David Herkt
Outliers: Eight Antipodean tales by Michael Jackson (Ugly Hill Press, 2025), 175pp, $40
In Outliers: Eight Antipodean tales, Michael Jackson presents the reader with enigmas and mysteries. Often these stories trace the part-biography of an individual, where decisions and circumstances are played out over time. The lines of causality are deliberately left shadowy or unrevealed. Some are group portraits, where the interplay between several people can be a catalyst for something unsuspected or an explosive event.
A ‘tale’ is defined as an apparently simple short narrative, often recounting a strange occurrence, focusing on something or someone exotic, marvellous or even supernatural—especially one that might be invented or difficult to believe. Jackson straddles these lines. Yet, whatever the stories in Outliers are, they are not simple. As the book’s deliberately archaic title indicates, they are all worlds in miniature, out on the edge, where origins will never be entirely revealed and ends are left open. Doubles and doppelgängers proliferate.
He writes in the book’s preface:
Although there is no evidence human destinies are influenced by the relative position of celestial bodies, I am not averse to drawing on myth to plumb the depths of a human life or provide a frame for storytelling … Although the eight stories in this book are situated in the Antipodes, I am mindful of the fact that in ancient geomythology, antipodean referred to people and places at the far side of the known world who walked with their feet facing backward. Accordingly, antipodean may be construed as a metaphor for being estranged by temperament or accident from mainstream society.
The collection’s existential discomfort is frequently concealed or embodied in the stuff of ordinary life, whether it is an acquaintanceship with a singular individual, an affair, a period of youthful confusion or the years of a friendship. The book roves back and forth between New Zealand and Europe, although it is largely centred on New Zealand as its point of origin.
Stylistically, Outliers also embodies a whole history of the New Zealand short story. ‘The Confidence Man’, the first in the book, shows this clearly. It would not be out of place in one of the early editions of The Oxford Book of New Zealand Short Stories, or indeed in the pages of a mid-1960s Landfall. ‘The Confidence Man’ also neatly foreshadows the themes of Outliers, particularly how the forces between individuals and their setting—in time, place and history—can coalesce. It is worthwhile examining in some detail.
The story’s narrator completes his university studies but has no idea of his future. He is a solitary young man who describes trying his hand at writing while working as a ‘seagull’ at the wharves and spending time in pubs. Eventually, his writing seems fruitless.
Even so, he becomes obsessed with a neglected book of fiction, Invisible Ink by Frank Carrothers, but can find little information on the author. He determines to write an introduction to the book towards an eventual reissue; the narrator is, in essence, a writer manqué, and the theme of the Double makes its first appearance.
With some effort, he finally tracks down Carrothers and meets him in a pub in Puhoi. He is ‘florid-faced and thick-set’ and ‘wearing jandals and shorts, and a seaman’s jersey with its sleeves rolled up’. Carrothers is evasive when it comes to his book. He tells an anecdote, ostensibly concerning another man’s cruel financial exploitation of the people of a Pacific island with a confidence trick, and the narrator suspects this man could be Frank himself.
Now drunk, the narrator takes up Frank’s invitation to stay in the caravan on his property overnight. On waking, he discovers that he is in a household with Frank and Leonora, a much younger woman with a heavily scarred face, and her three-year-old son, Oliver, who cannot speak. Leonora goes into the city once a week to sing at a night club, the Mocambo, with her face heavily made up to hide her scars, often not returning until the morning. For the next few months, they all settle into a shared life in the rundown house on the estuary of the Wade River, among mangroves and pōhutukawa.
This is apparently the bucolic life of Frank Sargeson’s classic short story ‘The Hole That Dug’ (1964) before its metaphysical depths yawn open. The narrator in ‘The Confidence Man’ and the character Frank are refracted versions of each other, following forking paths.
The narrator plays with and reads to Ollie and drinks with Frank, rowing across the river for supplies. Then one night, in a violent storm, he seeks refuge in the house, but standing outside on the veranda he hears an argument inside, in which Leonora’s pleadings are the only words that are clear: ‘Why … why … why? Why don’t you tell me … why?’ she begs. Frank’s replies are inaudible.
After the storm passes, this incident focuses the narrator’s sense of isolation and his feeling of oppressive claustrophobia. He feels forced to flee this small world, returning three days later to collect his possessions. Frank is alone in the house. He describes how, in the narrator’s absence, Leonora made an unsuccessful attempt to drown both herself and Ollie in the estuary, before they were rescued and taken to Leonora’s sister’s home. Frank then makes accusations about the narrator’s non-existent sexual misconduct with Leonora.
Resuming his wandering life, the narrator works as a steward on the Interisland ferry, the Maori, on its trips between Wellington and Lyttelton. He is surrounded by the gay men who often perform that service, a situation only further alienating him. The final section of the story relates how the narrator eventually locates Frank’s sister, who informs him of some of the family’s background, but whether these facts explain anything is debatable.
‘The Confidence Man’ is a succinct example of storytelling and a fine introduction to the collection. It can be reread with profit, especially as it remains an elusive but generative fragment, allowing a glimpse but never the solution to the labyrinth of the dark past and its relationship to the future, as observed through a fractured personality. ‘Our fates are penned in invisible ink,’ Jackson writes in the story’s conclusion. ‘We cannot read them. It is only after the fact that we become aware of the hidden watermarks imprinted in the paper on which the contours of our lives have been pencilled in.’
In an online interview conducted by NZ Booklovers, Jackson explained Outliers as involving:
the mysterious relationship between who we start out as and who we become … I have long been preoccupied with the philosophical question of whether we are free to lead the lives we imagine for ourselves, or are constrained by the families and countries we grow up in, the legacies that weigh us down, and the wounds we carry.
Boston-based and an emeritus professor of world religions at Harvard Divinity School, Michael Jackson, now in his eighties, has more than 35 books to his name, eight of which are poetry. Formerly an anthropologist, his fieldwork has involved the Kuranko people in Sierra Leone, the Warlpiri of Australia’s Northern Territory and the Kuku Yalangi of Cape York, Queensland. He has taught in New Zealand, Australia, Denmark and the USA. As a writer of autobiographies and autobiographical fragments, his experience on academic field trips frequently merges with his own personal perceptions and considerations, each reflecting upon the other.
The distinctions between formal academic study and philosophical and creative writing are blurred throughout Jackson’s work. He seems intensely aware of what the physicist Werner Heisenberg refers to as the ‘Observer Effect’, where the act of measuring inherently disturbs the very property being measured, because measuring requires interaction.
Outliers is a series of observations that cluster around that point. ‘The Gardener’ is the story of a charismatic young man, Gene, and his rivalry with the narrator. As a student at Auckland University, he seems charismatic, romantically enviable and au fait with the world, living in his mother’s house with its huge garden in Mount Eden. Yet Gene explains to the narrator that he feels he ‘has been on stage’ all his life.
His girlfriend, Melanie, secretly pregnant, takes a sheep abortifacient in the garden and dies. Gene then disappears, only to surface in a letter from Paris. The narrator, on his way to begin studies in Cambridge, agrees to meet him there. ‘If the theme of the double and of duplicity had enthralled me in the past,’ he writes in his Spirax notebook, ‘it now presented itself in hallucinatory clarity.’
It is a relationship of rivalry and inadequacy on both sides, but finally, after coming a complete circle, it ends where it had begun, in the same house in Mount Eden, now surrounded by a huge overgrown garden. Gene has suffered a crippling injury in a car crash. Neither of the men is the same, and the scars, both psychic and physical, remain. Each man reveals or mirrors the other.
‘The Gardener’ reaffirms the pattern of the first story in the book—age, doubles, reflections, accidents and scars—which are further examined as if Jackson is turning this pattern around to observe it from all angles. ‘Why should we think of our lives as linear or trace our genealogies with lines of descent,’ he asks in ‘The Inventor’, ‘rather than acknowledge our capacity to choose our own forebears and influences, and determine our own birthright?’ This argument between free will and determinism is the basis of many decisions in Outliers.
‘The Survivor’ further condenses Jackson’s basic theme. Noah survives a climbing accident through the unexpected and selfless act of his brother, Jake, with whom he has always had a competitive relationship. Jake shelters Noah with his own body during a fierce storm and freezes to death. Surviving, Noah establishes a temporary relationship with a woman, Joanne. He eventually tells her about Jake. ‘Some debts we can never repay,’ she responds. ‘But what about the debts we owe ourselves? What is the point of living for others if we forfeit our own lives.’ After this conversation, Noah suddenly stops seeing Joanne, for no apparent reason. Then he meets an uncanny, shambling, shabby figure on a shadowed street at night.
‘I see you,’ the stranger says.
‘Do I know you?’ Noah asks.
‘I’m watching you.’
Each of us, Jackson seems to say, has a sinister, uncanny double, one who lives our lives as a surrogate: our brother, our witness—the dying and reviving God from Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, who watches and mirrors our struggles, knows, judges and nurtures us, yet travels a divergent path and declines as we flourish. It was a subject that interested Sigmund Freud. In his 1919 essay ‘The Uncanny’, he describes visiting the bathroom in a train when he suddenly catches sight of a stranger behind him and ‘thoroughly disliked his appearance’, only to realise it was his own reflection.
For Freud, this failure of recognition occurs because we are frightened of these dark doubles, and ‘our dislike of them was a vestigial trace of the archaic reaction which feels the double to be something uncanny’.
The book’s concluding story, ‘The Bystander’, has the most resemblance to Jackson’s own life and neatly brackets the first story. Again, there is the uncanny double, Michael Keiran MacGowan, who reminds the narrator of ‘Samuel Beckett’s Malone, Moran, and Molloy’. While MacGowan and the narrator had briefly flatted together, they had little in common, ‘except there are individuals who shadow you through your life’.
There is a meeting in Wellington that takes them hitchhiking, but they are forced to stop in Hamilton, MacGowan’s hometown, where his father tells a story about a crashed NAC aircraft and how he had led the first search party to the scene but had let others take the credit. Jackson’s essential theme begins to reveal itself again.
The narrator leaves New Zealand, returning as a well-respected academic on a lecture tour, only to meet MacGowan again, now with ‘all the decrepitude of the old’. He is also someone whose mind is consumed by his past, ‘who had never given birth to himself, someone to whom life simply happened … nothing added up or made much sense’.
Then, while giving a lecture, he sees MacGowan in the back of the university theatre. The narrator does not speak to him, and the story ends with the question:
What is it that decides the difference between one life and another when, as far as one can tell, they begin in the same place, at the same time, and in identical circumstances?
Jackson’s short stories contain much more than initially appears. They concern knots in time, and lives that need to be considered and unravelled. Ostensibly very simple, they are intricate constructions. They are often eerie and accidents are seldom random. Jackson attempts to turn light on shadows. Outliers is a book both sacred and profane. It contains worlds and their reflections, seen both in a glass darkly and in full Antipodean light.
DAVID HERKT is a poet, widely published journalist, book reviewer and writer of short fiction. He resided in Australia for 20 years and was educated at the University of Melbourne. Formerly working in television, his documentaries have received awards for ‘Best Factual Series’ and ‘Best Children’s Television’ at the New Zealand Film and Television Awards. He now lives in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.
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