Landfall Review Online

Ties that Bind

June 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Carolyn McCurdie

The Ash, the Well and the Bluebell by Sandra Arnold (Mākaro Press, 2019), 332 pp., $35

Canterbury writer Sandra Arnold is an accomplished contributor to the literary life of Aotearoa New Zealand. Her published work includes flash fiction, short stories, memoir and novels. She was co-founder, with David Howard, of the literary magazine takahē. The Ash, the Well and the Bluebell is her third novel.

The prologue opens the story with a jolt that for New Zealand readers will feel immediate and recent. Lily is enjoying precious moments with her much-loved daughter, Charlie, before Charlie leaves for a new job in Australia. They’re in a café in the centre of Christchurch on 22 February 2011. The date at the head of the chapter warns us. The earthquake leaves Lily in hospital, mind reeling and unable to grasp the fact of Charlie’s death. Among the jumble of nightmare and memory are images of her childhood in the village of Eshwell Bridge in the north-east of England. Chapter One takes us there, to 1955, when Lily is a child. [Read more…]

The Women Who Knew Too Much

May 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Brannavan Gnanalingam

Shakti by Rajorshi Chakraborti (Penguin Random House NZ, 2019), 20, 336pp, $36

A common critique of superhero narratives is their inherent fascist tendencies. Superheroes exist in dysfunctional societies, and their powers necessarily exist outside of the law. Obviously, this is because the law in their world is corrupt and those with power can’t be trusted. The superheroes’ vigilantism becomes a way of restoring some sort of moral equilibrium. In many superhero narratives, the consequence of this vigilantism is largely skirted over: writer and reader generally assume, to borrow a line from Dylan, that ‘to live outside the law, you must be honest’. [Read more…]

Not a Capture but a Lavishing

May 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Janet Newman

By Sea Mouths Speaking: Collected poems 1973–2018 and related prose by Denys Trussell (Brick Row, 2019), 784pp, $75

It is hard to remember the time when human entanglement with the environment was not at the forefront of our minds. Yet only forty years ago, Denys Trussell’s ecological sequence of poems ‘Dance of the Origin’ was ‘outside the dominant view’ of New Zealand contemporary dance, for which it was written. The performance of Trussell’s poetic sequence explored ‘the body as nature; the body as ecological entity within larger ecological processes’, says Origins Dance Theatre founder Alison East, in an essay in this collection – ideas which in 1980 contrasted with ‘the dominant view of human beings as separate from and superior to all aspects of nature’ (532). [Read more…]

Going All Houdini

May 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Diane Brown

The Father of Octopus Wrestling and Other Small Fictions by Frankie McMillan (Canterbury University Press, 2019), 146pp., $27.99

Reading Frankie McMillan’s The Father of Octopus Wrestling and Other Small Fictions is like taking part in a speed dating evening. You only have five minutes to meet the fifty-five applicants. All are equally fascinating and equally elusive. If only, you think to yourself, I could spend half an hour reading each one, delving deep to find out if any is a wife beater or an alcoholic.

It was probably a mistake to read this book after rereading Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, and then, Olive Again. At first, I resisted the slickness of McMillan’s small fictions that never allowed such close encounters with character and background. But nothing is more annoying than the reviewer who says ‘Why didn’t the writer write it like this?’ or ‘It would have better if she’d done this.’ There is a world of difference between Stout’s connected short stories set in one small town, and McMillan’s fictions, which roam from unspecified locations to Rotorua, Lake Bunyonyi, Ireland, Amsterdam, Ukraine and a myriad of other places. [Read more…]