Frustration, Anger, Dejection, Dissatisfaction

Vaughan Rapatahana
Beyond the Reef: Selected stories by Graeme Lay (Hanlon Publishing, 2025), 244pp, $39

This is a collection of 20 short stories, both penned and chosen by Graeme Lay, covering a period that begins in 1990 and ends with ‘A Natural Man’, which appeared in 2025. Thirteen of the stories have been previously published or broadcast, according to his Previous Publications page, which, however, omits Lay’s first published story, ‘The Children of Wah’. So the total is actually 14. Most are from late last century or early this one. With a number of previously published story collections, as well as works of non-fiction, Lay is a well-published, long-standing author.

The title summarises well the geographical focus of many of these tales: they are set in or about the South Pacific and feature the various indigenous and expatriate populations encountered there. Thus, Fiji, the Cook Islands, Samoa, Tahiti and Tonga are often referenced.

But later in this assemblage, the tales twist away from the equatorial Pacific to focus on locations in Aotearoa New Zealand, particularly the small town of Kaimara, well beyond any coral reefs. Although resplendent with several quirky Kiwi characters who reappear in different episodes, Kaimara is not an ‘actual’ town but a handy nexus for Lay to plot his equally eccentric escapades.

In fact, the author stipulates early on that: ‘In this collection my childhood stories are in the final group.’ What strikes me—beyond noting Lay’s obvious careful crafting, whereby he continues to create stories with momentum and readability, proving himself a master of this genre—is that the crux of many of the stories turns on some form of utu, or, in approximate reo Pākēhā terms, retribution. Lay’s characters often love to extract some kind of revenge at the end of their respective portrayals, though never outright murder—although murderous intent is hinted at in the fine story ‘Letting Go’ (originally titled ‘Beyond the Reef’), set in Tahiti, where Simone and Pascal’s increasingly fractious relationship is threatened by Pascal: ‘Gripping the knife in one hand, he stared at her … Brought his knife up high.’

Elsewhere, too, vengeance of some form reigns perpetual. In ‘Dear Mr Cairney’, an anonymous letter writer threatens the newly appointed headmaster of Kaimara Intermediate School with considerable violence if he touches a hair on the head of the letter writer’s son, a letter triggered by the father’s own strapping by Mr Cairney, decades previously. Lay states that this is actually based on his own experience: ‘Every stroke of the strap by the teacher involved, every pitiless action he takes against the small, vulnerable boy, really happened to me at my primary school.’ For this writer, revenge—here figurative rather than actual—seems to be sweet.

In Kaimara, also, at the ‘lemonade factory’, Leon happily urinates into the boss’s soft drink concoction to pay this boss back for his consistent meanness and for the constant sanctioning of his son’s spoiled, destructive behaviour. Thus, ‘Essence’, the title.

During the internecine professional academic squabbles and petty rivalries at Auckland University’s ‘Social Anthropology’ department, the protagonist Richard Treadwell gets his own back after a malicious yet ego-flattering April Fool’s joke played on him by his prime antagonist, Barry Cooch (Lay has a fun way with his character’s names throughout). In this saga, ‘Academic Friends’, Lay also depicts exactly what life in academe consists of for Treadwell, namely: ‘His department, his faculty, the entire campus, it seemed to him, was characterised by mediocrity and petty feuding’.

Back in Fiji, such academic friction transmogrifies into gender hostilities when Paul, ‘a retired lecturer in Pacific History from the University of Auckland’, is accused of potential sexual misbehaviour by Dierdre, who ‘was a lecturer in social anthropology at Canterbury University’. Paul’s innocence of the alleged sexual misdeeds, and his final ‘frustration, anger, dejection, dissatisfaction’, are revealed when the local girls and their mother, whom he had helped earlier, arrive on the liner he and Dierdre are voyaging on to thank him munificently. So ends this tale, ‘Cross-Currents’, the title a clever pun on both the cruise-ship voyage and the frissons of the relationship between man and woman. Paul Barclay makes a further appearance later in the lengthy ‘The Cruisers’, where he is described as ‘An emeritus professor of Pacific history’. Unmistakeably, the experiences of Paul Barclay and Graeme Lay are twinned.

The most pronounced saga of retribution, though, is revealed in the story ‘The Citadel’, which Lay confesses in his chatty Introduction is based on his real-life encounter with ‘a man I knew’, who was extremely pissed off about ‘his new house and the way its subsequent leakiness ruined it’. This man decried the property developer in no uncertain terms, saying: ‘I’d like to flood his own fuckin’ building’. Subsequently, Lay has produced, on behalf of the ‘man I knew’, this gushing story of revenge, of utu, which culminates cleverly with the words: ‘For the first time in months, he felt positive. Buoyant, almost. Going with the flow.’

In the concisely constructed and rendered ‘The Copier’, the South Pacific comes to Tāmaki Makaurau when Moana Tereaki, originally from the Cook Islands, deftly extracts her own form of ‘muru’ from a company set in exclusive central city office surroundings; it’s a business that has greatly underestimated Moana’s entrepreneurial skill set, as she ultimately wins out over the financial director’s parsimony. I especially like this story and its strong woman-centred centrepiece, and I hold the same admiration for Lay’s equally succinct ‘Room at the Inn’, where Nicola Nicolls remains staunch to her kaupapa and decides not to adopt, via purchase, a Samoan child.

Lay is ever an adroit portrait master when it comes to depicting character relationships: both male and female, male and male. In ‘The Course’, he once again presents a determined woman as the centrepiece, who—after enrolling in and attending ‘how to write’ sessions where her tutors turn snarling and snarky on one another—decides to give her paramour Barry the boot. After all, ‘Living with a man who has no art or passion isn’t fun.’ Yet, in ‘The Wave Rider’, it is the teenage Justine who is deserted by an American surfer, who, after arriving in Kaimara, uses her as a laundress, a cook and a bed partner. Ultimately, he summarily dumps her without any form of farewell. Justine is marooned alone in the small town, pregnant and played upon by Karl Sikowsky, the predatory wave rider of the title.

Justine’s parable is tragic, as is the funeral of the late Grant Galligan, where the preacher brusquely and cruelly castigates the deceased for being gay. This piece, ‘A Natural Man’, is powerful and something of a heartbreaker. Lay can and does delve deeply into humanity’s expansive array of emotions throughout this collection. He frequently grounds his work in raw, lived experience, keeping us immersed in an ongoing realism, if you will, except perhaps in the sole ‘ghost story’—his words, not my own—included here, namely ‘Vailima’, where Rupert Brooke makes a rather spectral appearance.

His tale, ‘Blood’, set in the Cook Islands, is the epitome of stark, direct, pungent shorter-form writing, in which relationships, whether marital, relational or casual, are tested and twisted towards breaking points. Here, Ken and Nga teeter on the edge of dissolution because Ken has had enough of Aitutaki, epitomised by Nga’s nephew George Tama, who, allegedly, has been pilfering their business funds. Then their son Riki has a serious road accident. Riki has a rare blood type, and although the Islanders flock to have their blood tested to identify a match for his, none is found. And then—just as it seems their son will pass away—George Tama is identified as having the correct blood group. Needless to say, Ken rushes to convince George to donate, ‘If you don’t give him some of your blood, Riki’ll die. Your cousin will die’. In the end, Riki survives and Ken remains: ‘“I’m not leaving” he said.’

In ‘Blood’, then, we run the gamut of emotions as we read and are led to keep on reading, seamlessly and without superfluity. There is a lot going on in many of these short stories. Lay has learned well from his mentor Frank Sargeson. Namely, to: ‘Show, don’t tell. Don’t write and report too much. Try instead to suggest.’ It’s the power of suggestion that keeps the reader involved, guessing, thinking. And sometimes surprised. Here, this author proves once and for all that he is a doyen of his craft. Little wonder, then, that the New Zealand Society of Authors inaugurated the Graeme Lay Short Story Award in 2011, a competition he continues to adjudicate.

Finally, I want to remark on the serialised story ‘Coastlines’ from 2005, in which Lay seems to veer somewhat towards political incorrectness, with his stark depiction of early Māori civil battles, our current land rights and tino rangatiratanga. Characters’ remarks, such as ‘So, the next time a part-Māori university radical tells you how idyllic life was before the nasty Pakeha [sic] arrived and seized their land, you should remind them what happened to the poor Ngati [sic] Waiau,’ initially troubled me, especially as I write this looking at my own tribal haki flapping in today’s gale. They also troubled me because such inter-iwi wars, even if here depicted in the fictional locale of Logan Bay, were fuelled by Pākehā sales of muskets to one tribe first, thereby enabling an immediate firepower advantage over the other. In this multilayered saga, Oliver also ‘resented Maori [sic] claiming that it was they alone who felt a deep attachment to the land’. But surely Māori, as tangata whenua, do have a more ancient attachment?

However, I credit Lay with attempting to recover and reveal historical Māori connections to contemporary Māori–Pākehā interrelationships, and the balanced concluding conversation in ‘Coastlines’ between the two Pākehā main actors does go some way towards a more harmonious resolution of the situation in Logan Bay. ‘You never know, some good may come out of all this,’ ruminates Walter, referring to the tremendous floods sweeping through deforested land that have disinterred masses of aged human bones. To which Oliver responds, ‘Good? How?’ And Walter says, ‘They could learn more about the past. Respect who was here before we were.’ Tika.

Lay is never afraid to confront such ethnic interplays across tēnei whenua—this land—a theme also present in ‘The Children of Wah’, concerning: ‘the one Chinese family who lived on my Taranaki hometown, Opunake’. Here, the Wah whānau are seen as: ‘Chinese as chopsticks, as exotic as eggplants’. So, if in a couple of places he perhaps plunges carelessly into the deep waters beyond the reef of political correctness, overall, this collection, from an important writer anchored in this land, is a taonga, made more lustrous by the various stratified adventures of his characters across the South Pacific islands, journeying to and from Aotearoa New Zealand.

After all: ‘E u’u no te akau roa, ka oki rai iaia ki te akau roa. E u’u no te akau poto ka oki rai iaia ki te akau poto.’ Which translates from Cook Island Māori to: ‘Whether the parrot fish travels near or far from the reef, it always returns home.’ An apt summary of this timely compilation.

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VAUGHAN RAPATAHANA (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Te Whiti) is a poet, novelist, writer and anthologist. He is co-editor of Te Awa o Kupu: Poetry and stories by contemporary Māori writers (Penguin New Zealand, 2023), Katūīvei: Contemporary Pasifika poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand (Massey University Press, 2024), and Te Moana o Reo | Ocean of Languages (The Cuba Press, 2025). His book Sexual Predation and TEFL (Brill, 2024) is a critique of gender-biased texts used in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL). He holds a PhD from the University of Auckland.