Craig Cliff
Star Gazers by Duncan Sarkies (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025), 407pp, $38
Back in September 2020, the Taxpayers’ Union tried to manufacture outrage about the latest round of projects receiving Creative New Zealand funding. This was in the wider landscape of the Covid-19 pandemic and the billions being invested in New Zealand’s economic recovery. Twelve months later, NewsTalkZB was at it again. Both times, a grant toward ‘a novel about the collapse of democracy in an association of alpaca breeders’ by Duncan Sarkies was singled out from the ‘smorgasbord of abject waste’.
A week after the September 2021 recrudescence, Sarkies responded online in a piece for The Spinoff:
Of course, the attack isn’t really about this project in particular. It’s a part of a larger campaign against the validity of art in general. It was just my turn. My project made for a great soundbite, the same soundbite that will hopefully attract people to read it.
Sarkies’ response emphasised his novel-in-progress was intended as an allegory and his wider concern was the rise of autocratic regimes (such as those that might, um, fear what artists have to say …) and ‘the conflict between selfishness and selflessness’. But he also spent a lot of time talking about alpacas and the New Zealand breeding community he’d been researching for two years up to that point.
Writing an allegory is always a tightrope walk. My question at the time was not if Sarkies would fall, but which side would he fall on? Would his love of these fleecy camelids end up burying the political subtext too deeply? Or might the irony of right-wing sock puppets singling out his half-written book (Alpacas? Ridiculous!) make him lean harder into the politics and turn his own characters into cardboard cutouts?
His September 2021 piece ended with this byline: Duncan Sarkies is hoping to publish his novel through Penguin Random House in early 2023. Two years beyond that original estimate and a change of publisher later, Star Gazers has now been unleashed upon the world. (The back cover blurb drolly describes it as ‘the much-anticipated alpaca novel by award-winning writer Duncan Sarkies’.)
I can report with some relief that there are no obvious proxies for the Taxpayers’ Union or NewsTalkZB journos in Star Gazers. Sarkies appears to have stayed true to his original vision and walked the allegorical tightrope with only minor wobbles.
Star Gazers begins from the perspective of an alpaca and returns to Svalinn and her herd at various points, but this is not that kind of allegory. The political and personal machinations of the humans in the local alpaca industry are the central concern.
Svalinn, we discover, is owned by Willemijn de Vries, a straight-talking, autism-coded veterinarian and member of the reform faction of the Alpaca Breeders Organisation of New Zealand (ABONZ). Her friend, Caleb McKenna, an engineer and pragmatist, is the face of the Reformers and stands to become president once the votes have been counted in the latest ABONZ election. Meanwhile, the Breeders Party, nominally led by Kevin McKillop, the current president, will do anything to retain the status quo. Within this camp, Shona Tisdall, a successful breeder and now distributor of alpaca feed supplements, is the real power broker. She has taken under her wing Caroline, a small-time breeder and home baker. Caroline’s first task as Shona’s acolyte is to tamper with the postal ballots to ensure the Breeders Party retain control of ABONZ.
When the results are announced, Willemijn cannot believe it. She starts making calls. She alerts the chairman of ABONZ. She alerts the two-person staff of the Alpaca News. Democracy is under threat.
The stakes are raised further when a form of encephalitis that causes afflicted alpacas to look to the heavens (stargazing) begins to spread through the country. While the cause is unknown, the outcome is often fatal. Willemijn insists that the upcoming Breeders Showcase might become a mass spreader event and it needs to be cancelled. Shona’s faction argues that doing so would severely damage the economic outlook of breeders and ABONZ. While an independent review of the dodgy election is ongoing, Caleb and Willemijn don’t have the numbers to stop the event.
Soon it is revealed that the cause of the stargazing epidemic is a tainted batch of Shona Tisdall’s VitAl Paca Health Biscuits. Tisdall demurs and deflects. Alternative lab tests are produced that question this conclusion. Tisdall’s niece is inserted into the Alpaca News to manage messaging. The showcase must continue, with VitaAl Paca as the primary sponsor.
Recounted at this level, the parallels to the Covid-19 pandemic are apparent, as are wider contemporary trends such as the rise of fake news, dirty politics and dysfunctional democracies. In ambition, mode and body count (alpacas rather than humans in this instance), Star Gazers’ closest recent comparison is Eleanor Catton’s excellent Birnam Wood. It’s exciting to see Duncan Sarkies tackle big ideas, but Star Gazers ultimately succeeds because the low micron fleece it lays over this didactic skeleton can stand on its own as a story.
The breadth and depth of characters in Star Gazers mark an evolution from Sarkies’ previous works. From his debut story collection, Stray Thoughts and Nose Bleeds and the script for Scarfies (both released in 1999) through his two subsequent novels, Two Little Boys (2008) and Demolition of the Century (2013), Sarkies’ stories tended to focus on battlers and outsiders, especially dim-witted ones. Characters confronted with challenging moral decisions (admit to hitting a backpacker with a car or dispose of the body; deny a racing magnate’s insurance claim or accept a bribe) chose to take the darker path. Too often, however, it felt as if Sarkies was punching down on his ne’er-do-wells.
Star Gazers features at least a dozen characters that have sections told from their perspective. Male, female, successful, struggling, neurodiverse, megalomaniacal, timid, forthright. There are still simpletons, like Shona Tisdall’s front-row forward Bull, or dolts, like the randy President and the bumbling Chairman, but they don’t drive the plot (or bog it down). Caroline might start off as another one of Sarkies’ innocents who makes the wrong decision by tampering with the ABONZ election, but her arc is far more interesting than a perpetual spiral downward. As she gets more and more responsibility within Shona’s business, we see how intoxicating power can be. How tribalism can lead the timid into hatred and violence. But she remains a fully realised character with a bemused husband and a dwindling herd of alpaca.
Willemijn, also, is a compelling character. While she stands for the side of truth and reason, her abrasive nature and impatience push even her closest allies away. And all of this ABONZ nonsense means she has been neglecting her own herd, much to Svalinn’s annoyance.
But this broader swathe of humanity, and the underlying political messages, don’t come at the expense of the humour many associate with Sarkies’ earlier work. There’s still a sprinkling of slapstick and gross-out moments, as well as some guffaw-worthy one-liners. An event planner meets with the President of ABONZ at Shona Tisdall’s house and spots a nude self-portrait of Shona. ‘“There’s a lot of them around the house,” the President says. “If you look closely in the right places, you can see some pubes.”’
Later, one of Shona’s prize alpacas is being photographed for the cover of the Alpaca News. The animal refuses to look at the camera, so Shona imitates the orgling sound a male alpaca makes when en flagrante. ‘Shona’s husband,’ the photographer notices, ‘seems to be having a similar reaction as the alpaca.’
Star Gazers could be even funnier with minor amendments. Three-quarters of the way through the book we learn that Pat from the Alpaca News has knitted a scarf from the fleece of two of her alpacas, Sciatica and Shingles. Knowing much earlier that Pat wasn’t just a journalist but a breeder and that she had this dark sense of humour would have enriched her character, allowed for this joke to land and be called back and expanded through the novel. But coming where it does, it is more likely to make the reader question the impression they had formed of Pat rather than chuckle at the names.
And at times the writing strains toward a more literary tone. Daph, Pat’s colleague at the Alpaca News, struggles to reconcile the two parts of the publication’s mission statement (promoting the alpaca industry and sharing helpful information with breeders). ‘She can feel it inside herself too; her vital organs have become less vital, the blood in her veins reduced to some kind of diluted residue.’ Some kind of diluted residue? Not only can I not picture this, but it’s hard to conceive of a more flaccid ending to a sentence.
Later, Pat is being crowded at her workstation by Shona Tisdall’s niece/spy. ‘Pat can feel the breathing at the back of her neck and her overly imaginative nasal passages can smell perfume, a scent that is becoming familiarly contemptible to her.’ A lot less would be a lot more in such cases.
For a manuscript with a long and semi-public gestation, some rough patches are to be expected. But if we are to sneer at the performative philistinism of the Taxpayers’ Union, we should not overlook a book’s flaws (particularly ones that a more rigorous edit could have eliminated). With that said, Star Gazers is far and away the best book Duncan Sarkies has ever written. His next book is much anticipated.
CRAIG CLIFF is the author of the story collection, A Man Melting, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book in 2011, and of the novels The Mannequin Makers and Nailing Down the Saint, all published by Vintage. He lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin.
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