Landfall Review Online

A Train of Ghosts

February 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Majella Cullinane

The Unreliable People by Rosetta Allan (Penguin Random House, 2019), 352 pp., $38

In the last two decades New Zealand writers who have explored settings outside New Zealand include Elizabeth Knox with her 1998 The Vintner’s Luck set in France, Lloyd Jones’ Mr Pip, set in Papua New Guinea and, more recently, Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize-winning novel The Wish Child by Catherine Chidgey, which takes place in Nazi Germany. Rosetta Allan’s second novel, The Unreliable People, immerses the reader in the world of 1930s Soviet Russia and, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, in 1990s St Petersburg. [Read more…]

Parody and Poignancy

February 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Vanda Symon

The Nancys by R.W.R. McDonald (Allen & Unwin, 2019), 400 pp., $32

The blurb for this novel runs:

Tippy Chan is eleven and lives in a small town in a very quiet part of the world – the place her Uncle Pike escaped from the first chance he got as a teenager. Now Pike is back with his new boyfriend Devon to look after Tippy while her mum’s on a cruise.

Tippy is in love with her uncle’s old Nancy Drew books, especially the early ones where Nancy was sixteen and did whatever she wanted. She wants to be Nancy and is desperate to solve a real mystery. When her teacher’s body is found beside Riverstone’s only traffic light, Tippy’s moment has arrived. She and her minders form The Nancys, a secret amateur detective club. [Read more…]

Portals into Possibility

December 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Octavia Cade

The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox (Victoria University Press, 2019), 666pp., $35

Fantasy comes with expectation. It’s a genre of escapism, often involving a very literal escape from one world and into another. Escape, however, is rarely so linear, and there is an expectation that the problems of one world manifest themselves in new ways in another. What it means to be left behind, what it means to compromise yourself, what it means to lose faith and then find it again … these are questions of isolation, of consequence, and of the transformation of self that goes with the movement between worlds. [Read more…]

A Cultural Journey

December 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Shirley Simmonds

Te Kōparapara: An introduction to the Māori world, eds Michael Reilly, Suzanne Duncan, Gianna Leoni, Lachy Paterson, Poia Rewi, Lyn Carter and Matiu Rātima (Auckland University Press, 2018), 484 pp, $69.99

In the same way that we search a crowd for someone we might know, or scan a group photo for a familiar face, my eyes ran down the contents list on the inside pages of Te Kōparapara. Initially I was drawn not to the chapter headings, but to the names below each title.

Some I knew, some I knew of, and some I didn’t know but wanted to. Then I read the chapter headings for each to see what their particular kaupapa was, their contribution, their gift to this impressive and weighty compendium. [Read more…]

Sailing into the Wind

December 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Tom Brooking

100 Days that Mapped a Nation by Graeme Lay (New Holland Publishers, 2019), 208pp, $65

This is the first Cook book I have ever reviewed, although I have managed a couple of large tomes on French exploration in the Pacific, and taught Honours courses on early New Zealand featuring the outstanding navigator from Yorkshire. Such books will appear relatively frequently over the next few months as the 250th anniversary of Cook’s arrival is commemorated. Unlike most recipe books, however, some of these publications are destined to be controversial. One of the reasons for the contentious nature of the Cook story is that some Polynesian historians, like Haunani-Kay Trask of Hawai`i, see Cook as personifying all the baleful impacts of colonisation upon indigenous peoples. Some Māori commentators, including descendants of Rongowhakata, the iwi settled around Gisborne, feel much the same way. They cite the killing of nine of their tīpuna and current problems – such as the high prison incarceration rates of Māori, on-going poverty and educational underachievement – in support of their claim that European colonisation of New Zealand has seriously damaged the indigenous people of the last major land mass on earth to be settled by humans. Such critics seem set on supporting the now rather outdated notion of the ‘fatal impact’ of colonisation, which portrays all indigenous people as hapless victims without any historical agency. [Read more…]