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Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

World Turned Upside Down

June 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Mia Watkins
Wulf, by Hamish Clayton (Penguin NZ, 2011), 240 pp., $30.00

Time escapes Wulf, leaps and bounds and bubbles and weaves between the words on the pages. This is no armchair narrative, you don’t get to cosy-up in a warm blanket sipping hot chocolate, a semi-conscious passive recipient of a predictable, orderly narrative. Thinking is compulsory. Even little knowledge of New Zealand history is a passport to thrive on Wulf and if you don’t know, here’s a fine way to enter the conversation. Wulf rewards the diligent reader. Dive into the ancient, imagine a time before time, the origin of time, words heavy-laden with ancestors treading deep into the infinite as you read.

            Te Rauparaha — the ‘Great Wolf’, ‘Southern Napoleon’, monster-demon, warlord, magician, cannibal-poet, ruthless, cunning and mightiest of New Zealand chiefs — permeates the narrative like the underside of a long cloud foreshadowing history. Traversing the landscape barefoot he glances behind, spies blood on a stick broken underfoot; the land is bleeding (his foot is bleeding) but the land is bleeding; flesh is land, people are land. If you haven’t forayed very far into the Maori world, be prepared to turn everything you thought you knew upside down. New Zealand is, after all, geographically upside-down to England; a fitting image for a meeting of worlds. The Southern Cross is an anchor, gold is green, geographical drawings are portraits of faces staring back at you, trees root deep into a sky beneath sky and history is prophesied. Language doesn’t reside in ink on paper but lives on faces and dances in caves, riverbeds and markings in the sand; a vocabulary of the natural world in which Te Rauparaha is highly educated.
            Cowell, trading master of the brig Elizabeth, bridges the impasse of mirror opposites. He’s been to New Zealand before, traded and spoken the native tongue. The crew ponder his true allegiance while listening awestruck to his tales of mighty chiefs, shrunken heads, giant eagles, alliances and betrayals, peace-time, slavery, infanticide and creation-myth and legend. Tribes fade in and out of existence like twinkling stars puncturing the black void of night, shifting in the kaleidoscope. Earthquakes shift land too, creating deep ravines, echoless pits and mountainous ranges. Details are bloody, gruesome and cruel; corpses adorn the landscape — draped from trees, littering waterways. A young boy is killed with a single snap of the neck, a young woman is ensnared to her death, tracked, butchered and cannibalised. The carnage is savage and not for the faint-hearted; and yet equally these constellations of circumstance are breathtaking, dizzying, wondrous.
            Wulf is also deeply paranoid, and so it should be, it’s historical fiction. History is subjective and often as enigmatic as the Old English poem ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’ that inspires the novel. Who tells the story and how do you know who they are? History is a fanfare of voices heard and unheard, stories told and untold, morphed, altered and contentious, a cornucopia of image, sound and flesh. This is refracted throughout the novel. The crew aboard the Elizabeth politely eye-ball each other, pry into corners of privacy, discover themselves there and become more paranoid. True intentions and identities are suspect. For these illiterates in an alien land, the inability to decipher a layout of shells on a beach, a fire on Kapiti Island or sounds of breaking sticks is unnerving, as is the inevitable default to familiar frames of reference. Is a surreptitiously placed basket of fish a gift of food or a trap? Even alone in nature they feel watched, tracked, spied upon, entered by unseen spirits. All eye all askance. Te Rauparaha observes from land, Cowell and crew from sea, each astutely aware of each other’s presence, in dreams and in waking. Omens, visions and premonitions trip over themselves, watching, waiting nervously for their respective fates to collide.
            In refusing to name his narrator, Hamish Clayton supersedes the perennial problem of pleasing history (without losing authenticity) and teases, taunts even his reader and critics by denying disembarkation. It’s your story too, you don’t get out that easily, not without a deep look in the mirror. Nameless narration causes you to recognise a little of yourself in the fabric of the story. As the novel unravels, Cowell’s charm fades as he is seen for what he really is; the bridge retreats and mirror opposites start to look the same. These tacticians begin to reflect the inconsolable truth of each skilfully playing the other at his own blood-soaked game, each a Trojan horse destroying the other from within, and yet much more like the other than they dare to think or even realise.
            Authorship must be more than the clever arrangement of words on a page. Words breathe when they command attention, when complicity is mandatory; otherwise they fall away like dead cells. Clayton achieves this in Wulf, a haunting, powerful evocation of a book I loved and clung to, even as it sank me under an ocean of tears.

MIA WATKINS is a Dunedin-based writer most recently published in Landfall and The International Literary Quarterly. She is inspired by a simple love of reading and writing.

Filed Under: fiction

From Seek to Hide and Back Again

May 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Anne Kennedy
Fosterling, by Emma Neale (Random, 2010, $29.99)

I’ve read two New Zealand novels recently that have on their covers walls of dense bush with arch-shaped escape-routes in them, through which can be seen the light at the end of the tunnel. First, Patrick Evans’ superb, mimetic
Gifted, and now this layered and original novel from Emma Neale, Fosterling. On the Neale cover, a tall, fuzzy, uncertain-looking man walks away from the camera, framed by the arch. But he is really walking toward us, the reader, Kiwis, living just beyond the bush. The New Zealand undergrowth, it seems, whether suburban or back-block, continues to deliver a range of fictive mysteries to us, from literary icons, to pig-hunting blokes, to tutus-and-gumboots, to the unlikely Tarzan Presley, to tall hairy beasts. These characters, the invention of the bush or of those who live alongside it, come shyly into the light.

    In Fosterling, a yeti-like creature called Bu, seven feet tall and covered in a thick pelt of glossy hair, emerges from deep, dark South Westland bush. Initially mute, he inspires a media circus, but also draws out tenderness and compassion among the small group of people who try to protect and care for him. As Bu’s story unfolds, we learn to liken him to a sasquatch, to Big Foot, to a maero; he creates a connecting tissue of universal myth set here in New Zealand. And we wonder, mesmerisingly, where he came from and what will happen to him.
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Filed Under: fiction

Haunted

May 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Jenny Powell
Weathered Bones, by Michele Powles (Penguin Books, 2009), 299 pp., $25.99

This is one of the few books I have had dreams about. The sea in it ended up permeating my nights: images of a blue-black seething ocean — repetitious, insistent images that are as compelling to the reader as they are to its characters — dominate Michele Powles’ first novel.
            Weathered Bones weaves together the lives of three women, initially unacquainted but about to become closer than they ever could have imagined. Eliza McGregor arrives in Wellington in 1840. Despite her initial new-immigrant expectations, life soon plummets from joy to the depression of a lonely grind at Pencarrow lighthouse. Her husband drinks his earnings, and her young children exhaust her spirit. The husband’s eventual drowning leads to Eliza herself becoming the keeper of the light.

            This is a fascinating aspect of the book, historically speaking, as ‘Eliza’ was inspired by the true-life story of Mary Jane Bennett, appointed New Zealand’s first keeper of a permanent lighthouse at Pencarrow in 1858. Powles allows us the opportunity to ponder the difficult life of Mary Jane, who was surely one of New Zealand’s early feminists.
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Filed Under: fiction

What Happens Next

April 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Lisa Samuels
Kingdom of Alt, Jack Ross (Titus Books, Auckland, 2010) 240 pp., $45.00


If Jack Ross has not read J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, someone should get it for him. Kingdom of Alt has some of the serial agonistic airs of that work, but it is  more dispersed: Kingdom of Alt is a collection of tales and takes involved with relations between real-life events and imaginary fictions that score the traumas of those real lives. The narrators include variously: a twenty-or-so female university student, a thirtyish divorcee taking evening poetry classes and making freakish death films from video fragments, a middle-aged man, Jack Ross himself as the speaking author, and other, both fragmentary and unified, human-ish points of view.

            The book opens with ‘Trauma’, a compelling short story that lampoons the difficult-subject liberal university course, the traumatised people who take it, and the suiciding student who seems to be the inevitable result of that equation. The story is largely presented as a series of journal entries including marginal edits from the narrator. These edits tend towards smoothing out her self-presentation, so that the student will come across as nicer than her first-thought compositional impulses might indicate. Thus ‘correcting’ the university journal or essay is associated with self-editing as making nice. By extension, smoothing out and correcting writing – making ‘good’, finished art – is presented as a making-nice of the painful equations of human culture. Kingdom of Alt does not want to make nice in that way. The fictive framing of this story, as with others in this collection, is multiple: real-life journalism, psychological theory, an embedded story, and the draft composition journal bracket each other, while the tale moves toward its ‘resolution’ of sorrow and sympathetic incomprehension.

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Filed Under: fiction

How to Layer an Ensemble

April 1, 2011 2 Comments

Siobhan Harvey
From Under the Overcoat, Sue Orr (Vintage, 2011), 348 pp., $29.99

Clothes: whether it’s the beret worn by Anna Sergeevna in Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’, or the beige raincoat donned by the protagonist of Lorrie Moore’s ‘How to be an Other Woman’, or Nie Chuanqing’s ‘blue gown of lined silk’ in Eileen Chang’s ‘Love in a Fallen City’ (i), or the ‘dark mohair’ bristling at the nape of tragic heroine of Maurice Duggan’s ‘Blues for Miss Laverty’ (ii), the garb writers choose to dress their characters in not only offers the kind of detail that makes prose convincing and compelling, but resonates with thematic and symbolic effect.

Of course, like most literary motifs, clothes are binaries. Worn by characters to suggest inner emotions — their atmospheric and cerebral worlds — this clothing is also simultaneously put on by the writer each time he or she picks up a pen and begins to place words beside each other to flesh out, develop and refine the wearer. The notion of waning, venereal Flaubert donning Félicité’s dimity kerchief, red skirt, grey stockings and apron whilst penning his poignant short story ‘A Simple Heart’ in 1877, or love-struck but vilified Mikhail Bulgakov wearing the typist’s fil de Perse stockings in his satirical novel Heart of a Dog might amuse or appal, but figuratively speaking, during each text’s development, so it transpired.

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Filed Under: fiction

Reflections in a Golden Eye

April 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Paul Sharrad
Quinine, Kelly Ana Morey (Huia Publishers, 2010) 315 pp., NZ$35.00.

When I was a teenager living in Port Moresby, my parents decided we would take our allotted leave in New Zealand. Full of touristic bonhomie, we chatted to a taxi driver who asked where we were from. ‘Papua’, we replied breezily. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Is that North Island or South?’ Once we realised what he was on about, we explained. ‘Oh yairs,’ came the rejoinder, ‘I knew you was from the tropics; you’ve got the yeller look about yer.’ So our sense of being part of a broad Pacific community was stripped away by parochial focus and our healthy suntans reduced to a medical routine of fighting off malaria with jaundice-inducing pills. These two elements frame the recent novel 
Quinine.
            Once Papua New Guinea gained its independence in 1975 it began to fade from the consciousness of Australians and others who made a living there as missionaries, planters, international advisers on everything and colonial administrators. The number of non-indigenous writers producing fiction set there also dwindled. Ex-colonials like Randolph Stow (Visitants, 1979) produced some good novels — after the usual slather of colonial romance twaddle, although that influence persisted in works like Louis Nowra’s postcolonial dystopian Palu (1987). Australian freelance traveller Trevor Shearston turned a critical eye on colonial officers and missionaries in Something in the Blood (1979) and White Lies (1986). Other sojourners have turned out books based on their experience there — for example Inez Baranay with her Rascal Rain (1994) — but overseas audiences have largely lost interest in the region, unless some crisis in the news, such as the Bougainville secessionist conflict or intertribal warfare in the Solomons, gives a novel topical appeal — as with Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip.
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Filed Under: fiction

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