Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review
Elizabeth Heritage
Crazy Love: A novel by Rosetta Allan (Penguin Random House NZ, 2021), 329pp, $36
In hindsight, the subtitle should have tipped me off: ‘A novel’. The last pukapuka I reviewed for Landfall, A Runner’s Guide to Rakiura: A novel, had the same subtitle, but in that case, it was so the reader didn’t mistake it for an actual running guide. Here, the claim to fiction is doing a lot of heavy lifting—and not very successfully. [Read more…]
Owen Marshall
The Deck by Fiona Farrell (RHNZ Vintage, 2023), 304pp, $37
Fiona Farrell is one of our foremost writers, accomplished in fiction, drama, poetry and essay, and as a scholar. All of these talents are necessarily employed in The Deck, her most challenging work yet, both for her and for readers. The Deck is a powerful and layered book, a cross-genre piece bringing together the past and the present, fact and fiction, poetry and statistics, escape and confrontation. Farrell never writes the same book twice and this is further proof of that.
Even the title itself has a teasing multiplicity of meaning. On receiving a copy of the book, I thought, what deck? After reading it, I was able to see various references and connotations: the decking on which the holidaymakers gather to tell stories, the deck from which life deals cards to us all, and of course, most significantly, the connection to the title of Giovanni Boccaccio’s classic volume The Decameron, which was written in fourteenth century Italy shortly after the horrors of the Black Death. [Read more…]
James Norcliffe
Eddy, Eddy by Kate de Goldi (Allen & Unwin, 2022), 288pp, $29.99
Kate de Goldi’s scintillating novel Eddy, Eddy, tells the story of the eponymous Eddy Smallbone, 19, a school dropout and now part-time dog walker and shift worker at New World and his journey through the last months of 2012, two years after the first earthquake that shook Christchurch.
This book’s title is instructive: Eddy suggests swirl and turmoil, while the repetition suggests both exasperation and a plea. Eddy’s life is swirling. He is an orphan, living with his uncle, always referred to as Brain, one of a quartet of mildly eccentric friends and relatives who keep a kindly eye on him. Although he had been a potential scholarship candidate, personal issues compelled him to leave school for menial work; his love life has fallen apart and there are clearly deeper issues that, in the meantime, remain diffuse and unexplained. This mystery provides the subtle tension underlying the plot, and the reveal, when it comes, is more of a sad confirmation than a rug-pull, but striking for all of that. Foregrounded are day-to-day events and the dance of off-beat characters, with their rich and fascinating conversations and minor obsessions. [Read more…]
Harry Ricketts
No Rising of the Sheep by Bill Bradford, illustrated by Thomas Lauterbach (Mary Egan Publishing, 2022), 80pp, $30; Selected Poems by Andrew Johnston (Te Herenga Waka Press, 2023), 206pp, $40; The Tip Shop by James Brown (Te Herenga Waka Press, 2022), 78pp, $25
There’s a long literary tradition linking shepherds and poets: Theocritus, Virgil, Spenser, Milton. But this tradition doesn’t have much to do with sheep as such. The flocks, the herding, the pastoral landscape are simply high culture tropes, allowing the poet to write about other things: love, society, arcadian spaces, sex, poetry, loss, religion. The poems, wonderful in their way (Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ remains a ball-park knock-out), are self-consciously artificial and stylised. You won’t find sheep shit in Virgil nor foot-rot in Milton. Even recent agrarian poets such as Ted Hughes tend to have only an occasional piece that gives much idea of what the ordinary shepherd’s lot is (or was) actually like—Australian poet Philip Hodgins is perhaps an exception, but he grew up on a farm. [Read more…]
Nicholas Reid
A History of New Zealand in 100 Objects by Jock Phillips (Penguin Random House NZ 2022), 464 pp, $55
Can a country’s history really be told as a series of material objects? This question must nag at any historian who reads Jock Phillips’s A History of New Zealand in 100 Objects.
The concept of using objects to produce a historical narrative has been around for over a decade now. Jock Phillips tells us he was inspired by Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects, published as a book in 2010 after having been a series of BBC broadcasts. Since then, there has been A History of Ireland in 100 Objects and a similar German production. Something of the same inspiration was produced in New Zealand in 2015 when Annabel Cooper, Lachy Patterson and Angela Wanhalla published their book The Lives of Colonial Objects, even if they stuck with the nineteenth century, unlike Phillips’s very broad swing through time. Phillips’s first ‘object’ is the fossil bone of a crocodile-like creature from forty-plus million years ago, cleverly reminding us of the very ancientness of these islands. His last objects are knitted dollies representing Jacinda Ardern and Ashley Bloomfield curating public health in the time of Covid-19. Very up to date. [Read more…]
Mary Macpherson
Though Shaded Glass: Women and photography in Aotearoa New Zealand 1860–1960 by Lissa Mitchell (Te Papa Press, 2023), 368pp, $75
I searched online for nineteenth-century New Zealand photography. The first link that came up was Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand’s page on photography in the 1840s to 1880s. It covered the role of photography in recording the colonial narrative of progress, portraiture and carte de visite prints and listed the Burton and Tyree Brothers, William Meluish, James Bragge and several other male photographers. This otherwise well-informed entry only mentioned one woman, Elizabeth Pulman, for her role in photographing Māori, with the comment that she was probably New Zealand’s first woman photographer. In the section about photography from the 1880s to 1960s, seven women were referenced, compared with around seventeen male photographers. [Read more…]