Fear and Fearlessness

Emma Neale

Pretty Ugly by Kirsty Gunn (Otago University Press, 2024), 197pp, $35

Beginning in the 1990s, with her poetic novella Rain (1994), which was followed up by her first full-length novel, The Keepsake (1997) and then by her first collection of short fiction, The Place You Return to Is Home (1999), Kirsty Gunn’s work has managed to be sensuously evocative at the level of style, yet unflinching and sometimes highly disturbing in terms of theme and preoccupations. It is a deliberate dissonance exemplified in its essence by the title of her new collection, Pretty Ugly.

The paradox reflected in that title is at the core of Gunn’s work, affirming that she is a writer who seeks to be utterly uncompromising in her poking and prodding at boundaries. It’s as if she wants to see how far she can take experimentation in genre while also confronting certain social and moral taboos. (Her 2013 novel The Big Music, listed for the James Tait Black and IMPAC awards and winner of The New Zealand Post Book of the Year in 2013, provides clear evidence of the same urge).

With her debut novel, The Keepsake, the use of reiterated, seductively sensuous imagery lulled the reader into an entranced sense of the physical beauty of an object that is in fact evidence of extreme physical and sexual violence. I found the resulting tension created a distressing reading experience. In such a context, does the author’s stance towards the reader border on bad faith, given she evokes one set of feelings while all the time luring us towards another? Is something of this manipulative element also what is so very unnerving about both ‘Blood Knowledge’, the opening piece here, and ‘All Gone’, the final story? (‘Night-Scented Stock’ is billed as an Afterword, its commentary on a collection called Pretty Ugly more a metafictional jest than a stand-alone story.)

My visceral memories of the troubling fusion of gorgeously poetic imagery and sometimes horrific subject matter from Gunn’s earlier works resurged with a vengeance after reading the first story in Pretty Ugly. ‘Blood Knowledge’ centres on a romance writer, whose public life, one of clockwork productivity, as she writes a globally successful historical novel every two years, has a destructive flipside that nobody else, not even her husband, is aware of. Her fiction, she knows, is ‘only living on the surface of things’. Gunn herself refuses to write this type of ‘familiar and loved story’ of ‘success and beauty and marriage and wealth’—although initially, that is the life her main character Venetia seems to have lived. Instead, using repetitions like refrains that lend the story something like the structure of a poem, yet also the sense of a fable, and of an ominous return, as if to trauma, the narrative becomes one about a character trying to exert a degree of control that tips over into self-harm and also into the broader territory of Thanatos, or the death-drive. (Unfortunately it’s difficult to discuss this without revealing the central concealment of the story: should you wish to preserve the moment of revelation for yourself, you will need to exit this review now.)

Venetia educates herself in herbal lore, with the intention of ending her own pregnancies multiple times. She succeeds in this again and again, with increasing risk and levels of suffering and pain. At one point, when the herbal elixirs don’t work, she resorts to using a self-fashioned prod. She buries the evidence of these pregnancy ‘conclusions’, as she calls them, in the beautiful garden she and her husband share. The initial trigger for this grim secrecy appears to be a reaction to her husband’s smooth dismissal of her wish for a different life as ‘silly’. More broadly, it seems to be a reaction to the conventional expectations he and wider society have of her role and of marriage. Venetia’s repeated, clandestine act is an insistence on a private, interior life and a separate sense of self. Yet it’s one which is distressingly morbid and it puts her own life at grave risk: at one point, she contracts a blood infection and is hospitalised. Nevertheless, she greets each deliberately induced miscarriage with ’a sense of private achievement’ and says she has always needed it to give her a sense of herself, of ‘her own powerful essence’.

In one sense, the story seems weirdly outside the contemporary moment. Whatever happened to contraception? References to ‘global trends’, TV, Moleskine notebooks and wide, supermarket-like aisles suggest the twenty-first century. Yet what modern woman with Venetia’s financial means, intelligence and education wouldn’t know to use a diaphragm, an IUD, a Mirena, or to go on the pill and find a way, if necessary, to conceal the daily contraceptive dose from her husband? Why does Venetia put herself through all the subterfuge and danger rather than seek an easy medical solution? On this level, the story refuses realism and psychologically explorative fiction; it reaches instead for symbol or dark parable. The most obvious readings of this adult fairy tale are that apparently ideal lives can harbour deep, sinister secrets and come at a cost; that Venetia’s actions complicate and challenge conventional notions of innate maternal feeling; that women, once seen as ‘the angel of the house’, can be monsters, too.

Yet other interpretations are more troubling. What I find most jangling in the story is both the way it seems to take aim at Venetia’s agency, and the way it seems to depict abortion as a shameful, dirty secret, and not as a means for women to find release from economic and psychological hardship, to either literally survive (when pregnancy and labour risk what the medical profession call ‘direct obstetric deaths’) or to sustain general physical and mental health, and maintain autonomy. The wealthy, privileged Venetia is not at any obvious risk: in between her bouts of pregnancy termination, she chooses to have four children; she says it’s a ‘glorious feeling’, knowing that her buried pregnancies are in the garden while her children are playing. The little scraps of paper where she maps the burial spots are also, she says, records of ‘the most private excitements’.

The discomforting story gives very little narrative time or space to a deeper exploration of how or why Venetia’s bizarre strategy has evolved. We don’t see how some recognisable trauma or potent survival mechanism has led to it, so the repeated acts of self-inflicted abortion come to seem an oddly unanchored and even gratuitous focus for the story. ‘Blood Knowledge’ could easily have an anti-feminist, anti-choice reading. It left me feeling more than a little seasick.

Thank goodness ‘Blackjack’ was the next story up. Here, a mother tries to keep a lie about her husband alive, to protect her children’s view of the world. This story sustains a great sense of tension, a credible internal psychology, the pace is tightly controlled, the ‘reveal’ is deftly placed, and it also leaves us at the hinge of a decision, as it tackles complex and layered themes of power and subjugation, addiction and submissiveness, and the instinct to protect one’s children more than oneself. Gunn delves into morally complex territory without provoking intense reader unease.

Many of the remaining stories share this subtler investigation of character. The prose of ‘Wairarapa’ uses mannered convolutions, a swirling, repetitive style that evokes how the central children edge towards understanding the constantly changing dynamics in their extended family. The style imitates the tentative, circular questions the young children get stuck in when a ‘new cousin’ arrives, and when they are only granted a partial, fragmented family narrative. (This is sometimes delivered with bleakly comic lines from the grandmother like ‘You be nice to Beulah, or when she’s gone, I’ll skin you alive.’) The general style of long, winding, multiple-clause sentences, where the main subject and verb are pulled far apart, effectively captures the atmosphere both of adult deflection of the truth, and the children’s bewilderment. ‘Wairarapa’ enacts the confusion of not having a clear and stable version of a family story, and how when new information arrives, the onset of knowledge is less a revelation and empowerment than it is a shock destabilisation. The entry into adulthood is also the entry into loss.

There is a secret at the centre of this story, too: the closest we come to learning about what the absented grandfather figure has done is a comment about ‘bad bloodline’, and a young woman being told she must ‘get away from here as fast as she can’. The narrative voice is thus indirect, evasive, in an effective evocation of the dread and the wondering that the children feel. The adult reader might catch the intimation of either incest or rape: yet this is inferred very obliquely. Similarly, where the children see their grandmother as ‘resilient’, the adult reader might find her also formidable and manipulative, as she occasionally lets slip elements of the family narrative as a way to wield power, the way a wasp might use its sting.

In another story titled, ‘“It is lonely being a young man sent abroad to fight,” she said’, the narrative builds enough tension that we fear for the safety of two women characters, yet it executes an effective, moving turn. The women discover a case of excessive hoarding and household neglect, a symptom of what the machine of war inflicts on an individual soldier. ‘Fear and fearlessness set among confusion’, a phrase from the story that describes both a dream and a real-world scenario, could equally be the title; and also an apt tagline for several other stories in the collection.

A handful of the stories also share a preoccupation with the nature of fiction. ‘“It is lonely being a young man being sent abroad to fight,” she said’, too, is laced through with discussions of how to write the story even as it unfolds on the page. Although this element reveals a sophisticated understanding of artifice and a distrust of naturalism and realism, indicating that Gunn is hyper-aware of what these modes must edit out, embellish and how they achieve their effects, there were times I found the metafictional aspect distracting. Given stories such as this one do thrum with the engine of intense human experience, and show real skill in capturing it, sometimes when the metafictional aspect resurfaced, I wanted to ask Gunn to move out of the way. It felt as if the sidestep into self-conscious postmodernism was like her dancing in front of the movie screen. Here, the core of the story is the terror, helplessness and inevitability of the war machine. The main protest against the depredations of war bubbles up as a disordered psychological symptom. This, I felt, was the heart of the story and where its most urgent and compelling aspects lie.

There are other shared threads in the collection: ‘The Round Pool’, ‘Flight Path’ and ‘Poor Beasts’ carry the pulse of dread over environmental damage: ‘The Round Pool’ is a poetic, plangent narrative about a man returning to a wilderness area of his youth, to try to recover memories of his father and lost aspects of himself. The rhythms and cadences of the prose remind me of the Vivaldi of ‘The Four Seasons’, the forward-driving pulse, the rounding back in repeated motifs, act out the revisiting, the circling back, to specific seasonal memories and sensations. In this story, the changes wrought on the man’s childhood landscape are immense; the potential link between a knowledge of an essential self, and the ripeness of a healthy landscape, are made moving and persuasive.

‘Flight Path’ is an outstanding story, for its vivid and potently timed use of image, and the swerve into thriller as the facts behind an extraordinary natural event are revealed in an only-just-futuristic scenario. It travels like a fusion of lyric poem and racing plot. Although we are told it’s a horror story at the start, its focus on detail and wonder in the body of the story lead us away into something elegiac, reverent, so that when the change comes, the horror still has full impact. We were warned: and yet we became entranced by the moment. It’s a devastating mimesis of our wider inertia in the face of environmental catastrophe.

‘Poor Beasts’, too, has a piercing and central moment that combines desperate concern for the destruction of a local ecosystem in Scotland and Gunn’s here effectively sour use of writerly reflexivity. A man about to lose his livelihood, says, ‘Just remember it’s not a story, that’s all.’ This is fiction that is underpinned by the enormous ecological pressures the world is under. It reminds me of the Bertolt Brecht poem:

In the dark times
will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.

Other stories continue to offer three-dimensional, intriguing characters: for example, ‘King Country’, ‘Dreede’ and ‘Mam’s Tables’, where the protagonists are either depicted with deep compassion, or experience moments of powerful awakening from illusion: moments that will carry lifelong ramifications. In ‘Dangerous Dog’, the author has a lot of fun with her metafictional tendencies, which she sprinkles both with a chatty informativeness and a delightful punning energy around the central dramatic tension of a small woman in a stand-off with a potentially violent, disaffected group of young men. (One of whom listens to her retelling of Jane Eyre and then quietly reveals the likely source of his own aggression: ‘my gran used to put me in a room like that’).

On the other hand, ‘All Gone’, the penultimate full-length story, is one where, to my mind, the characters aren’t fully persuasive. Some Reading Room and Landfall followers will know this story ignited a furore on social media. Various readers called the story ‘disgusting’ and ‘hateful’, and questioned, or even vilified, the editors who decided to publish it. The story has two main characters: the narrator, who is a member of a church congregation that the other character, a racist criminal, also once belonged to. It is a story that is partly about disgust: clearly some readers found the depiction all too effective, and their own deep hurt, stress, offense—and indeed, disgust—were turned back on both the author and the editors.

In the story, the racist develops an obsessive, relentless, dehumanising focus on the smell of a very young child. Scent is one of the most personal, intimate aspects of our physical selves, and one we have limited control over: especially, of course, when we are very young children. There is something visceral, primal, in our response to fragrance and odour. It’s on one level a protective response: as a reaction to certain smells, for example, it probably defends us from potential poisoning, illness, threat and even fatality. Yet what the main character fears in the story is cultural contamination: she fears that she, her family and her community, will have their social norms, rules, lifeways, opportunities and privileges eroded. It is an irrational and destructive fear of the immigrant, and of the so-called ‘out group’, writ crude and large.

The ending, which closes in on an extreme act of violence, and the main character’s admission to it, leaves the reader reeling. There is no attempt at repair or treatment of the shock from the narrator, the supposed buffer between the criminal and the reader. We don’t see the narrator recoiling, struggling to understand, or overtly condemning the crime. The knowledge of what the crime was has been withheld through the whole story: she offers it as an almost triumphant punch line. And there’s a strange way in which the sad smile with which the main character delivers her clinching dialogue at this point is meant to make us think about her loss; as if, in her mind, she’s been obliged to make this sacrifice; she either seeks empathy or pity still, or a sort of awe at how far she has gone in her rigid sticking to control, her dangerous and impossible fantasy of there never being any ‘unpleasantness’, no ‘difficulty’ at all. (These phrases are typical of the character in her evasive use of litotes; they underline her irredeemable nature.) The character is a sociopathic white supremacist, essentially: and yet the problematic aspect of the story is less that it depicts a type that we know, horrifically, exists in the world outside fiction. (Such people need to be exposed.) It is more something to do with the tone, the uneasy handling of psychic distance in the story. There are times when, because of the nature of the free indirect discourse, the narrator’s voice and the character’s voice almost seem to merge; there are others where they’re clearly more separate, but the distinction is made a little after the fact; a little awkwardly.

Because although weeks had passed since that day, she kept finding the smell of the other child, the family, on Laura’s hand. In the bath at night she’d scrub her daughter all over, but on her hands especially, using a brush on her knuckles and fingers and under her nails, rubbing at her upturned palms with Laura peering into them—‘All gone, Mummy?’—until she started to cry, ‘No more dirty!’ trying to get out of the water, slippery like a fish and no one could have caught her. It seemed as if something in her daughter, too, had changed, she told me. That awful expression, ‘No more dirty’—and realising how Laura continued to be in touch with the girl, in the hours they spent at the nursery together … it made her shudder.

… she knew the friendship was there, embedded. Out of sight, maybe, within the nursery grounds and walls, but alive and growing, and not only between Laura and the other, who had both started it, she knew, her own daughter the first to let it in, but festering by now among all the children, multiplying and getting stronger while they were playing together, sharing food and toys and glasses of juice …

These were the sort of ideas, you understand, that were present in her mind, and ran amok there. I’m simply reporting them, the circumstances surrounding this one woman who we all liked and got on with, who had lovely manners and was beautifully turned out and so on …

Is the sense of some shifty, misleading element in this story actually to do with readers having misplaced expectations grounded both in genre and social convention? Given the narrator stands outside the central action, do we think we will witness greater psychological distancing, repentance, a cleansing of the crime, or some sort of ritual of acceptance of guilt, if not from the perpetrator, then from the story’s mediator?

The narrator, instead, has a creepy fascination for the woman and a slightly wide-eyed sense of her own access to her. I think my own discomfort with this story arises not only from the character’s dehumanising association of smell, dirt and disease with a very young child, and the unbearable way in which the innocence and vulnerability of small children is targeted by the character. It also resides in the way the narrator delivers the racist character’s last line, its weird attempt at self-exculpation, as a blow. In a sense, it wields a micro dose of the power that the hateful criminal has. It makes it seem as if the story is primarily told for its shock value: by both the narrator, and Gunn, so it comes across as a heavy-handed, even grotesque, manipulation of its audience.

I’ve read other reviews that have praised Gunn for her audacity, and for the fact that her stories confront the distressing aspects of society that we ignore at our peril. I agree that we need fiction that has this powerfully exposing, truth-telling component: that we need imaginative writing that helps us examine mental disease, obsession, our own complacencies, complicities, hypocrisies, blind spots, flaws, biases. Yet I also sympathise with readers who feel disturbed, unseated and unsettled by the tone of at least two of the stories here: the thorns, the greasy hearts, the spongy, the near-dead, the dry, as certain flowers in the bouquet are described in ‘Afterword: Night-Scented Stock’.

In these two instances, it wasn’t the subject matter alone that was disturbing: it was the style of the telling, a discomforting sense of something amiss in the author-reader dynamic. This comes not from the fact that the story makes us realise our own complicity or complacency in the situations at hand; rather that there’s a lingering sense that our strings have somehow been duplicitously pulled in the narrative set-ups and pay-offs.

Nevertheless: I think it’s essential that we have creative writers willing to take the aesthetic risks that Gunn does, even if we don’t enthusiastically embrace, accept, or even very much like some of the results. Openly discussing the artistic and ethical issues the stories raise seems a healthier way forward than the cancel culture pile-on approach endemic in social media. And the majority of the stories in this output have a finesse and humanity that our very ugly contemporary moment could do with far more of.

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EMMA NEALE is a writer and freelance editor. She is the author of six novels and seven collections of poetry, as well as the short story collection The Pink Jumpsuit. Her most recent collection of poetry is Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit (Otago University Press, 2024), currently longlisted for the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.