Landfall Review Online

Craig Cliff

Drongo by Ian Richards (Atuanui Press, 2019), 384 pp., $38

It’s 1977. Andy Ingle has finished at Palmerston North Boys’ High School and wants to be a writer. With his trusty portable typewriter, Half-Arse, and his girlfriend Chloe, Andy travels to the outskirts of Masterton to visit a school friend, Phillip, who’s living with his dad. After a failed attempt to lose his virginity, Andy absconds with a bankteller, Penny, who’s heading to Wellington. After another near-miss at losing his virginity (‘my sex life was turning out to be a lot more complicated than I’d planned’), Andy ghosts Penny and takes the ferry south by himself. The pattern holds for the rest of the novel: Andy latches onto someone, enters their world, stumbles at a sexual hurdle and then lights out for the next territory.  [Read more…]

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…]

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…]