New Zealand books in review
Max Oettli
Fletcher of the Bounty by Graeme Lay (HarperCollins, 2017), 304 pp., $36.99
Arr I like a good sea yarn. In my tender youth I took the bus on a weekly basis to the Hamilton Public Library (Young Adults Section) and took out a novel to read for the week. I coasted through Arthur Ransome, sailed through both Showell Styles and Ronald Symes, and was agreeably pressganged into C.S. Forester’s Hornblower series. [Read more…]
Helen Watson White
A Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington 1888–1903 by Redmer Yska (Otago University Press, 2017), 271 pp., $39.95
In his prologue to A Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington 1888–1903, Redmer Yska recalls Graham Greene’s idea that childhood is ‘the fiction writer’s credit balance’. In this regard, he says, Mansfield as daughter of a millionaire businessman ‘would leverage [her] stock to the maximum’. Wellington with its ‘ridgy, clasped terrain, its mobile weather’, and the ‘frontier’ experiences that shaped the girl Kathleen, were – in a different metaphor – ‘the seedbed, the blood and bone fertiliser of everything that came later’. Wellington-born himself, and growing up in Karori, Yska is well qualified to describe the streets walked by the writer in her time, the atmosphere she sensed, the world she knew. [Read more…]
Elizabeth Smither
Heloise by Mandy Hager (Penguin Random House, 2017), 382 pp., $38
Hilary Mantel, in her second of five Reith Lectures, commented on the tendency of women writers to falsely empower female characters in history, in rather the same way we might attribute power and influence over her father to Ivanka Trump. She talks of the desire to ‘rework history so victims are the winners’. This is not a criticism that can be levelled at Mandy Hager’s Heloise, though some of the psychological insights that Heloise d’Argenteuil and her nuns arrive at might owe more to our times than the twelth century. It seems we can no more escape 2017 than Heloise could escape 1098–1142. [Read more…]
Michael O’Leary
The Stolen Island: Searching for `Ata by Scott Hamilton (BWB Texts/Bridget Williams Books, 2016), 112 pp., $14.99
The term ‘blackbirding’ has usually been associated with the capture and enslavement of people in Africa to be transported to the United States for enforced labour and abuse in the southern states. However, The Oxford English Reference Dictionary defines it as ‘Blackbird: a kidnapped black or Polynesian on a slave ship’, and it is the history of Polynesian blackbirding that Scott Hamilton’s new book deals with. Previous publications have documented slavery of the nineteenth century in the Pacific, for example, Edward W. Docker’s 1970 book, The Blackbirders: A brutual story of the Kanaka slave-trade, which dealt with the ‘recruiting’ of South Seas labour for Queensland between 1863 and 1907. Also, in his 2007 book, The White Pacific, Gerald Horne reconstructs the history of blackbirding (slave trading) in the Pacific region. He examines the role of US citizens (many of them ex-slaveholders and ex-confederates) in the trade, and its roots in Civil War dislocations after emancipation of slaves. The origins of a White Australian policy and the rise of Japan as a Pacific power are also discussed. New Zealand played an active, if somewhat incidental, part in this human trafficking, with cutters, ketches, schooners and, later, larger ships leaving New Zealand ports for the New Hebrides and the Solomon Islands, forcing or conning Islanders onto their vessels, then delivering them to planters in Queensland or Fiji. [Read more…]
Max Oettli
Seen in China 1956 by Tom Hutchins, edited by John B. Turner (Turner Photo Books in collaboration with Photo Forum as Photoforum issue 86, 2016), 124 pp., $25; The Shops by Steve Braunias and Peter Black (Luncheon Sausage Press Books/Photo Forum, 2016), 62 pp., $40
What did I know about China in 1956? I was nine at the time, a smart-arsed Swiss-German kid, the runt in a family of four. We had a German Jugend book I’d devoured, as I devoured everything readable in our house, a kind of companion volume to Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet I suppose, of a German’s experience of living in China for 30 years. The book was probably from a time when Germany was a somewhat tarnished currency (as was Harrer’s Tibet book, incidentally), but this did not stop me reading it avidly. There were countless millions of Chinese, apparently; they drank tea, did gruesome things to women’s feet and had rather fixed dietary habits and somewhat rudimentary plumbing, which gave them and their whole country a distinctive smell, to put it mildly. Their governance was based on a very hierarchic Confucian order and their punishment of criminals was gruesome. [Read more…]