Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

The Secret Life of Everyone

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Rachel O’Connor

Bug Week & Other Stories by Airini Beautrais, (Victoria University Press, 2020), 184pp, $30

The cover of Bug Week is a soft coral pink, faintly reminiscent of one’s grandmother’s fully unrestored bathroom. The hand-painted bugs that crawl among the letters of its title are similarly benign, referencing a gentler time when entomology was as much about fine art as science. Between the covers of the collection, however, lies a darker, more dangerous place, implicitly familiar in its mundane settings and populations, but made noxious by the insidious contaminants of human weakness, disillusionment and betrayal. In these thirteen short stories by Airini Beautrais, we are all subject to scrutiny under the microscope, and no one emerges looking good.  [Read more…]

Cartography for the Soul

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Tim Saunders

Map for the Heart: Ida Valley essays by Jillian Sullivan (Otago University Press, 2020), 280pp., $35

The last time I visited the Ida Valley in Central Otago I stopped on the road beside the Idaburn, the river that cuts diagonally across the plains between mountain ranges. The sun was slung low in the sky and the moon was already rising, as if caught in some cosmic game of chase across the heavens. It would soon be dark, and I still had an hour’s drive to where I wanted to be.

I watched a hawk slice the thick evening air as water flowed over river-smooth stones, its dark shape flicking over sheep scattered across brown grass. Magpies sat upright in trees, turning their backs to the sun to catch the last of the warmth. As I looked at these creatures that had made a home here, among the tussock and in the shadows of hills, I had the sudden desire to stay just where I was. There was something there in that limitless landscape that beckoned me to put down roots. [Read more…]

Dandelions Flung Together Learning to Grow 

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Erik Kennedy

National Anthem by Mohamed Hassan (Dead Bird Books, 2020), 68pp., $35; Childwood by Denis Welch (Steele Roberts, 2019), 64pp., $20; The Sets by Victor Billot (Otago University Press, 2021), 118pp., $27.50

The ‘national anthem’ of Mohamed Hassan’s second book of poems, National Anthem, is built on a clever contradiction: it is not actually meant to be a national anthem at all, as it is sceptical of the very idea of nation states. As the title poem puts it:

I pledge myself to

no flag

no border

no house of trees

no fairy tale past

no charismatic king

no industry of false profits

burying their dead in the sand [Read more…]

Gardens for the People! 

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James Beattie 

Common Ground: Garden histories of Aotearoa by Matt Morris (Otago University Press, 2020), 284 pp., $45

In Common Ground: Garden histories of Aotearoa, Matt Morris writes affectionately of our love affair with gardens through time. In it, expect to find stories of your uncle and aunty digging spuds or planting kūmara in the back garden, rather than details of the wealthy real estate developer and her husband quaffing cocktails on their mansion’s manicured lawn. Morris draws from wide-ranging archival and published sources, as well as interviews. The result is a fine-grained and touching history of our relationship with gardens. [Read more…]

A Magnifying Glass to Enormity

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Helen Watson White

Searching for Charlie: In pursuit of the real Charles Upham VC & Bar by Tom Scott (Upstart Press, 2020) 368pp, $49.99

I have to confess that I wanted to review Searching for Charlie not because of its subject—a war hero both famous and infamous for his unstoppable aggression—but because of its author, Tom Scott, a cartoonist and columnist both famous and infamous for his satirical zeal.

Scott’s urge to make satire is equalled only by his enthusiasm for storytelling. At the end of his engaging and agonising study of his own family life, Drawn Out: A seriously funny memoir, he acknowledges: ‘I am indebted to a legion of editors on the New Zealand Listener, the Evening Post, the Auckland Star and the Dominion Post for giving me the freedom to leave my office desk in pursuit of stories I thought worth telling.’ The Upham story is one of those, and in March 2019 Scott left the Dominion Post altogether to pursue it. The search for ‘the real Charles Upham’, like his pursuit of Sir Edmund Hillary (for a TV series, a book and a documentary), involved extensive travel in New Zealand and overseas. [Read more…]