniel’s workmates view those with an education as stirrers, who think the world owes them a living. In a telling statement they clarify their desire for egalitarianism in their new home; ‘We don’t want them and their funny ideas here – that’s what we bloody left for.’

Survival for the Petersons becomes a matter of resilience and adaptation. It is also a matter of relinquishing dreams and desires. Each Peterson responds in a vastly different manner. Moir’s success in displaying the impact of even the smallest of events elicits our frustrations and sympathies.

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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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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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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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