Landfall Review Online: NZ Books in Review

In Vivid Colour

February 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Robyn Maree Pickens

Colours of a Life: The life and times of Douglas MacDiarmid by Anna Cahill (Mary Egan Publishing in association with MacDiarmid Arts Trust, 2018), 444 pp., $80

Before I settle in to a book I like to examine its paratextual material: features such as foreword, acknowledgments and endorsements. By examining the way in which a book is framed I get a sense of how its author, subject and producers would like the book to be received. Every book embodies an agenda, and I like to see how this intersects with my reading experience. With this in mind it is worth noting that the artist Douglas MacDiarmid – the subject of Colours of a Life – is Anna Cahill’s uncle. This familial investment is underscored by the publishing relationship between Mary Egan Publishing ‘in association with MacDiarmid Arts Trust’. In other words, the book is not an independent or disinterested production. It is undoubtedly a tribute to kin by kin. This bond between subject and author has the distinct advantage of providing Cahill exceptional closeness to her subject, and has resulted in a highly detailed, intimate and warm biography of MacDiarmid. After a brief glimpse of MacDiarmid as a struggling artist in an actual garret (!) in Paris, 1953, the book assumes a chronological trajectory from the artist’s birth in Taihape, 1922, to the recent present of his long-lived life in Paris, 2017. (At the time of writing this review MacDiarmid is approaching his 96th birthday.) [Read more…]

Stoic and Steadfast

February 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

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…]

Freedom, Risk and Childhood

February 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

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…]

A Gender Magpie

December 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Chris Brickell

I Have Loved Me a Man: The life and times of Mika by Sharon Mazer, with a foreword by Witi Ihimaera (Auckland University Press, 2018), 288 pp., $59.99

It all began in Timaru. Neil Gudsell, who later transformed himself into the drag artist, activist and performer Mika, started his life in the provincial South Island town. A Māori child adopted by Pākehā parents, he had to ride the ‘swings and roundabouts of identity’ in a not-always bicultural Aotearoa/New Zealand. As a ‘reflexively daring’ child he invented a sense of himself through performance. I Have Loved Me a Man: The life and times of Mika is a lively tale of all of these things: biculturalism and the everyday expectations and politics that surround it; self-fashioning; enactments of culture, gender and sexuality; and a society that has changed – mostly a lot, although not wholly – since Mika’s birth in 1962. Biographer Sharon Mazer provocatively suggests that Mika’s life offers a useful perspective on the liberations and repressions of the 1960s, the slowly waning homophobia of the 1970s and 1980s, and the neoliberalisation of the 1990s and 2000s. Mika’s awakenings tell of broader patterns of social change. [Read more…]

Elemental Awareness

December 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Laurence Fearnley

Dark Forest, Deep Sea: Reflections of a hunter by Richard Hall (Submarine, 2017), 250 pp., $38; Oxygen by William Trubridge (HarperCollins, 2017) 336 pp., $39.99

Every now and again you open a book, begin reading and relax as you realise that you have found the perfect fit for your mood. This is what happened to me when I began Richard Hall’s Dark Forest, Deep Sea: Reflections of a hunter. I hadn’t known that I wanted to read a book about hunting, but the depth of Hall’s detailed observation immediately struck a chord. The opening paragraph begins with a description of the scent of his felted wool hunting jersey:

Laced within was the scent of beech forest from the mountains of New Zealand – aromatic like cinnamon, but mixed with a volatile component reminiscent of eucalypt – a scent so crisp it struck all other thoughts from my mind. Then another layer – earthy, like wet fistfuls of crumbling humus fresh from the forest floor. The subtle musk of deer from past hunts lingered, not unpleasant, distinctly animal. My head spun and I was taken straight into a memory of the Southern Alps, far from the wooden panels of my shed on the rim of Wellington Harbour.

Immense snow-capped mountains rose up around me, valleys clad with thousands of acres of dark green forest, braided rivers flowing through golden tussocks. A rifle lay across my lap and my dog, Jack, leaned against me, our prints dotted out behind us in the dew. Breath condensed in puffs, wafting up like smoke. I pulled the jersey away, returning to reality, and stood over my pack with the garment hanging loosely from my hands. The vision left me, but the feelings did not. Feelings of enchantment, contentment, wonder, longing. [Read more…]