Three Things

A Daring Book: Three Reasons To Read The Mermaid Boy

4/29/2015

John Summers, author of The Mermaid Boy.

John Summers’ new book is an exciting and innovative work. It combines the frisson of true story with the shape and persuasive power of short fiction.

I'll be helping to launch The Mermaid Boy on 7 May at Unity Books (6pm). In the meantime, here are just three reasons to read this important new book.

Laughing at Real Life
The best books persuade us on many levels. It’s often the humour of The Mermaid Boy that gets me first. But the laughter comes from unexpected places.

In ‘Real Life’ a bunch of male students set up in a grotty flat. But it’s not in the usual ‘student ghettoes’. This flat is across town in a poor and dangerous street. And the people they meet are not ‘playing at real life’, but trapped there. They're damaged and eccentric strugglers. So the comedy comes from trying to reach and understand them, to reconcile their vastly different outlooks on the world.

The prime difficulty is the landlady, and her ideas about what's reasonable for tenants to expect. Insulation might be reasonable in some parts of town, but not this one.

'She repeated the word syllable by syllable. ‘In-su-la-tion, in-su-la-tion. Why, I never heard of such a thing,’ she said. ‘Insulation?’
‘Like a Pink Batt,’ I said.
Her eyes widened, her voice rose. ‘A pink what? Oh, my goodness no.’
It was as if I had said something like ‘French letter’.'

Piercing a myth about manual work
The Mermaid Boy also pierces an old tendency of New Zealand writing to romanticise manual work. Growing up as an arts student in Christchurch, this young man has the opportunity to work for the top employer in the area, the Warehouse, or find equally mundane alternatives.

Punching the clock on a series of boring jobs in factories and workshops, lugging pallets and stapling mattresses, he tells himself he's 'collecting experience’ for a Great New Zealand Novel. But eventually he's confronted with the holes in this fantasy:

'What I was really collecting were memories of mundane work and of sitting lonely in smoko rooms. I was too shy to start conversations with my co-workers, and never learnt much about them beyond how they went about their jobs. Only the blowhards and the loudmouths made their stories known to me, and then they already sounded like bad fiction.'

On a Slow Boat to China
John Summers has published widely as a travel writer. He also writes for the adventure website Up Country. At first, the central character seems to share this interest in adventure, especially overseas. In The Mermaid Boy we’re taken twice to China, and once to Japan. We also visit Australia, Burma, and many small New Zealand towns, via a hitchhiker’s thumb.

But this is far from some self-aggrandising yarn of world conquest. In fact, probing questions are asked about the value and meaning of travel.

One of the most intriguing stories takes place on a slow boat to China; not in the unknown, but still getting there. Trapping the reader in this liminal space for the entire story, this clever structural technique tests our expectations about what travel stories are, and what their characters do.

Read more about the book here. Launch details below.

Completely in charge: Philip Temple’s Beak of the Moon

10/30/2014

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1. What you don’t know about Nestor notabilis. Philip Temple opens the 1981 edition of his kea classic, Beak of the Moon, with acknowledgments of the regular sort—a few family members, a few friends and experts—and then there’s this:

'Though some readers may consider keas a figment of my imagination, New Zealanders who have lost socks or had their tents demolished know only too well that they are real mountain parrots (Nestor notabilis) and are completely in charge of the sub-alpine regions of the Southern Alps.'

In one way, it’s simply a helpful pointer for Temple’s readers from abroad. But it’s also a hint of how this absorbing book will work. Local readers like me might think we know something of these real birds and alpine places. We’ve tramped there, been harassed at those campsites. We know what keas are like.

But after only a few pages of life through the eyes of Strongbeak, the kea protagonist, we realise there’s a vast world of kea existence we know nothing about: what their myths are, what breakfast is called (First Beak), how their friendships work. In fact, their whole experience. The perspective that Temple offers—his version of kea life—is detailed and deep, and his kea psychology works, yet it’s mostly made up. These characters, their thoughts and talk, are figments of his imagination.

'impressed by all this craft, I was also simply gripped by the story'

The fact that we’re convinced is a clever trick of point of view, of fiction itself, one that works cumulatively as we read the book, and one that always strikes me in well-crafted novels of this anthropomorphic sort. Harlic: The Story of a Fur Seal Cub, for example, White Fang, Watership Down. Typically young animals come of age at the same moment their entire culture comes under threat. They must leave home to learn how to survive, then return with new knowledge of how to adapt.

Classic hero’s journey stuff, and particularly appealing to young readers on the cusp of similar thresholds and, arguably, more receptive to the genre’s powerful empathic connect. And all a trick of story, of course: we can’t know whether these animals really think the way these characters do in these books, but forget to care about the question anyway, because point of view is so seductive, and because the close sharing of someone else’s adventure always grips us.

2. A Local Craft. Beak of the Moon displays many of these techniques, adapted to the local environment. Like Watership Down, it begins on a multiply transitional point. Strongbeak, the protagonist kea, must come of age and accept his destiny as a leader at the same moment that a new species arrives and threatens to wipe out kea—or change their lives completely, potentially altering their morality in the process. The new species is a tall ‘longleg’ bird that brings clearing fires and pasture in its wake. Pākehā human settlers, in other words, but never called that in this book, because that’s not kea language. A similarly unprecedented species, woolly, four-legged, and pink-faced, then grazes everything, and there’s not enough kea food to go round, which in turn creates chinks in the authority of the existing ‘boss’ kea.

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After the Cold Flood of Danger: Elizabeth Knox on Wake

7/20/2014

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(Warning: spoilers.)

Wake is that rich sort of novel that keeps changing and enlarging without ever losing its urgent narrative pull. It begins with horror—Elizabeth Knox practising what she has called effects that inspire fear—as the inciting calamity exerts its grip on Kahukura and the baffled survivors.

As the characters become acquainted with the invisible monster that lives among them, feeding on their sadness and shame, the novel becomes much larger. Preying on their vulnerabilities, the monster forces its victims to become violent and self-harming and unsociable. In this deadly pattern of influence, it enlarges the moral capacities of the story, opening a conversation about grief and hurt and their capacity to unmoor us from our established personalities and ways of behaving.

But Knox has stressed, in her illuminating essay on the writing of Wake, that the monster and its actions are not simply allegorical. It’s a real monster; what interests her is the response of the characters to its disastrous visit.

I found this an intriguing challenge for a writer: giving shape to an invisible force in a novel. The monster cannot be seen, yet its presence is made awfully palpable. To Sam it manifests as a ‘wind’, a tower ‘made up of everything it had destroyed—deaths—moments of miserable dying.’ Later we see it playing with Warren in the last moments of his life, ‘passing back and forth through Warren and pushing him, like a cat bored and disgusted by a half-dead mouse.’

These combined effects had me gripped by this novel and fascinated by its craft. I asked Knox three questions how it was put together.

LP: You’ve said that writers of non-realist fiction must ensure their world-building is ‘logical, consequential and vivid.’ In other words, it might be a fantastical world, but it must feel completely real and believable. In a novel like Wake, where there are so many new concepts for readers to grasp—the No-Go and its workings, the monster that can’t be seen, and the mysterious ‘man in black’—how do you make sure that those elements of the world are adequately explained without overpowering the story?

EK: What I wanted to do was have inventions that gradually reveal how they work in relation to one another: the madness to the monster, the monster to Myr, doing all he can, quarantining the monster in the No-Go, which is both quarantine and trap. Then there's Sam, a trap inside a trap. These were all devices, and they had to be logical, plausible, metaphorically rich, but what I was most interested in were the conditions of existence all this invention would light up and throw into high relief: the condition of being horrified and helpless, being left to cope, having to be the responsible one in difficult circumstances.

And Sam's alienation, the tormenting difference in the conditions of her existence. Sam is like anyone whose life was ever shaped by a secret imposed on them, a secret of scarcely describable oddity. For instance, anyone with a family that requires lots of explaining, and imagination on the part of the person listening to the explanation, like the hearing child of deaf parents. I mean, what is that like?

"If you throw in monsters, mayhem, force fields and aliens
then there's a danger ..."

The challenge for me in using all these inventions is that readers used to horror and science fiction are also often accustomed to zipping along in the slick channel of those genre's tropes, as they understand them. And the reader of literary fiction is used to highly literate texts appearing in the right clothes for the occasion. If you throw in monsters, mayhem, force fields and aliens then there's a danger the reader of literary fiction will think they're reading something a little uncouth, unpolished, or simply inappropriate.

So the balance of too much to too little information for the audience isn't a very helpful way of thinking about the task, because the needs of any audience of a hybrid or interstitial work like Wake are going to vary hugely. What I had to think of were the needs of the work. And I have a few aesthetic (I guess) guidelines. I think that if the invention is largely fresh and original, the fun of figuring out how things work will keep all readers of appetite and curiosity reading. Then again, if a trope or myth I choose to use has a few useful readymades to it, I don't mind that either – so long as that's only part of the story. So the desert island device of the No-Go is recognisable as an example of what get called "bubble" stories (the best and purest of which is the German film Die Wand).

But my personal tic with inventions in speculative fiction – mine, not other people's – is that I like things that seem to be different elements to turn out to be related. Partly because of my feelings about probability. What are the chances that your mass-insanity, entropic barrier, man in black, and stagey "split" girl aren't causally related, and in the same place because there's a crisis for which someone has prepared? And how probable is it that a sentient being made of soil, and a dream-haunted bit of territory, aren't somehow related? It is a kind of tidy-mindedness in me, but it's mostly my easily offended sense of probability. I like my inventions to be as probable as possible; so, as consistent as possible in their relation to each other and the novel's world.

And the novel having a strong sense of a world is the last bit of my balancing act. I love strong observation in writing (when that's not all it does – you know, be wonderfully observed but not add up to much!). I'm interested, or possibly obsessed, by phenomena, weather, plants, machines, landscape and the uses of the land, the way stuff works and people behave. But I'm not putting my real details into place with tweezers, like a skilled sushi chef with a garnish. My invention is marinaded in the real, the real has soaked in, till each thing imparts flavour to the other.

LP: A descent into moral barbarism among survivors tends to be a cliche of stories involving catastrophe. Characters quickly become selfish and violent; they shoot and stab and sometimes even eat each other. In Wake you appear to deliberately challenge those expectations, showing instead ‘how good, and tender, and civilised, the survivors were, despite the accepted wisdom about mobs, and riots, and the dissolution of the social contract that sets in whenever disaster strikes.’ Did this criticism come out of a frustration with the cliches of such fiction, or a determination to honour, as you’ve written in your essay, the courage and dignity that people can show when ‘tough shit’ strikes?

EK: There's a book by Rebecca Solnit called A Paradise Built in Hell, which gives accounts of heroic helping and cooperation, altruism and community-mindedness, both short term and sustained, in various historic catastrophes, from the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 to Hurricane Katrina. It talks about effort and trouble taken and the deep satisfaction and sense of purpose reported by the people who rolled up their sleeves and got stuck in. People who got to learn what a common purpose is, and how meaningful it can be. It’s a book that's a remedy to the social Darwinism that – completely unexamined – informs the world view of everyone who approves of where we are now with the poverty gap and disenfranchisement of the poor. People who think that most people are naturally selfish and self-interested, so shrug if they are, or society is.

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Cataracts of Blood or Rust: 3 questions for Carl Shuker

10/29/2013

Carl Shuker is the daring writer of The Method Actors, The Lazy Boys, Three Novellas for a Novel, and now Anti Lebanon. I find his fiction fearless, exciting, and never the same.

His new book is the gripping story of a Lebanese Christian pushed into crisis by a Hezbollah insurgency. It takes risks in terms of genre, using aspects of vampire literature to transform a novel that’s already dealing with war and religio-political nightmare. This is fiction that won’t be constrained by old ideas about borders, a point made by Pip Adam in an illuminating review here.

Shuker is currently in Wellington as the writer in residence at Victoria University. I took the chance to ask him three questions about this book.

LP: For me the first eruption of vampire activity in Anti Lebanon came as a shock—I swore out loud! But it’s not as if Anti Lebanon suddenly becomes a simplistic orgy of vampire violence and torment. It seems you’re more interested in using aspects of that genre to explore “pyr”, a violence of attitude that rises from old and complicated sources. What influenced your foray into that genre, and did you always intend to incorporate aspects of vampire literature, or did that grow out of the developing story?

CS: I initially had a book in mind that was partly speculative. I went as far as inventing alternative and parallel organisations to those that really existed in the civil war—new militias, political parties, personalities, even religions. I wrote a piece I still like about an Armenian militia that insisted on fighting unarmed—they simply marched against their foes over the bodies of the dead, embarrassing their enemies into ceasefire. But as a whole it lacked depth and urgency and wasn’t working, and as I explored Leon I naturally came around to returning my militias and sects back to the reality we know, and then the novel began to feel dangerous and exciting. Until it died again, after about fifty pages of work. The book and the material wanted something that mere reality couldn’t furnish.

It was around then I realised an old teenage ambition of mine—to write a monster novel, particularly one with vampires—had found its moment. What could be more scary or appropriate in the ruins and Ottoman villas of east Beirut, alongside the rebuilt city centre full of glittering marble and tile, the flowers of the manicured gardens chosen for the specific combination of their scents, than a Christian vampire in mourning roaming the emptied streets? We don’t believe in vampires do we? Imagine your neighbours don’t believe in your god—so, by extension, you—and then invade your area. It seemed perfect.

LP: Leon’s rage seems to be partly sourced in his despair over the waste and misuse of a key Lebanon resource—water—as symbolised most powerfully in the poisoning of the Anti Lebanon aquifer. For me this despair resonated strongly with concerns about water elsewhere in the world, especially here in New Zealand. Was that part of your decision to set this story in Lebanon—the universality of those concerns about water?

CS: It’s everywhere we look, isn’t it. It grew out of the material, the way these things should. I went on research to Lebanon, Syria and Israel with water and blood in mind, but I wasn’t prepared for the state of the Beirut river, the Jordan, or the Dead Sea. The more you read in the history of the Lebanon, the more you understand it as an incredibly singular phenomenon in the area. The richness of its natural resources, compared with Syria and Israel as they are currently drawn, is an astonishment. The cedars, the rivers, the mountains, plains and sea. And it is religion that has done its damndest to ruin these things.... (please click Read More)

Tough, Amy Head

6/21/2013

It was an honour to launch Amy Head’s new book of short stories, Tough, last night. You can read the launch speech here. I found this book deeply intriguing, and there were lots of thoughts I couldn’t cover in the speech. Here are three of them.

1.   Do you think birds are sexy? One of the stories I didn’t have time to mention was ‘Duck Pluck’. It features a bizarre competition in a West Coast pub, where contestants skull rum and cokes before speed-plucking dead ducks. A rather exotic American visitor called Raquel agrees to compete, but only on the condition that she can use the feathers for her erotic photography business. The way that she is accommodated by the locals—once she gets her hands dirty, has a bit of fun with them, and forgets her pain for a while—tells you a lot about the Coast that is reimagined in this book.

It’s also just wonderfully funny and weird. Raquel later has second thoughts about using the feathers for sexy photos. She asks a fellow contestant for his opinion.

‘Do you think birds are sexy?’
‘Sexy? Birds? No.’
‘Me either really. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll stuff a pillow.’

2.    That’s a shrub on your face. The distinctive writing style of Tough is difficult to capture by isolating a sentence, but perhaps one example is this description of the sons of Edward Dobson. They’re early Pākehā surveyors, keen to map ‘new’ routes to the gold-fields on the West Coast. Here we see them through Dobson’s eyes: ‘His eldest sons, straight-backed, were drinking their beers through shrubberies of beard.’ Shrubberies of beard! What a perfect image. It’s funny to picture those early Pākehā with mānuka and Prickly Spaniard growing all over their faces.

It’s also typically muscular in wrestling together disparate imagery of ramrod ‘pioneer’ characters and the landscape they’re attempting to subdue. Of course, the irony is that one of those sons will later be murdered in the bush, his surveying gear buried along with his body in a shallow grave. In Tough, the bush often has the last laugh.

3.    Tough Ironies. There’s a terribly moving moment in the last story, ‘Visitors’, when a man falls in a modern-day mining accident and is choppered to hospital. From the rescue helicopter there is an 'amazing view' of the mine where he works, but of course he’s unconscious and strapped to a spinal board on the floor of the helicopter, so he can’t enjoy it. It’s a typically tough irony. And it's extended by the fact that the man is now paralysed, leaving his wife to care for him and their young son, without compo for the accident because alcohol was involved.

It’s also a story that reflects back powerfully on the whole collection, because in that view from the helicopter, it’s as if we're looking back on all the frontier endeavour that’s been attempted so valiantly on this Coast. The technology of mining has improved out of sight since those first days with the pick and goldpan—their equipment is now so sophisticated that they listen to it with stethoscopes—but really nothing has changed: random accident still strikes down the average guy, and when that happens, there is the same need for the loved ones who are affected to grit their teeth and get on with it. In these stories, Amy shows how the toughness of such characters comes through in their willingness to remain open to the world's colour and humour despite such challenges.

Learning the craft, live on stage

5/22/2013

In June twelve brave writers are workshopping their poetry, fiction, and scripts live on stage. The fiction writers are (l to r) Rachel Kerr, Emma Martin, Matthew Bialostocki, and Kerry Donovan Brown. It’s a stimulating format, they’re innovative writers, and I can’t wait to see how they respond. As background, I’ve been reading some books on craft. Here are three things that have interested me.

1. The Nail that became a Spike: Famously, as a child Stephen King had a nail above his bed. On this he impaled rejection letters. Over the years they mounted up, and a longer spike replaced the nail. Still he kept writing, kept improving. Recounted in On Writing, the story of his dedication through these early years is an inspiration.

But he shares some of the credit for his later success with his wife, the novelist Tabitha King. It was she who pulled the experimental draft of Carrie, his first novel, from the rubbish bin. Don’t abandon this story, she said, ‘You’ve got something here’. And on the fiction since then she’s had a vital influence as King’s ‘Ideal Reader’, the one who reads his drafts and provides feedback on pacing, character, and so on.

King isn’t a fan of writing workshops—at least, as he experienced them—but clearly he believes in this process of sharing and feedback. Besides the Ideal Reader (capitalised in his memoir, such is her importance), up to eight further readers read the draft novels. They note sags in the story and errors of fact—the characters who tote anachronistic rifles, who shoot “peasants” instead of “pheasants”.

2. The World is a Story Factory: Reading King’s book reveals a young man eager to continually learn the craft, to get better at telling stories. And it’s interesting to note the wide circle of sources for this learning. His brother, who pumped out circulars from their basement. Films. A local-rag editor, who lacerated his apprentice journalism, showing how to cut away every word that wasn’t telling the story. It suggests that committed writers can grab advice from all parts of their worlds.

In a way this reminds me of my architect friend. We flatted together in Wales. He was in his foundation course, and always working on his concepts and drawings, and encouraging others. One night we got talking about competition, I think in relation to sport, which wasn’t really his thing. But the conversation quickly became useful to him. ‘Let’s have a competition,’ he said. ‘Who can make the most ideas in twelve hours. I’m going to try for two hundred. See if you can beat me.’ In the morning we met to compare notes. Of course I’d given up after a couple of writing experiments. Flicking through his sketch book, my friend showed page after page of new sketches. In the end he'd made more than 50. Not quite 200, but at least he’d turned that dull talk about sport into something useful.

3. The learnable craft: Writing is a learnable craft. This is how Chris Galaver puts it in The Exercise Book. This idea has always appealed to me. Writing workshops, advice from more experienced authors, exercise ideas taken from craft books—not every writer will find these tools useful. Some writers will work things out more readily on their own, through solo experimentation and endless private writing and reading. But all of these tools are good ones. They’re all valid. One way or another, everyone has to learn how to get better at what they do.

This makes me think of my brother’s career. He’s a joiner. When we were kids his superior skill with wood and tools was obvious. Now he runs his own business, with Master Joiner status pending. But it wasn’t the gift he showed as a kid that got him there. It was the pre-trade course, apprenticeship, advice from other tradesmen, overseas experience, and years in the local industry that capitalised on that raw talent to make him excellent. It’s a craft he continues to learn.

Of course the most important ingredient in the careers of all these people—King, my architect friend, the joiner—is their endless, committed private energy. The drive that apparently set Anthony Trollope to writing for two and a half hours each morning before work. For Daniel Woodrell, author of The Death of Sweet Mister and Winter’s Bone, this obsession seems to have been a saving one. At age twenty-three he told his father he would become a writer ‘or be a nightmare.’ His father’s reply was characteristically dry. ‘Let’s hope the writing pans out.’

The Exercise Book Live is at Bats Theatre on 11 June (poetry), 12 June (fiction), and 13 June (scripts). 8pm each night.

Christmas in Rarotonga: the John Wright Story, with Paul Thomas

4/3/2013

As Captain Cook and his celebrated Englishmen toured New Zealand, meeting a resistance from our cricketers that surprised many people, I picked up again this story of the gutsy left-hander John Wright. I’m not one of those who like to glorify such bygone heroes over our current cricketers. The game has changed, and our Blackcaps today are as dedicated as any, as the visiting Englishmen discovered. But I do love this book, for these three reasons.

1. The ghost who delivers death: Christmas in Rarotonga is ghost-written by the superbly versatile Paul Thomas, who in his other life writes excellent New Zealand crime. Last year’s Death on Demand was his best so far, darker, leaner, and more subtly funny than the previous Ihaka novels. In that book his rugged protagonist Tito Ihaka has spent five years in exile from Auckland CIB, and it’s as if the writing style has matured with him, trimming excess weight and refining its focus. I recommend it.

2. It’s easy to be a knocker: Thomas also writes an interesting column on sport for the Listener. During New Zealand’s last tour of Australia he dissected the tendency of our media to naively assess the performances of our sportspeople purely on a win (‘heroic!’) and loss (‘appalling!’) basis. As he pointed out, top-level sport, and particularly test cricket, can be more complicated than such analysis might suggest.

Wright echoes this view, gently extending it to the rest of us—the great army of armchair-occupying, Radio Sport - listening experts who’ve never played anything remotely as difficult as test cricket: ‘It’s easy to be a knocker and play it from the sideline but being in the game, you can see how hard a guy has worked and what he’s put himself through … unless you get out and do it yourself, you don’t understand.’

Having tried only once to elevate my cricketing status beyond that of a third-grade opener with a very limited range of shots—the forward prod, the leave, and a rather venturesome off-drive—without any success at all, I find this argument persuasive.

3. We like stubborn: Famously, Wright batted nearly six hours for 55 on debut, resisting Willis, Botham and Co, to help New Zealand defeat England for the first time ever. At the Basin in March my brother and I watched Kane Williamson make the exact same score. Like Wright's innings, this slow act of resistance was vital to his team and to the series. When he came to the crease New Zealand were following on and still 186 runs behind. Stuart Broad was whipping in with a handy breeze and six first-innings wickets behind him. At the other end it was Jimmy Anderson. There was no Graeme Swann (injured), but Monty Panesar was getting encouragement from the rough outside leg. If Williamson went cheaply he'd expose Ross Taylor, who'd fallen to a golden duck in the first innings, and a somewhat out-of-touch Dean Brownlie.

Like a good test No. 3, Williamson dug in. For 233 minutes he cut out the flash shots, maintaining a stubborn defence and concentration that seemed remarkable from the stands. It was an innings for the test match purist: slow, tense, and gripping. And, with the help of some obliging Wellington rain, it saved the game for New Zealand. In turn, securing this draw set the stage for the thrilling third test in Auckland, where New Zealand came so achingly close to winning the series 1-0. It was an important moment in a memorable series, and I felt privileged to witness it. Bravo.

Six by Six: Readings on the Rocky Outcrop

3/6/2013

I was thrilled to chair a Six by Six event at Paekākāriki on 23 March. For the visitors, there were Pip Adam, Kirsten McDougall, and Ashleigh Young, and for the home team, Helen Heath, Lynn Jenner, and Tina Makereti. Preparing for this event was a chance to reread six books I admire. Here are three things that struck me this time round.

1.   The eye that does not blink: Graft
Helen Heath’s Graft brings together—and sometimes wrestles down—disparate elements of our universe into tight poems of considerable power. In one poem the techniques for making a pot of tea are applied to the vast forces of the big bang. Later poems open up families to explore the violence that can hide inside. The ‘Justine’ poems, exploring the predicament of a teenage victim of family violence, are particularly potent in this respect.

They give her a menstrual
pad the size of a surfboard
and tell her to put on her pants
then Michelle takes her arm
and they hobble to the recovery room,
beds curtained off from each other
each one holds a bleeding woman.

As with earlier poems about the death of a mother through cancer, these pieces display an unflinching determination to look closely at the ugly truths they discover, and to never blink. The tight control of form intensifies this effect. Here the mother figure is burned and ground down in the crematorium:

Embalmer’s fluid
ignites easily, smoke rises.
They use
a large tool to grind the bones.

But Graft is not grim. Among my favourite poems are those that show how, fundamentally, great scientific discoverers such as Marie Curie and Newton have shared the simple sense of wonder that we all experience at some point in our lives. Anyone doubting the capacity of poetry to explore difficult aspects of our reality with precision and force should read Graft soon.

2.   The melody of gratitude in Everything We Hoped For
When I first read Pip Adam’s fiction I was struck by the willingness to challenge the reader with rapid, associative sentences, sudden shifts in direction, and forbidding paragraph blocks. The reader was thrown around and resisted. From a piece published in Hue & Cry 3, here is a description of rain falling and turning to ice:

'Douglas didn’t see it coming, couldn’t see it coming because it wasn’t coming, not in the same way as the falling down was coming but he sees it land, feels it land, senses it landing. Puddles form and evaporate and turn to ice in the air and explode BAM.'

This is a daring aspect of a distinctive voice in New Zealand fiction, one that’s always searching for a new and forceful fictional language. But this time, while rereading Everything We Hoped For, what I noticed was the quietly ameliorative note in stories like ‘A Bad Word’—a measure of gratitude and cautious celebration.

In ‘Shopping’ May is negotiating a fractious supermarket trip with her mother, who is an interferer from way back. But May is also remembering her graduation. Her mother was bossy and interfering then as well, fussing over May’s hood and collar, but she was there nevertheless, supporting May and recognising her achievement. And the story ends with a note of gratitude between them: ‘Jane tried to look down at the collar, then touched it. “Thanks,” she said.’

3.   Adding a murmur of my own: Dear Sweet Harry
Dear Sweet Harry explores the unaccountable empathy between a 21st century consciousness and a jangly collection of people from the past—a shackled Houdini tunnelling inside a whale; Mata Hari standing before her firing squad, possibly naked beneath her coat. Why do I feel close to these people? What does that affinity say about me? These are some of the questions this intriguing book asks.

It captures in words and images a feeling I get when I'm exploring history—a feeling I can’t quite articulate myself. It’s a feeling I imagine biographers get. For example, I’m not a Christian, and I don’t think people should be ‘converted’, but I’m attracted to the story and words of the missionary Octavius Hadfield. For some reason I want to speak to his time here in Kāpiti, to endorse it somehow.

The poet of Dear Sweet Harry puts it more elegantly than I can:

'Late at night in my house on the hill, I would also listen
for heartbeats, sighs, and curling things [Houdini] might say softly to himself
for comfort. I might add a murmur of my own.'

The Invisible Rider, Kirsten McDougall (And Other Favourites)

12/27/2012

This is one of my favourite books of this year. It’s expertly written, moving, and funny. Here are three things that interested me about this clever book.

1.   A complete character. The Invisible Rider has an interesting structure—a discontinuous narrative. But what I love most is the central character, Philip Fetch. He’s completely believable--utterly caught in the adult spiderweb of kids, work, wife, unformed hopes, and a troubled heart. Kirsten has said he was developed in a character workshop run by Elizabeth and Sara Knox. I admire the work that’s been put into building this character—it glued me right into the book.

2.   Small but important. One of my favourite chapters is ‘Laughing Stock’. The prospect of a party at a society friend’s house fills Philip with dread. But he trundles along for his wife’s sake, and bravely attempts conversation with a politician and his self-regarding friends. His key anecdote is a flop, and creeping death ensues. But Philip doesn’t slink off. Instead he calls the politician on his selfishness. ‘And you know what? I and my little office will never vote for you and your self-serving little ideas.’

Philip’s journey is peppered with such moments of small bravery. They are sometimes funny but always important, because they reflect Philip’s pragmatic but sound system of ethics. For example, the wonderful moment when he stands up to an abusive football dad:
[The man] looked away from Philip and did a little snort. ‘Fuck-knuckle.’
Philip held his whistle up. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is not a word.’

3.   All I feel is an urge to die sooner. But the episode I most admire is ‘Love’, in which Philip is asked to facilitate the divorce of the local greengrocer, Dennis, who has gradually lost contact with his desired life. Unlike the unscrupled host of the earlier chapter, Philip refuses to opt for what is expedient. Instead, he determines that the divorce mustn’t go ahead, and encourages the couple to talk to each other: ‘You might just need some time alone together. Children are truly wonderful, but they do make your life complicated. And with running the shop as well …’

Ironically, his perspective just depresses Dennis even more: ‘In the face of your relentless optimism, all I feel is an urge to die sooner.’ Finally Philip closes the door on them, shutting himself out of his own office in order to rescue their marriage.

Perhaps this is what makes Philip so easy to identify with. He seems like so many of the well-meaning, harried people we know from real life—exhausted by kids and work and all the things that get too complex, and by the sense of life escaping him, but still making an effort to do things right, and to make life a small bit better for his family and the people he works with.

And Ten More Favourite Books

And here are ten more favourites that I've read this year, but haven't had time to write about.

1. Crime, Ferdinand Von Shirach (2009)
Precise and incisive tales of crimes motivated, mostly, by twisted-up love. ‘The Ethiopian’ is a story to work a jaded heart. For me, Crime is a lot better than the second book, Guilt.

2. White Fang, Jack London (1906)
I was amazed at how effectively Jack London suggests the experience of a wolf. Interestingly, it’s nowhere near as convincing when the human characters speak.

3. Somebody Loves Us All, Damien Wilkins (2010)
My favourite Wilkins book. To me it seems the most accessible and tender so far, but still it includes some daring bits, like that long narrative detour on bikes in the centre of the book. I admire the risks that Wilkins takes—for example, in the most recent collection of short pieces, To Whom It May Concern, and in the novel about Thomas Hardy that's coming out shortly, excerpted in Sport 40 this year.

4. Their Faces Were Shining, Tim Wilson (2010)
5. The Desolation Angel, Tim Wilson (2011)
His narrative ideas are striking—the Rapture, the creep of kikuyu grass, a home-invading angel of desolation—but what I like most is his ability to convey despair subtly, as a by-product of an engaging narrative.

6. The Road, Cormac McCarthy (2006)
I read the print version twice, then listened to the audio book two and a half times more. Boy is it gripping.

7. The Angel’s Cut, Elizabeth Knox (2009)
Welcome back, Xas. I found the last half of this book particularly magnetic.

8. The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane (1895)
Civil war, adventure, and a deep study of a character under stress. Yay. My kind of book.

9. Soon, Charlotte Grimshaw (2012)
Grimshaw is a real expert. In Soon it’s impressive how she intrigues us in the lives of characters who can be very difficult to like. There’s also the matter of a politically inexpedient murder, which I thought was cleverly managed.

10. Rangatira, Paula Morris (2011)
Funny and gripping. I was surprised at the light touch this managed to bring to a big, unusual story about Paratene Te Manu, a rangatira of Ngāti Wai.

American Youth, Phil LaMarche (2007)

12/1/2012

I read this white-knuckle ride for the second time recently. Here are three things that struck me—and one problem that irked me—about this absorbing book.

1.    The Dubious Goodness of Guns: American Youth has gun trouble at its heart. But mostly it avoids the simplicities of a gun crime debate. On the one hand, Ted's proximity to firearms pitches him into a bloody awful crisis. At the same time, guns are the site of precious memories of outdoor times with his father and uncle. One of the tragedies of his life is that their old hunting grounds are being milled for housing developments. For an equally intense take on guns and male inheritance, watch the film version of LaMarche’s story 'In the Tradition of My Family'.

2.    Good authority, bad love: Ted’s predicament is made worse by his mother’s insistence that he lie about who loaded a certain gun. The problem of his mute and fierce loyalty to both his parents—who piss him off tremendously, nonetheless—is plain to Officer Duncan, a decent local cop. As Ted spirals through arson, bad grades, and self-abuse towards jail time, Duncan takes him out in his car for lunch. ‘Your mother loves you very much,’ he says. ‘Too much, Ted. She’s not seeing this clearly.’ By now the reader is screaming at Ted to fess up. But we’re also aware that, to save himself, he has to betray his mum. LaMarche pitches this perfectly. In David Vann’s terms, Ted now has the problem of the classic divided protagonist—whatever he decides, it’s going to tear him in half.

3.    Torn up and Firebombed: This bind is made worse by the fact that Ted is stuck in a place where he can’t easily communicate. Trapped in a lie, he’s also bound by the painful inarticulacy of teenage boyhood. Plus his father is miles away. Barely realising it, the boy aches for his dad’s restoring presence, without ever voicing it: ‘A great fondness for the man welled up in the boy, but it was quickly followed by a tremendous ache—his father was so, so far from him, standing in the backyard as he was, half stoned and torn up as hell. He stood for a moment and waited for it to pass. ’

It’s the same when Ted is aided and abetted by Terry, his best mate, who protects him when his gangmates turn nasty*. When Ted tries to say thanks, Terry tells him to shut up. Instead, he hands him a Molotov cocktail and firebombs a car in a revenge attack. This is where the book’s minimalist surface is revealed to be rich and deep. It’s not that the men of this book don’t have feelings, it’s just that their communication comes out mute and twisted. Sometimes it’s easy to think that spare, active writing of this sort is reductive and unsubtle, but it’s not. It’s the opposite.

*Small is Big: One thing that irritated me was the decision to anonymise Ted in narration as ‘the boy’. Similarly the pan-American naming of the gang ‘American Youth’, which in turn gives the rather grandiose title to the book. These techniques seemed to be striving for the everyman, anytown effect—universalising a story that works best when it's most precisely focused on Ted's immediate, local experience.

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A Daring Book: Three Reasons To Read The Mermaid Boy

Completely in charge: Philip Temple’s Beak of the Moon

After the Cold Flood of Danger: Elizabeth Knox on Wake

Cataracts of Blood or Rust: 3 questions for Carl Shuker

Tough, Amy Head

Learning the craft, live on stage

Christmas in Rarotonga: the John Wright Story, with Paul Thomas

Six by Six: Readings on the Rocky Outcrop

The Invisible Rider, Kirsten McDougall (And Other Favourites)

American Youth, Phil LaMarche (2007)

3 Things

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