Landfall Review Online

Equally Valid Ways of Knowing

September 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Emma Gattey

The Reed Warbler by Ian Wedde (Victoria University Press, 2020), 624 pp., $35

Beyond the daunting double whammy of The Reed Warbler’s intricate introductory family tree and the opening words of the blurb (‘Pregnant after rape …’), Ian Wedde breathes life into seven generations, their complex inter-relationships, and individual lives, observations and desires. Early on he gives a sympathetic nod to readers after slinging a welter of names our way following a family reunion, acknowledging the vertigo induced by complex, tangled family histories. Beth, the ‘girl-swot’ family historian, isn’t sick from her cousin Frank’s driving through the Kaitīeke Valley, but ‘rather felt a bit sick from the winding around of names’. Yet even with a complex opening, from this point onward there is no more motion sickness. The Reed Warbler is a finely crafted triptych of a novel: three parts composed of interwoven stitches in time. [Read more…]

Confidently His Own

August 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Vincent O’Sullivan

What Sort of Man by Breton Dukes (Victoria University Press, 2020), 239pp., $30

Eight of the nine stories in Breton Dukes’ new collection ‘confront’ their readers with the frank demand of a title that could easily slip to an aggressive question: ‘What sort of man?’ You cannot help but think of Primo Levi’s similar question with his memoir, If This is a Man, or Sarah Helm’s history of Ravensbrück camp, If This is a Woman. It is not a title that is meant mildly to intrigue you. You know you are about to be challenged in various ways. You are going to be as far from Frank Sargeson’s coded male world, or Barry Crump’s blokish romps, or admirable mature behaviour, as New Zealand writing has so far gone. For the most part, these stories are rough, brutal, mean as pigshit, yet written with an artistic finesse that is, in itself, a celebration. Dukes’ fictional world, at first so starkly black and white, breaks down to just how complex that simplicity may be when attended to so finely. He takes us into the intricacies of male competitiveness, its rare promptings to what elsewhere might be taken for tenderness, the ineptness of a certain kind of man to draw much from the women he relates to, or to absorb the errors of his past. A world with few winners, with multiple losers. [Read more…]

The Air Up Here

August 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Sally Blundell

High Wire by Lloyd Jones and Euan Macleod (Massey University Press, 2020), 96pp., $45

The air up here is clear. High above the clamour of the city and the rush and roar of the ocean, above the islands, the headlands and the setting sun, a solitary figure slouches towards Australia on the single drawn line of a high-wire cable.

In James Marsh’s 2008 documentary Man on Wire, a New York bystander, anchored to the footpath by a heavy coat and bags of shopping, wept as she watched the impossibly frail figure of French high-wire artist Philippe Petit walk, kneel and wheel on a cable drawn 411 metres above ground between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. [Read more…]

Of Oceans and Oilfields

August 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Erik Kennedy

Always Song in the Water by Gregory O’Brien (Auckland University Press, 2019), 264pp., $45; Mary Shelley Makes a Monster by Octavia Cade (Aqueduct Press, 2019), 88pp., US$12; A Year of Misreading the Wildcats by Orchid Tierney (The Operating System, 2019), 108pp., US$24

A book about New Zealand’s remoteness from the rest of the world is timely right now. The fact that it has nothing to do with pandemics or politics is a blessed relief. Gregory O’Brien’s Always Song in the Water is an artist’s journal of dozens of sparkling essaylets, poems and artworks that together advance the thesis that Aotearoa New Zealand is first and foremost a Pacific nation. Based around two trips that O’Brien took to some of the farther-flung outposts of New Zealand’s territory—a road trip in Northland and a sea voyage to the Kermadecs—the book argues for an ‘archipelagic concept’ of nationhood. Only one-seventeenth of New Zealand is dry land, if you take into account its exclusive economic zone, and O’Brien makes a strong case that it is the sea that gives coherence to our lives and art. [Read more…]

A Tool of Hope

August 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Jessica Thompson Carr

Protest Tautohetohe: Objects of resistance, persistence and defiance by Stephanie Gibson, Matariki Williams and Puawai Cairns (Te Papa Press, 2019), 416 pp., $70

The survival of the objects in these pages has depended on many factors—some exist because of their careful owners, others through luck. – Preface

Growing up, I didn’t have much access to my Māori taonga. Most of the treasures of our whānau were either lost or had disintegrated in the bush, or are now kept in a museum. We learned what we could, and our connection was limited to our mum returning from trips up north with Ngāpuhi T-shirts and bumper stickers. Those were my taonga. [Read more…]