Michael Morrissey

Words and Water by John Parkyn (Atzimba Press, 2017), 220 pp., $30

Many decades ago John Parkyn and I worked in the proofreading room of the Herald. We were aspirant writers. At my count, there were at least four (maybe five) hopeful writers in total. Proofreading rooms were like that in the 70s – would-be artists, poets, miscellaneous misfits, left-wing desperados, people who had not yet found their niche were part of the mix. Plus ‘seagulls’ (casual employees on the wharf) and posties. Writers just seemed to emerge out of this diverse compote. Today, writers go to university and do courses in creative writing. [Read more…]

Holly Walker

All Our Secrets by Jennifer Lane (Rosa Mira Books, 2018), 276 pp., $30

Ostensibly, All Our Secrets is a book about a series of murders, and about a religious commune that moves in to live uncomfortably alongside a conservative rural New South Wales town, Coongahoola, in the 1980s. There’s a mystery to be solved, and an eleven-year-old protagonist, Gracie, from whose perspective we hear the story. It defies genre: it could be young adult fiction for mature readers, or an adult novel rendered from a child’s perspective.

What sticks with me most after putting it down for the second time, though, is not the mystery but the portrayal of family life, and what this book has to say about love and parenting.  [Read more…]

Majella Cullinane

Gone to Pegasus by Tess Redgrave (Submarine, 2018), 280 pp., $35

A passion for music, and its ability to connect the most dissimilar of women, Eva McAlester and Grace Coles, lies at the heart of the novel Gone to Pegasus. Divided into four parts that correspond to musical tempos, the story is set in February 1892, and from the outset provides the reader with vivid, engaging evocations of place: Dunedin, New Delhi and Lake Wakatipu.

The novel opens in Dunedin, and we follow twenty-year-old Eva as she leaves her house on Pitt Street, walks past Knox Church, through the Octagon and on to Princes Street. Eva is about to audition for a part in a choir, and as she passes three men playing Vivaldi she is reminded that her husband has been incarcerated at Seacliff Lunatic Asylum. [Read more…]

Chris Else

Confessions of a Cockroach and Headstone: two novellas by Mike Johnson (99% Press, 2017) 180 pp., $29.95

‘Mike Johnson is the most underrated of all living New Zealand authors.’ So said Iain Sharp in a Sunday Star-Times review of Johnson’s The Vertical Harp: Selected poems of Li He. There is substance to Sharp’s claim. Johnson has published nine works of longer fiction, two collections of short stories, six collections of poetry, a medical memoir and a children’s book. Despite critical attention and recognition from awards and dispensers of fellowships, in a career spanning over thirty years he has never managed to retain a mainstream publisher and has had only fleeting recognition from readers and reviewers. The reason for this, it seems to me, lies as much in the literary context as in Johnson’s creative predilections.

For the most part, New Zealand’s literary taste still has a preference for realism. Or, to put this point in commercial terms, the small overall size of the New Zealand market means that the sectors of that market that are keen on non-realistic modes – fantasy, say, or science fiction – are too small to sustain local publishing programmes. As a major local publisher said to me recently, ‘Dystopian doesn’t sell, fantasy doesn’t sell, magic realism doesn’t sell, ghost stories don’t sell.’ Even crime seems to be marginal. No doubt there is an element of cultural cringe in this situation. Local writers of fantasy are competing in a global market, and a New Zealand fan is more likely to look to one of the big overseas publishers than to seek satisfaction in the local scene. [Read more…]

Harley Hern

The New Ships by Kate Duignan (Victoria University Press, 2018), 362 pp., $30

Seventeen years after her highly praised debut novel Breakwater, Kate Duignan’s second novel, The New Ships, explores very different territory. Peter Collie is a model of reliability and responsibility, a Wellington lawyer in his late forties, financially stable, cautious and dependable. As a young man he once dismantled great ships piece by piece, but as the story begins it is Peter who is being pulled apart. His wife Moira has recently died, his grown son Aaron has absented himself, and Peter’s career and reputation are spiralling downwards. As the three epigraph poems suggest, paternity and grief are present from the first page of Chapter One. But Peter also revisits his past. Abigail, the baby daughter he lost, and Geneviève, the woman he once loved and abandoned, both haunt his thoughts. In addition, Peter uncovers a secret that, within this place of grief and loss, forces him to question his marriage, his life and his sense of self. Set mainly in New Zealand, but with action that navigates India and Pakistan, the UK and Europe, The New Ships is the story of Peter’s re-examination of his actions—or inactions—and of what it is to be a father, husband and son. [Read more…]