Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

A Magnifying Glass to Enormity

Leave a Comment

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…]

Flaxroots Theatre Made By All 

1 Comment

David Eggleton 

Bus Stops on the Moon: Red Mole days 1974–1980 by Martin Edmond (Otago University Press, 2020), 274pp, $39.95

On the book’s cover they have the stance of a rock band; they bristle like hip young gunslingers tuned into the New Wave zeitgeist. They are the Red Mole theatre troupe, the magnificent inner core of seven, photographed in black and white at Coney Island, New York, during an 18-month sojourn performing overseas towards the end of the 1970s. In Bus Stops on the Moon, Martin Edmond remembers, celebrates and eulogises a generation, an era, a mood—and in the main chronicles a few hectic years, the glory days, to tell us what it was like to be part of New Zealand’s foremost avant-garde theatre group that was itself the product of a particular historic moment. [Read more…]

The Fragility of Being

Leave a Comment

Catherine Robertson

The Strength of Eggshells by Kirsty Powell (Cloud Ink Press, 2019), 320pp. $29.99; Sprigs by Brannavan Gnanalingam (Lawrence & Gibson, 2020), 438pp, $30

The thread that binds these two novels is one of gender expectations within New Zealand society, and the dark side of conforming to the narrowest definitions of the roles of ‘man’ and ‘woman’. Both novels show that going against these expectations is never easy because they are most often enforced by peers, friends and family. It is one thing to be rejected by a wider faceless society, and quite another to be shunned by those you love and look up to. [Read more…]

Garden of Unearthly Delights

Leave a Comment

Tim Jones

Monsters in the Garden: An anthology of Aotearoa New Zealand science fiction and fantasy, edited by Elizabeth Knox and David Larsen (Victoria University Press, 2020), 607pp, $35

Editing anthologies is hard work. Editing speculative anthologies—those covering some combination of science fiction, fantasy, horror and related genres—is even harder work. Having co-edited two anthologies of speculative poetry, I’ve bumped up against the type of decisions that have to be taken both before the project starts and as it develops. What genres, what types of work, do and don’t qualify for inclusion? Do we take a narrow definition of the field or a wide one? Do we include only published work, only original work, or a mixture? [Read more…]

A Beautiful World Has Gone 

Leave a Comment

Robert McLean

Letters of Denis Glover, selected and edited by Sarah Shieff(Otago University Press, 2020), 800pp, $79.95

Letters are perhaps the least likely genre to produce good enduring writing. Unlike writers’ diaries, that most self-conscious genre so memorably manipulated by a Pepys or a Woolf, letters, especially those written in long-hand, are transactional, at once spontaneous and habitual, and seldom submitted to revision. They are the medium most likely to induce regret in the writer and discomfort in the reader given that they often seem to induce writers to show off and parade themselves at their unbuttoned worst, such as the epistolary bawdiness, hokum and spleen of T.S. Eliot or Phillip Larkin addressing their pet-named pals. But for readers who manage to find writers’ lives interesting, collections of letters are frequently read as a substitute for an unwritten autobiography, albeit one that is even less reliable than the latter’s self-curated disclosures, given the myriad manners literary letterists assume for their various recipients. [Read more…]