Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Taking risks

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Ruth Brown

The Life of De’Ath by Majella Cullinane (Steele Roberts Aotearoa, 2018), 242pp., $34.99

If Mephistopheles has been making a comeback, it’s in new guises appropriate for societies that don’t believe in hell: in London’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse production of Doctor Faustus, she was a mischievously jolly best friend rather than the embodiment of evil. In Majella Cullinane’s multi-layered debut novel, he’s an amiable and reliable narrator, and somewhat dissatisfied with his other-worldly status: there’s a clever twist at the end to explain his real identity and motivation. [Read more…]

A startlingly rackety life

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Stephen Stratford

Life as a Novel: A biography of Maurice Shadbolt by Philip Temple (David Ling Publishing, 2018), 328pp., $44.99

Would anyone under 60 be interested in a two-volume life of Maurice Shadbolt? Should they be? One volume sufficed for Maurice Gee. On the other hand, the other Maurice led a startlingly rackety life, so there is much gossip. Between the sheets, and also two sheets to the wind.

I had thought my generation was pretty frisky but we were nothing like this lot – at it like knives, all of them. For example, ‘earlier in the year Maurice and [then girlfriend] Beverly Richards had witnessed [Dick] Scott in bed with his wife-to-be and with the relieved co-operation of her current husband’. What complicated lives they led. ‘Maurice,’ notes Temple, ‘was never short of sexual partners, temporary, medium or long-term.’ The Barbara Magner/Marilyn Duckworth overlap of 1969 is dizzying, with girlfriend Beverly and wife Gill still part of his life.  [Read more…]

Is it me or is it us?

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Susan Wardell

Not For Ourselves Alone: Belonging in an age of loneliness by Jenny Robin Jones (Saddleback, 2018), 248 pp., $39.99

… I grew up without a community, You went to school, you joined Girl Guides, later on the Brethren, But they never felt like communities, or at least not communities that I really belonged to, What would a community you ‘really belonged to’ look like, Utopia? I must admit, I’m interested in utopias. So how come you didn’t belong to the communities you joined? Perhaps I didn’t understand the rules or perhaps I wasn’t the kind of person they wanted. 

In this book Jenny Robin Jones has invited you into her living room, where she has pulled every book out of her well-cultured bookshelf. They fall open on the floor – history, sociology, poetry, some old photo albums. She makes you a cup of coffee. She makes a new and willing friend of you. You sit down in the midst of it all and she starts talking … [Read more…]

A celebration of solidarity

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Alice Tawhai

A Change of Key by Adrienne Jansen (Escalator Press, 2018), 252 pp., $28

I love all the musics, but classical is my least familiar, so I wondered how I might go with Adrienne Jansen’s new novel, A Change of Key. I wasn’t even that fussed on the title, which seemed a little mundane. But music is joy, and Adrienne does good joy. Life mightn’t be flawless, but there’s music.

Using the perfect strategy of setting her story in a block of flats, Adrienne is able to show us rather than tell us (as the rules wisely decree) the lives of people who, like migratory birds, have somehow blown off course and found themselves in a cage with an open door, here at the end of the world. Their lives are rich in terms of lived experience rather than money, and political, financial and personal wind currents may prevent them from ever returning to their original place of departure. The narrative is told through the carefully plotted unfolding of the characters’ conversations and thoughts, and each short chapter is an opportunity to lay out more of the story, sometimes with a smidgeon of plot action. [Read more…]

Short, Sharp Shocks

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Lawrence Patchett

Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Michelle Elvy, Frankie McMillan and James Norcliffe (Canterbury University Press, 2018), 293 pp., $39.99

There’s a feeling of currency about flash fiction right now. The editors of Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand seek to capture – and capitalise on – this excitement around the form. Flash fiction is ‘arguably the fastest growing literary form worldwide’, they say, pointing to strong journal and competition submissions as evidence of a related surge of interest here in New Zealand. But although editors Michelle Elvy, Frankie McMillan and James Norcliffe celebrate the form’s current energy, they don’t claim any special newness for its most recent iterations. Instead they acknowledge the ‘deep roots’ of the compressed form in New Zealand literature, reaching back to the work of Katherine Mansfield and Frank Sargeson, as well as the more recent short short-story anthologies edited by Graeme Lay and Stephen Stratford from 1997. The nod to Sargeson in particular seems important. Published more than eighty years ago, his very short stories like ‘A Piece of Yellow Soap’ still read with extraordinary urgency. But if, like me, you’re relatively new to the more recent variations on shorter forms, Bonsai provides an exciting entry point.  [Read more…]