Landfall

Ancestral Vessel

October 1, 2011 1 Comment

Tom Brooking

No Simple Passage: The Journey of the London to New Zealand, 1842 — a Ship of Hope, by Jenny Robin Jones (Random House, 2011) 350 pp., $45.00.

This book is very different from either historical ‘faction’ such as Ray Grover’s excellent Cork of War (on Te Rauparaha and Te Rangihaeata), or Judy Corballis’s Tapu (on Hongi Hika), let alone orthodox history books. The novelty is appealing because it provides a fresh approach on the early settlement of Wellington. Instead of unfolding a chronologically structured narrative of voyage and settlement, Jones sits, Goddess-like, on the shoulder of her ancestors, expanding on the somewhat cryptic and skeletal story told in the diary and letters of her great-great-grandmother Rebecca Remington and others who travelled on the London as it voyaged to Wellington for 124 days between 29 December 1841 and 1 May 1842. The others include Dr William Mackie Turnbull, obsessed with the illnesses of the passengers, especially the many sick children on board, and William Empson, fixated on the weather and the ship’s progress, or lack of it. Jones starts each day’s entry with Dr Turnbull’s notes on ailing and dying children. Then she fasts forwards to develop some comment or theme revealed in the diaries. In this way the story of her family’s experience is told along with that of other passengers and the broader, Wellington community.

There are advantages in adopting this imaginative approach in that it really brings home the awful problem of high infant mortality aboard ship before the discovery of antibiotics. The heartbreak that will affect any parent or grandparent is deepened by the savage irony that these hopeful immigrants thought they were travelling to a healthier place. Trawling around in contemporary records like newspapers also highlights the sheer physical courage required for such a long and uncomfortable voyage. After reading this account the modern traveller will feel ashamed at complaining about the discomfort of long (twenty-four-hour) flights on cramped jets. It is all too easy to forget just how claustrophobic most below-decks accommodation was and the dreadful smells that had to be endured. The sheer terror of storms at sea also helps explain why many migrants to New Zealand, the world’s ‘farthest promised land’ as Rollo Arnold once put it, including some of my own family, refused to ever again travel on any kind of a boat. Some stayed in New Zealand simply because they could not get back to Britain, especially before the advent of steam ships services in the 1870s.

Jones’s thorough research in manuscripts, letters and newspapers held in the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Archives and Masterton Archives catches much of the texture of life in early Wellington. Once again she reminds us that settlers, despite their high expectations, experienced much more physical discomfort in poorly built housing served by chronically underdeveloped infrastructure. Rudimentary sanitation made the new settlement anything but healthy and parents had to continue coping with the pain of losing more children. As Jones points out, losing children then was no less painful than in other, more secure periods, despite the reality of high infant and maternal mortality persisting into the twentieth century. Certainly infant mortality remained high in Britain as in the rest of the Empire and the USA, but migrants were disappointed that rates took so long to drop in a supposedly ‘better’ environment. On top of the trauma of losing children came the terror of the 1855 earthquake — an 8.2 monster that would have proved catastrophic in a more intensively settled town. Danger also took on less spectacular forms for adults: clearing forests to make way for farms involved the danger of being burned alive or of having heavy trees falling upon the less expert woodsmen. Cuts, easily gained in bush clearance, could trigger fatal blood poisoning. Travel, too, involved dangers, especially drowning in swollen rivers that could only be crossed on foot. Horses, although nowhere near as dangerous as motor cars, sometimes threw their riders and rolled on top of them. The marginalisation of Maori, from the seven mysterious figures on board the London to those encountered at Wellington, is also probably a fairly accurate reflection of both the attitudes and experiences of the majority of British settlers concerning race relations.

Involvement in churches and a host of other social and cultural organisations also rings true, and provides further evidence that contradicts Miles Fairburn’s argument that nineteenth-century New Zealand was made up of atomised, disconnected individuals rather than cohesive communities. As Jones demonstrates, many of the families who came on the London ended up intermarrying and supporting one another in the tough business of building towns and making farms. Jones and Random House must also be praised for the high standard of presentation including the attractive colour reproductions of period paintings. Even if the relevance of one or two seems questionable, they look stunning.

Yet, for all its energy and imaginative evocation, assisted by Jones’s lively prose, there are problems with her novel approach. By hopping around so much and playing fast and loose with time, she produces a work that is very retrospective and over-loaded with hindsight. The people whose lives she hopes to illuminate simply did not experience things this way. Rather they engaged with life and its vicissitudes day by day as history unfolded. They did not know that earthquakes were coming until at least 1844, and could only assume that Maori resistance would eventually be overcome. They anticipated that sheep farming and wool growing would earn the colony a living — but there were no guarantees of success. Leaping around between theme and time also makes the interwoven stories a little hard to follow because the narrative drive is frequently disrupted. For this orthodox historian, at least, the experiment would have worked better if the author had related the voyage first and then unfolded the story of what happened after arrival next. Alternatively, holding an imaginary conversation, or creating a dialogue with her ancestors on the London, would have provided more coherence for this reader, at least, than the approach employed here. Of course, others who find mainstream historical writing to be rather dull and plodding may prefer this rather different and highly playful approach.

It must be conceded, nevertheless, that nineteenth-century New Zealand was an experiment in every sense, whether we are talking about economic development, environmental transformation, social engineering, cultural formation, race relations, or political systems. Wakefield’s theories and schemes added to the sense of trying something different, but the British migrants who became New Zealanders had to start anew and develop their country in their own way, with or without Wakefield.

Adjusting to very different realities involved working through a very organic process, just as eastern Polynesians had become Maori before British settlers arrived by learning to come to terms with the larger land mass and harsher and cooler environment of Aotearoa/Te Wai Pounamu. It is fitting, therefore, that Jones has experimented with the presentation of family and migration history and tried something different. For her imagination, bravery and hard work she deserves plaudits, but like most experiments her approach needs fine-tuning and modification, just as Wakefield’s ideas had to be significantly adjusted in practice to match the difficult realities of a new and very different land.

TOM BROOKING is Professor of History at the University of Otago. His books include Seeds of Empire: The Environmental Transformation of New Zealand, (with Eric Pawson), published by I.B.Tauris (London) in 2010, and Lands for the People? The Highland Clearances and the Colonisation of New Zealand: A Biography of John McKenzie (1996). He is currently writing a biography of Richard John Seddon, New Zealand’s longest-serving Prime Minister.

A Father’s Rights

October 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Brett Lupton

Settlers’ Creek, by Carl Nixon  (Random House, 2010), 330 pp. $29.99.

I have been an admirer of Carl Nixon ever since, some years ago, I read his short story ‘My Father Running with a Dead Boy’. Settler’s Creek is Nixon’s second novel and, having read this, I want very much to seek out his first, Rocking Horse Road, written in 2007.

The story in Settler’s Creek is told through the third-person perspective of Box Saxton, a man devastated by the sudden death of his stepson. Worse, the boy’s biological father, a Maori elder, takes the body without consent to be buried in ancestral land. Through his shock and grief, and memories of his own unfortunate family life, Box is compelled to set out to recover the son he has lost.

Nixon obviously recognises that much of the emotional power is already in the material and through tasteful changes of tense, from past to present, he adds additional focus as needed. All of which culminates in a simple but evocative style of prose that subtly reinforces themes and provides insight into the lives of the characters and how they may later react.

Box looked at the tools left hanging on the walls of the shed. A lot of them were missing now …. When he was very young Box hadn’t understood that his grandfather had drawn around each tool in here with a heavy marker and then painted in the outline in black on the wall. Back then, Box, the boy, had believed … that the tool had left behind its shadow … He looked at the black marks now, faded but still visible. Surrounded by the smells of linseed and earth, he stood for a long time and stared at the wall of lost shadows.

Yet despite the relative simplicity of plot and style, the issues Settler’s Creek addresses are certainly not so simple. In fact its cluster of thematic concerns are so snarly and gnarly, it took some thought to decide what this novel is really about. An ambivalent book for an ambivalent time: because it hugs the centre of a road that traces the nation’s bicultural faultline, as if testing territoriality, I am sure this book will mean different things to different people.

Initially the main concern appears to be the obvious clash of opposing world-views. And Nixon devotes much of the novel to developing this dynamic: the European equivalent of tangata whenua symbolised by a family bible; the dual cultural background of his stepson Stephen/Tipene; several examples of the inability of both sides to communicate effectively. He clearly wants a balanced view of both cultures.

But this is also where the novel occasionally wavers. Exactly because both sides of the argument have validity, and there are no readily apparent solutions, Nixon must act as a kind of facilitator — an explainer and ameliorator. As a result, there is sometimes the palpable sense of being led by a firm and insistent (‘fatherly’) hand through the issues. I feel the intentions of the story, and the storyteller, would be better served by allowing the reader the same space to think about the events as that which they’re allowed for emotional reaction — otherwise, paradoxically, the novel, wanting to maintain an even keel (overly concerned with everyone getting ‘a fair hearing’), is in danger of tipping into melodrama, bathos, or worse.

Balancing the cultural issues also distracts from what I feel is the novel’s true thematic focus: not the larger issue of social politics, but the ostensibly smaller – but no less important – question of what constitutes true fatherhood? This is where the novel derives its true power and purpose, and this is primarily why, I think, the author elects to tell the story through the suddenly bereft protagonist. Nixon is at his best when writing directly about Box and his experiences.

And when at his best, all concerns for the political issues that tend to divide us as a nation are swept away by what really matters, the immediacy of personal experience:

Now, looking at the damage, Box couldn’t help imagining latex hands cracking open his son’s chest. He felt a surge of anger. What the hell were they looking for anyway? Wasn’t it obvious that it was hanging from his neck that had killed the kid? Box imagined them reaching into the excavated chest and lifting out the boy’s heart. They would have held it up, turned it towards the light and slowly rolled it over for closer inspection. How much had it weighed? he wondered.

Notwithstanding the odd stumble, Settler’s Creek, with its exploration of contemporary moral complexities, and with its evocation of a particular time and place, lingers in the mind as a fine novel. And, despite my not having read his Rocking Horse Road (a situation soon to be rectified), this novel, in my estimation, is a necessary and successful step forward for this award-winning short-story exponent in getting to grips with the technical complexities of the larger form. It seems obvious to me that, from the luminous and careful crafting of this novel, and his dedication to building on that craft, Carl Nixon is destined to become one of New Zealand’s leading writers.

BRETT LUPTON is a writer and musician who lives in Dunedin. He is currently completing a PG (dip) Arts in English at the University of Otago.

Yourself who are Thousands

October 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Nicky Chapman

Dear Charles Dear Janet: Frame and Brasch in Correspondence, selected and edited by Pamela Gordon and Denis Harold (The Holloway Press, 2010), 61 pp., $250 (edition of 150).

Frame would have grinned and Brasch more likely grimaced, but both would have noted the gentle ironies surrounding this small book of short but often intensely interesting writings. Their letters, including email-sized notes on book loans and afternoon teas, have been preserved in beautiful font on thick cream paper, at a price no pauper writer could afford.

The letters, from 1949 to 1978, are torch-beams only. Readers need to go elsewhere for full biographical details. The book begins with Frame’s note sent to ‘Mr Editor’ from Oamaru (1949, between hospital stays). ‘A story. Crumbly and of poor grade. You probably won’t want it. In that case please burn it quickly – quickly – or crush into tinier pieces for Rat Darkness to sneak in and snaffle.’ Charles did not crush the story for Rat Darkness, nor did he reply to her, but he did tell Denis Glover to save it with her other submissions. In 1954 he asks to print one of her poems, and for more of her work, and their correspondence begins. Frame is outwardly diffident at first: ‘I fight off writing, but it has an overtaking habit, like sleep’.

Other writers and places are also briefly, evocatively, lit up. Frame finds England peaceful compared to the United States during the Vietnam era, and then remembers Dunedin in July: ‘… soon, the hills will be shadowed gold with the budding broom and gorse; it rains now, I suppose, and you light fires.’ Brash’s reply describes 1969 Dunedin with a Piggy Muldoon in the Capping Parade, and Hone Tuwhare, Warren Dibble and Ralph Hotere composing ‘a sort of humming top which now seems the centre of the town’s life’. The letters mention many other writers and artists, such as Ruth Dallas, the Baxters (Jacquie getting the children to work to pay off debts, while ‘Jim was up the Wanganui’), Frank Sargeson, Ted Middleton, Bill Manhire as an Icelandic scholar (‘rather sullen and silent’ but whom Frame liked), and even Grace Paley.

However, it is the writers themselves that fascinate most. Frame and Brasch were united in their passion for writing, respect for each other’s work, and affection, which overcame their differences in age, gender, personality and background. Brasch notes in his diary in 1965, ‘Janet shares my interest in moulding language to greater intensity and richness … She is so quick, receptive, all her antennae alive, aware.’

What differentiates them most is that Frame writes, in general, to explore and to reveal, while Brasch conceals his inwardness behind polite warmth and kind practicalities. Even having taken such care, he still fears posterity’s intrusions: ‘I am appalled at the way people fall like wolves on the letters of writers who are still alive or are barely in their graves; it’s a kind of cannibalism, it’s certainly very indecent.’

If personal exposure upsets Brasch, criticism of her work inspires Frame to passionate analysis. When a Landfall reviewer disparages her ‘weakness for metaphor’, she writes ‘… isn’t the need to compare, to perceive relationships the source of all art? … images … are the basis of my life and my need to write, and they all have meaning. The fact that they impede the path of narrative makes me a bad novelist, but, except in some of my stories, I’m not taking the narrative path.’

The editors have filled out the spaces between the letters with much more of Frame’s other writings than Brasch’s, but these give insights into both. Frame describes Brasch to her beloved friend, the American painter, Bill Brown, as a ‘pure earnest bachelor’ who had led a ‘shatteringly lonely life’ until his mid-fifties. When sitting next to Brasch on a plane, ‘I warned him that I would be likely to grab his arm if the plane were being buffeted and he whom I’m sure has remained ungrabbed all his life, suppressed a slight alarm and gallantly said he did not mind.’

The book has faults. Its price and print-run make it inaccessible to most. The printing is not clear on every page, at least on my copy. A little more contextual information would help many readers, for example, being told early on that ‘Ruth’ was Brasch’s secretary for Landfall. I would also have liked to have read all the letters in their entirety.

Despite such criticism, this book is a valuable addition to our understanding of both writers. Its revelations – of Frame’s witty warm compassion and Brasch’s intense privacy and extreme generosity – entice us back to their more formal work. The man who wrote ‘Separation’ (Home Ground 1974) was not ‘ungrabbed’. He also knew that all people are multiple and intertwined, and to create one voice is piercingly difficult:

12

To speak in your own words in your own voice –

How easy it sounds and how hard it is

When nothing that is yours is yours alone

To walk singly yourself who are thousands

Through all that made and makes you day by day

To be and to be nothing, not to own

Not owned, but lightly on the sword edge keep

A dancer’s figure – that is the wind’s art

With you who are blood and water, wind and stone.

‘Shoriken’ (Home Ground 1974)

NICKY CHAPMAN is a writer, editor and tutor, who shares Brasch’s and Frame’s strong connections to Otago. She lives in Port Chalmers, near Dunedin.

Poetry’s Many Different Voices

October 1, 2011 1 Comment

Nicholas Reid

The Best of Best New Zealand Poems, edited by Bill Manhire and Damien Wilkins (Victoria University Press, 2010) 224 pp., $35.00; These I Have Loved – My Favourite New Zealand Poems, edited by Harvey McQueen (Steele Roberts, 2010) 192 pp., $34.99.

Because you are reading this, you are part of the electronic revolution. These words exist only in cyber-space. Paper has nothing to do with them. And for the last twenty years or so, clever people have been telling us that this is the way ahead. Websites, blogs, on-line journals etc. are going to take the place of those physical objects, books. Printed books will go the way of the hand-written codex. A few reactionary ‘craft’ printers might still produce them as a kind of folk-hobby, but the rest of us will be Kindling and reading off screen rather than off page.

So isn’t it funny that when an on-line journal reaches its tenth year of successful production, it celebrates by producing a real physical book with real physical pages?

            The Best of Best New Zealand Poems gathers together what Bill Manhire and Damien Wilkins consider to be the cream of Victoria University’s online poetry journal Best New Zealand Poems, which began in 2001. The journal has had a different editor each year, from Iain Sharp in 2001 to Chris Price in 2010, so initial selection of contents is not tied to one person’s idiosyncratic taste.

            In his introductory essay, Damien Wilkins’ tone is a little defensive about producing a book to celebrate something online. He is determined to pre-empt this obvious criticism, as well as some others. There is, as he correctly notes, an element of hubris in calling a personal selection of contents ‘the Best’. He points out that of the 65 poets represented, there are 38 women and 27 men, so the two blokes who selected the contents haven’t been sexist or anything. He also writes: ‘One final piece of accounting – and this will inflame some readers. By my estimate more than 30 per cent of the poets in this book have connections to either the International Institute of Modern Letters or Bill [Manhire]’s old Original Composition class. What can we say?… these are the poems that most excited us.’ I’m not sure that it was prudent to say this. Whatever Wilkins’ intention, it inevitably creates the impression of a clubby in-group.

            And so to the 65 poets, arranged in alphabetical order from Fleur Adcock to Ashleigh Young.

            The hell of reviewing an anthology is that one is implicitly required to pick trends or make some sententious statement about the state of modern poetry. I am completely unable to do this. Walking from poet to poet, I encountered many different voices using radically different techniques:

            I’m interested that it is women rather than men who tend to dwell on the rough stuff (Michele Amas’ raw sexual concern for her daughter; Tusiata Avia’s celebration of a wild and crazy sexual encounter; Bernadette Hall worrying about war; Anne Kennedy watching the All Blacks’ vigorous tribal battle on the telly).

            Men and women are equally satirical (Hinemoana Baker’s surrealist protest poem; Gordon Challis defying regulations; Karlo Mila angry at fake stereotypes of Pasifika; Robert Sullivan doing his block about the government’s overriding of Maori customary right).

            Men and women are equally prone to strong feelings about parents and family (Rachel Bush in praise of old-time at-home Mums; Geoff Cochrane writing tenderly about his brother; Rhian Gallagher burying her father; Andrew Johnston’s long stately elegy for his father; Vivienne Plumb reflecting on her very sick son; Sonja Yelich worrying about the kind of education her kids are getting).

            Some poems are written loose blog-style (Jenny Bornholdt seeing a poet as a fitter turner; Stephanie de Montalk facing a bone-scan).

            By contrast, a few brave spirits go for more traditional structures and metres (the eight rhyming lines of Alistair Campbell; that radical young poet Allen Curnow translating Pushkin; John Gallas breaking into rhyme; Paula Green almost writing a Petrarchan sonnet; C.K. Stead replaying Allen Curnow’s loss of Christian faith).

            I could pick out those poets whose selection is dream-like or surrealist (Fleur Adcock), and those who are more social-realist (Peter Olds). But it is really impossible to make generalisations beyond the ones I’ve already made.

            And this one. New Zealand poetry is in good health. It produces a lot of interesting stuff.

            One quibble. At the back of the book are biographical notes on each contributor, and a statement from each poet on what the poem means or what inspired it. Some of these statements ramble on for longer than the poem being explained. The rebellious part of me kept wondering why the poems needed such crutches to lean on. Were they not capable of communicating what they had to say by their own text?

            High praise, then, to Sam Hunt and Gregory O’Brien for not playing the game and for providing no such explanation of their contributions.

•••

Harvey McQueen died late last year, at the age of seventy-six. He was a considerate teacher and anthologist, as well as a good poet in his own right. I had the pleasure of reviewing his last collection, Goya Rules, for Poetry New Zealand. I judged it sane, civilised and capable of making big statements about history without either embarrassment or mawkishness.

            The same statement can be made of the anthology These I Have Loved, the last thing McQueen produced before his death. As the title (per Rupert Brooke) makes clear, in choosing his one hundred favourite New Zealand poems, McQueen was guided first by his heart, not by current critical fashion or consensus taste. He explains in his introduction that he was not deterred, either, by complaints that some of his choices might be considered hackneyed. So he includes Ruth Dallas’s ‘Milking at Dawn’, Denis Glover’s ‘The Magpies’, James K. Baxter’s ‘Lament for Barney Flanagan’, Allen Curnow’s ‘House and Land’ and Mary Stanley’s ‘The Wife Speaks’. And why not? They deserve to be on anybody’s list of the twenty best New Zealand poems ever, let along the hundred best. It doesn’t matter that they have been anthologised often before.

            From somebody who died at a reasonable old age, much of McQueen’s selection consists inevitably of earlier generations of poets. Mason, Baughan, Bethell, Glover, Curnow, Fairburn and Tuwhare are generously represented, and a whole section is devoted to Baxter, whom McQueen describes as: ‘bestriding my poetry life like a colossus’. But McQueen kept reading new poetry to the end, and These I Have Loved also comes up with goodly selections from newer breeds (Kate Camp, Jenny Bornholdt, Mark Pirie, Janet Charman) as well as a few surprising choices from poets who have published little.

            How do you judge somebody else’s selection of favourites? You don’t really. You sit back and take in the anthologist’s comment that: ‘to a considerable extent [the selected poems] represent who I am, or maybe the person I would hope to be.’ The anthology is organised thematically. Each section is introduced by a brief essay. Often the tone is autobiographical, as McQueen explains why and how he first encountered the selected poems.

            He knew his end was approaching as he anthologised. He writes: ‘I’ve been diagnosed as having a rare muscular degenerative disease with no known cure.’ This is a browsable and school-friendly anthology. Also a heck of an epitaph.

NICHOLAS REID is an Auckland-based historian, poet and reviewer. He blogs about books online at Reid’s Reader.

Generation Xperimental

October 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Jodie Dalgleish

Zebulon: A Cautionary Tale, by Richard Meros, (Lawrence and Gibson, 2011) 169 pp. $24.00; Getting under Sail, by Brannavan Gnanalingam, (Lawrence and Gibson, 2011) 236 pp., $24.00; The Constant Losers, by Alex Wild, (Titus Books, 2010), 189 pp., $30.00.

The ridiculous is skilfully made both funny and thought-provoking in Richard Meros’ Zebulon: A Cautionary Tale, recently published by the writers’ co-operative Lawrence and Gibson. Not only does the book present a writer’s hilariously sadomasochistic efforts to dominate a few fledging writers in order to spark his own creativity, but the head of long-dead Che Guevera is made to thaw on a shelf of the FBI and head south, levitating and directing itself with a new-found power. What’s more, these two unlikely threads of storyline are brought together and intertwined to form a novel that playfully and pointedly explores the potential of experimental fiction and the act of writing itself.

As the book began, I suspected that the writer was going to do little more than indulge in the pursuit of smartass-edly writing about himself. But by the end of the second chapter he had begun to reveal his particular ability to throw reality around since ‘no mere story, especially one posing as auto-biography, can approximate reality’. Meros convinces the reader that the book’s main character is also its author, slyly establishing a chronological link to his previous book, On the Conditions and Possibilities of Helen Clark Taking Me as Her Young Lover. At the same time, he is the book’s main character: a writer typing words that ‘flopped off [his] computer, onto their pages, and onto the floor.’

At the hands of Sally and Leo the main character and author, Richard, is unexpectedly smeared in a number of condiments and subjected to an erotic encounter with a book on tattooed nudes. Somehow inspired, he devises a plan to dominate would-be writers, and reels in three recruits like trout that each require ‘a different type of tickling.’ In master and servant sessions they are slapped, pinched and caressed into writing, without drifting from their narrative flow. But by the end of the fifth chapter, Richard has inevitably and unsatisfactorily slept with one of his recruits, fired another and been overcome by the normalising demands of Riley, the third.

In the sixth chapter Meros goes further, throwing the reader into a narrative that is almost surreal. Taking the ridiculous to a new extreme, Che Guevera’s defrosted head is able to move as if controlled by the joystick of his new life force. Levitating without friction, Che traverses America at his own discretion, creating hysterical rumours and headlines along the way. At the end of the chapter, however, the author presents ‘Richard’s comments’ on that chapter’s text, making it that of Riley, his only productive recruit. And so follows a to-ing and fro-ing of chapters that alternate between the story of Richard and Che.

Over a lengthy nine chapters, Che Guevera achieves a second coming and eventually recognises the impotence, capitalisation and stylisation of his so-called revolution. Co-incidentally, Richard finds a new recruit, Karl, that turns the tables on him, more fully discovers his own impotence as he begins to write again, is suddenly engaged to be married and tries to quit the Lawrence and Gibson Group. This gives substance and movement to Meros’ novel, but if the author did wish to draw parallels between the idea of failed or eventually impotent revolution and writing, he could have made more of the play between these chapters.

Part way through his novel’s nine chapter interplay, Meros infuriates the reader. He takes the story of Che — which is supposedly that of Riley — into his own clutches, sneaking in bits of language he used in his first few chapters. The reader — who is also likely to be a writer, given the experimental nature of Meros’ novel — is likely to ‘tut tut’ and shake a finger. Fully aware of his flaunting of ‘the rules’, however, Meros deliberately plays a trick on the reader and rescues the reputation of experimental fiction in the last chapters of his book.

As it turns out, the members of Lawrence and Gibson (which include Riley and Karl) decide to declare their insolvency. But on the insistence of their accountant, the uncooperative cooperative’s James Marr claims the incomplete manuscripts of its last active members and tries to compile a book that will make enough money to cover their debts. He ‘[cobbles] the confiscated texts into something half-coherent, whittling it all down to two plotlines,’ sends it to Richard to both finish and edit, and calls it ‘Zebulon: A Cautionary Tale.’ In one fell swoop Meros finishes by throwing questions about the authorship of his novel up in the air, and causes the reader to rethink his entire novel as those questions fall.

***

Lawrence and Gibson’s other recently released book, Getting Under Sail by Brannavan Gnanalingam, is less successful. Gnanalingam recounts his extraordinary road trip from Morocco to Ghana with two guys previously his high school friends. It is, as advertised, part-travelogue, part-picaresque and part-confessional. This is what makes it interesting and worthy of attention. However, the language, while at times surprisingly refreshing, is often overburdened by grammar and diluted by unnecessary ‘factual’ or autobiographical information. In addition, the dialogue between Gnanalingam and his travel companions is often banal and the laddish dialogue that includes frequent mention of girlfriends as ‘good bitches’ will, I suspect, sound unreal to most readers.

With some direction and a good edit, Gnanalingam’s book could have been polished into a gem. For the author can conjure a place with a stellar phrase. Of Cairo he writes: ‘the pollution snarled at my eyes, stuck its tongue down my throat like an over-enthusiastic first kiss.’ In the medina of Marrakech: ‘music filled every spare corner … Moroccans [were] taking on the blues, or waltzes with traditional instruments that convinced the sky dust and night air to dance a dervish around the open space.’ In Mauritania, the aroma of fried fish ‘stood out in the blanket of dust.’ In Senegal, a van ‘was a stutterer under stress’, and ‘a sharp, cool, palliative beer’ washed away heat. ‘Tamale was a city lurking in wait.’ And in Busua, fishing boats ‘flopped onto land like a swimmer too tired to get out of a pool.’

Perhaps the most interesting, and yet underdeveloped, thing about Gnalanalingam’s account is his exploration of his own identity as a ‘darkie’ from a ‘white’ country travelling as a tourist in Africa. Throughout the book, the author gives little snippets of his Sri-Lankan heritage and muses on the nature of ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’. Poignantly, Gnanalingam calls himself ‘the black man who is white’. On the back of this is a load of guilt, contradiction and conflict that works its way to the book’s end. Gnanalingam does fully understand and explore the strange experience that is travelling, however. He mentions the need to explore the world for the sake of it, the practice of ticking off attractions, the way a traveller remains dislocated from people and their so-called monuments, the fact that ‘tourists’ and ‘locals’ inevitably act out their respective roles, and the supposed superiority of the well-travelled.

***

Like Zebulon, The Constant Losers by Alex Wild is a surprising and successful work of experimental fiction. Written as a series of zines that combine text-speak, doodles and photocopied notes, it offers funny and appealing musings on music, relationships, books and sexuality, among other things. Of particular note is its ability to be fully Generation Y (‘OMGWTF’) while it draws on plenty of music and other stuff dear and recognisable to a Generation Xer, such as the practice of making and exchanging audio cassette tapes.

It might seem unlikely that any writer could maintain a zine format with its truncated manner of speech and keep the reader engaged, but Wild pulls it off with ease. She lets her zine-like format structure her novel’s text under snappy headings and uses her doodles as visual cues. At the same time, she offers a recognisable narrative flow. She has a deft touch and a way of making her story live through her own kind of content. In particular, the tone of her central characters, Frankie and Amy, skilfully carries the smile, wink and nudge of the author. And the battle-of-the-zines that develops between them and ultimately brings them together is nothing less than a sweet read.

JODIE DALGLEISH is a curator, critic and author currently living in Wellington. She is a regular contributor to the online art journal EyeContact, and has a Masters degree in Creative Writing from the Auckland University of Technology.

Modus Operandi

October 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Lydia Wevers

The Frame Function: An Inside-Out Guide to the Novels of Janet Frame, by Jan Cronin, (Auckland University Press, 2011), 222 pp., $49.99.

Janet Frame’s 1979 Living in the Maniototo is her penultimate novel and one generally regarded, as Jan Cronin says in her book, as some kind of creative manifesto. The headings of the different parts of the novel are a set of instructions to the reader, predominantly about ‘paying attention’. If these instructions reflect Frame’s sense of her reader, or rather, to adapt Cronin’s title, the ‘reader function’, then paying attention might be something she thinks the reader already does (but not well) or does too much, or does not do enough, and there won’t, of course, be anything simple about what Frame might or might not be saying, but if it is possible to have a reader who pays enough of the right kind of attention, then that person is Jan Cronin.

The Frame Function picks up from a phrase coined by Patrick Evans in an obituary in 2004, the ‘Frame effect’, which described the way he thought that ‘as readers, each of us is … under her control whenever we read her and required to perform – to solve’. Frame referred to her fictions as ‘explorations’ rather than novels and the questions that have absorbed, intrigued and teased scholars over the duration of her work relate to the ways in which they do not conform to habitual reader expectations. The narrative will never arrive a point where all becomes clear and you are offered ‘closure’. And the reason her novels never reach a reassuring destination is because the author (or rather her many stand-ins because you are never allowed to rest in the comfortable arms of a reliable narrator) is always at your elbow troubling the waters of comprehension.

Cronin, adapting the ‘Frame function’ from Foucault’s famous term for the author, bases her ‘guide’ to Frame on the ‘authorial presence’ in Frame’s novels and how that presence impacts on the reader. Cronin opens with a wonderful example of Frame playing with her reader’s attention in The Adaptable Man. Over breakfast Russell Maude, the village dentist, his wife Greta and their son Alwyn are being treated to a reading of Anglo-Saxon poetry from Russell’s brother, Aisley, a clergyman who is convalescing with them. Misquotations and mistranslations are exchanged across the table cloth, Frame setting traps for an unwary reader who has done Medieval English 1 and thinks they know some Anglo-Saxon verse. Cronin notes that there is no question of Frame simply having made a mistake about which translation matches which Anglo-Saxon poem. Later in the text translated lines from ‘The Wanderer’ are repeated and matched with the correct Anglo-Saxon original. There are other ‘mistakes’ too, which are harder to classify, and like the good scholar she is, Cronin checked Frame’s ms and various editions of the novel and concluded, to her relief, that the reader ‘could not rely on the empirical author to clarify the text’. But at the same time the ‘wilful authorial presence in the text was such that it wouldn’t allow the reader to disregard it’.

Of course this is not a new insight in Frame studies. No one can read Frame and not become aware of the author playing cat and mouse with the reader, but what Cronin offers in The Frame Function is a detailed, erudite, clear and illuminating account of Frame’s novels and what she calls Frame’s ‘MO’ — how they work. Cronin acknowledges that her own MO, the ‘inside-out guide’, might be seen as ‘making an implicit claim to know the text better than Frame, to have access to a textual endgame of authorial interests and choices’, but she is always at pains to disavow the potential hierarchies of this position. Instead, she asserts that the ‘Frame function’ and the inside-out guide are two sides of the same interpretative coin. So does it help?

The answer is unequivocally that yes it does. Cronin delivers a very lucid and highly informed guided journey through corpus of Frame’s fiction, discussing the novels in roughly chronological order, and using each chapter to open out a more complex examination of the ‘prescriptive authorial presence’ and how the novels work. As she repeatedly notes, her interpretive labours are more focused on the how and not the what of Frame’s fiction, reflecting Frame’s own focus, as expressed in an interview with Elizabeth Alley, on the ‘pattern of things’. Towards the end of this comprehensive and learned book, the person she refers to as the ‘empirical author’ appears in her ‘own voice’ (the trouble with reading Frame is one’s heightened apprehensions of the chasms buried in that taken-for-granted, everyday kind of phrase) in quoted interviews and letters. These notes from the deep don’t really say anything that authors through the ages haven’t always said. For example she commented to Susan Chenery that ‘when you are writing you think you know what you are going to do but it gets organised for you’. This is not really any different from the old chestnut of characters taking over the narrative, but where Frame is unlike other people, the source of her great difficulty and treasure is how she changes her reader’s alertness to, and awareness of, the otherworld of the text. Where does the text stop and the world begin? Cronin shows, with expertly heightened attention, how shifty and cunning Frame and her texts are, and how complex and unfinished the reader’s experience will always be.

This is not a book for a casual reader. Cronin declares at the outset it is for those who have ‘acquired a taste’ for the novels of Janet Frame, and the book is primarily geared to a scholarly audience. Undergraduates looking for an easy fix to an essay won’t find their answers here. It is a guide more in the sense that Virgil is Dante’s guide through the Inferno — there are still complex mysteries. Cronin deploys the metaphor of the guide in her own syntax, which is the only thing about her book that I found irritating — the reader is always part of an armlocked ‘we’. But Cronin’s image for Frame’s novels suggests, I think, the expansions offered by her own text. Cronin says the image that sticks with her is the blue police box — yes the TARDIS, in which Doctor Who travels to new worlds — bigger on the inside than on the outside. This is true of both authors and their texts. The Frame Function won’t be the last word on its subject, but it will be a must-read for anyone trying to write about or get to grips with the work of our most extraordinary, gifted and elusive author.

LYDIA WEVERS is the director of the Stout Research Centre at Victoria University. Her most recent book is Reading on the Farm: Victorian Fiction and the Colonial World (VUP).