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Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

A Kind of Belonging

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Denis Harold
Touchstones: Memories of People and Place, by James McNeish (Random House, 2012), 295 pp., $30.
 
The publicity material and preliminaries of James McNeish’s recent book Touchstones hedge about its origins and purpose. He is the reluctant author, according to an interview in the New Zealand Herald (August 1, 2012). The book is the idea of other people, namely his publisher and his wife; he, in fact does not like ‘writing about myself’.
            McNeish is not writing ‘orthodox memoirs’, only ‘a relevant character sketch’ of himself, he states in his Author’s Note. An epigraph borrowed from Mark Twain warns the reader not to expect any motive, moral or plot. On the following page is a dictionary definition of ‘Touchstone’ as ‘Criterion. A standard of judgement’.
            McNeish traces in Part One, which is entitled ‘People’, the intellectual and emotional education he gained in his early career from contact with nine people, each of their names the title of a chapter. These mentors are presented in snapshots, their presence brief and sometimes fragmentary. Some of these reminiscences are memorable, but quite often there is a sense the author is straining for significance. The pattern manufactured from a compound called ‘touchstone’ is stamped upon the raw material of a memoir.

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Fractured Rhythms

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Lindsay Rabbitt
Common Land, by Lynn Davidson (Victoria University Press, 2012), 8 0pp., $28; Just Then, by Harry Ricketts (Victoria University Press, 2012) 64 pp., $25; The Cheese and Onion Sandwich and other New Zealand Icons, by Vivienne Plumb (Seraph Press, 2011), 56 pp., $20.  
 
At the launch of her book of poems and essays Lynn Davidson said she feels more like herself when she is writing. Was she saying that when she finds the time to write, and read the literature that informs the work, it also affords her the space to think and feel – deeply? Probably. She has invested much in this book, which could be likened to a family’s rite of passage. Common Land is made up of three interconnected essays (‘Leaving the Is-land’, ‘Selah’ and ‘The Flame Organ Concert’) that, amongst other things, carry themes surrounding the gradual losing of the poet’s mother’s cognitive abilities, and the loss at sea of Davidson’s first partner –  the father of her grown-up son. The essays are separated by runs of poems, relating to different periods in the poet’s life.

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The Anthropocene Era

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David Eggleton
Kermadec, edited by Bronwyn Golder and Gregory O’Brien, (PEW Environment Group/Tauranga Art Gallery, 2011) , 176 pp., $79.99; River-Road: Journeys through Ecology, by David Cook, Wiremu Puke and Jony Valentine (Rim Books, 2011), 92 pp., $40; Old New World: Photographs by Mary Macpherson, (Lopdell House), 96 pp. $50; Ice Blink: An Antarctic Imaginary, by Anne Noble, with an essay by Ian Wedde, (Clouds, 2011), 104 pp., $69.95.
 
We live at the fag-end of the heroic, in fact we inhabit the ashtray of the heroic, where the notion of a sublime ‘Nature’ has been replaced by that of an anthropomorphised ‘environment’, a measureable resource increasingly degraded by human interaction: the Anthropocene Era. All four of the books under review dwell on ecology and survival, all are steeped in climate change wisdom, and all are aware of the pressures of the geopolitical and the industrial. Essentially picture travel books, they span a kind of archipelago of South pacific psychogeographies, leaping from ‘the island’ to ‘the river’ to ‘the road’, and finally to ‘the South Pole’. They traverse the contemporary eco-moment, where manufactured terms, such as ‘dream location’, ‘greenwash’ and ‘carbon sink’ set the terms of reference, and where only aesthetic detachment can triumph.

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Brandishing a Paintbrush

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Raewyn Alexander
Before I Forget, by Jacqueline Fahey (Auckland University Press, 2012), 192 pp, $45 .
     
Venturing into often extremely private territory with honesty and insight, this memoir’s a remarkable read. Fahey’s stunning cover is a painting that suggests the older artist looking back: her younger self’s presented in a little black dress with high heels, with younger self yelling ‘Don’t, don’t, don’t’, (as if the older woman can never truly understand the past, not now). We make of memory what we may, crafting rather than recreating the actuality of lived experience, and Fahey illustrates this very well, giving the sense of a mature artist who mines the past for necessary information to unfold the stories she wants to tell and explore. Areas of darkness surround this sense of recall: in the cover image, a dog and an infant perhaps stand for traumatic events. Yet the interpretation of tumultuous life events persists, and the perplexities of returning to her past are carried out with aplomb. This is brave, admirably clear prose, written with wit and containing many surprises – a memoir with various layers and subtle meanings.

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The Accidental and the Purposeful

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Thomas Gough
The Forrests, by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury Circus, 2012), 340 pp., $36.99.
 
Talking with friends and reading reviews of Emily Perkin’s latest novel, The Forrests, I came away bemused by the range of responses. The critics tended to be impressed but their admiration struck me as less than heartfelt, and the compliments were sometimes delivered with a backhand, as in Simon Savidge’s review on Beattie’s Book Blog. ‘The writing is utterly beautiful’ Savidge writes, ‘yet sometimes Perkins so wants to fill the book with words – which some people will love – the sentences can become never-ending’. The opinions of the friends and colleagues I’ve spoken to suggest a similar jumble: esteem, even fondness, strained by frustration.
       A comment on a reader’s reviewing website pointed out that the personality of the characters in The Forrests seemed blurry and the story was hard to follow. This observation seems to me germane. The vast gaps in the narrative, the often unclear motivations of characters, the poetic reoccurrence of what seem to be random memories rarely serve to subtly advance the plot or even to develop our sense of a coherent character. Take, for instance, Dorothy’s detailed recollection of a stay on a childhood commune while her sister Evelyn is recovering from a serious injury: Light came through the window and she was on second base on the field at the commune, followed Michael’s gaze from the batter’s mound to see Eve and Daniel plow toward her through the long grass. Michael thwacked the bat into his palm. Gold lit the grasses. Daniel’s steady stride, Eve behind him, a shadow. This memory serves no predictable function in the novel. It doesn’t develop our understanding of Dorothy’s attachment to her siblings, nor add any special poignancy to the present of the plot. Like all memory, it is accidental, endowed with significance simply because it is remembered: the act of recall is the miracle.

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Jump Cut

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David Herkt
The Spaces Between, Russell Haley (Adastra Productions, 2012), 192 pp., $25.00.
 
‘Only connect…’, E.M. Forster wrote in the well-known epigraph to Howards End in 1910 as a dictum for a new century,  but connectivity, seen historically, can be considered the one consistent human theme.
            The lashed-together constructions of fronds and shells that made up the navigation stick-charts of early Polynesian voyagers were a precise metaphor that described and encompassed a world of tides, winds and isolated atolls. The Tabula Peutingeriana of the late Roman Empire was another: an intinerum, a graphically interlaced list of destinations, with place symbols and distances, arranged with a surprisingly similarity to Harry Beck’s famous London underground rail map of 1931.
            Our knowledge of the world can be seen as a series of diagrams only some of which occupy physical space.  Australian Aboriginal narratives, with their interwoven locks of route to hold and describe, are a fundamental example. Logic, the Greek system of abstract relations, is a spider-web of connected language statements and the dominant mode by which our world is perceived. Tim Berners-Lee’s link-based internet architecture is simply the most recent model.

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