Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Turning in Time

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Rachel O’Connor

Isobar Precinct by Angelique Kasmara (The Cuba Press, 2021), 291pp, $37; The Time Lizard’s Archaeologist by Trisha Hanifin (Cloud Ink Press, 2021), 259pp, $30

‘If I could turn back time,’ sang Cher in her 1989 smash hit. ‘If I could find a way,’ she says, she would unsay all the hurtful words that had brought a sad end to her relationship. We can’t, of course, take back ‘all those words that have hurt’. Mere mortals and insomniacs especially are condemned instead to endlessly revisit the mistakes of our own history, impotent to avoid or undo the damage done by our younger selves. But what if we could? Just how far would we be willing to go to alter the fabric of the past, and therefore the present and future, of ourselves and those we love?  [Read more…]

Between the Long and the Short of It

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Sally Blundell 

Middle Distance: Long Stories of Aotearoa New Zealand, ed. Craig Gamble (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2021), 478pp, $35

‘Maybe I could sew my legs together,’ Loretta muses, wishing for a tail. Penned-on lines or her own rashy, eczematic skin could pass for scales. Sniffing, dripping, allergy-ridden Jeremy is a likely candidate for the required slimy hagfish; a sickening Mrs Wilberforce (a nod to Maurice Gee’s Under the Mountain) is Loretta’s longed-for mermaid kindred spirit. This is the alarming, yet vividly drawn cast of ‘Scales, Tails and Hagfish’, Octavia Cade’s story of an insistent, angry, self-proclaimed mermaid that sets the pace for this collection of fourteen long short stories with unflagging brio.  [Read more…]

Dust-Red Wings

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Emma Neale

Unsheltered by Clare Moleta (Scribner, 2021), 242pp, $35

From its comfortless Grapes of Wrath epigraph to its acknowledgement in the endpapers of the Whadjuk Noongar people, this novel is unforgiving, underpinned by fear and grief that are not solely personal but species-borne; and yet it also lifts us with its glimmers of social connection, and speeds us along as if on dust-red wings.

Suffering no illusions about what a world that continues to careen into climate crisis will be like, Unsheltered also keeps the reader gripped by its alternately guttering and reigniting candle of hope, as the narrative follows the unpredictable knife-edge luck of its protagonist, the unsentimental and enormously pragmatic survivor, Li. [Read more…]

Drink ’til Dead

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This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 241

 

Janet Newman

The Animals in that Country by Laura Jean McKay (Scribe, 2020), 280pp, $29.99

‘Do we want to know what pigs on the way to slaughter are thinking?’ asked Australian author Sophie Cunningham at the 31 March 2020 virtual launch of Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in that Country. ‘No, we don’t,’ Cunningham answered. But that is what we get in McKay’s novel. Battery-farmed pigs are released from a truck on a five-hour-plus trip to the slaughterhouse––this is the Australian outback––because their constant hello-ing has unravelled the farmers in the cab. One pig asks, ‘Is it / good. What is / it.’ It’s grass and creeks. We discover that the pigs are not merely fearful; rather, they feel something more terrible and familiar: [Read more…]

The Grief of Ghosts

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Shana Chandra

The Impossible Resurrection of Grief by Octavia Cade (Stelliform Press, 2021), 77 pp, $14.99

Octavia Cade’s The Impossible Resurrection of Grief is a non-traditional ghost story, one that truly haunts as it is set in a future not so distant from ours, where the destruction of our seas and wildlife has left familiar land- and seascapes drained of life. Cade has won three Sir Julius Vogel awards for speculative fiction, and it’s worth noting that, besides her recent win for The Stone Wētā (2020), the other two were for novellas, both packing important questions into the small creative space. It’s also worth noting their titles—The Ghost of Matter (2016) and The Convergence of Fairy Tales (2017)—which hint at the themes she explores. [Read more…]

Climate Fiction for the Sunset Generation

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Emma Gattey

Scorchers: A climate fiction anthology, edited by Paul Mountfort and Rosslyn Prosser (Eunoia Publishing, 2020), 280pp., $29

At the time of writing, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just released its report on the physical science basis of climate change, including the role of human influence and the state of knowledge about possible climate futures. The findings are terrifying, sobering, devastating. They are also entirely unsurprising. Beyond the realms of climate research and science communication (although often with considerable overlap), fiction writers are among those who have long been grappling with eco-anxiety, futility and the overwhelming question of how on earth to compel people to care, and to act. [Read more…]