Something New

 

We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.  

    “LIAR, LIAR, LICK, SPIT” by Emma Neale (Otago University Press, $NZ30); “BLUE HOUR” by Jo McNeice (Otago University Press, $NZ30); “HOTEL THERESA” by Doc Drumheller (Cold Hub Press, $NZ28. 

 

The 85 poems of Emma Neale’s 7^th collection Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit has a title, drawn from an ancient chant, focusing us on the human capacity to lie, misinterpret or misunderstand reality, and sometimes suggesting that dreams can both beguile and confuse us.

The opening clutch of poems deals directly with lies. First there is a tragic situation. In  “False Confession”,  a dissenter in a tyrannical country is tortured until he gives a false confession – a case of the lie being forced. Then there are children’s lies. “Porky” has a little girl lying her first lie to mother ; then “The Quiet Type” has a little girl telling a lie to her teacher in primary school. Turning to more mature people, “Spare Change” displays the lie of a con artist. Perhaps God lies to us and is not fair – or at least this is implied in “Like girls were hot soft scones”. “Pandora First Gets Feminism, Age Ten” has the ten-year-old discovering her father’s stash of girly (or soft-porn) magazines – and then her father lies about it. “Threat” has a false bomb threat at a school – a malicious lie that scorches children’s minds for years after. “Androphopia”, a tale of a boy being physically mistreated by teacher, says “It begins when the child finds deceit / turns to truth if certain adults use it. / His tongue still curls at the grit of wrong, / like it did in the crumbs stuck to the sweets / from the man’s jacket pocket.” “Little Fibs” displays the small lies we all tell, as in  “Let us praise / the small evasions: / the missed call / the slight sore throat / the prior engagement…”. “Player” shows the capacity men have to spin untruthful yarns in casual conversations

So we learn of direct lies, forced lies, innocent lies, theological lies, foolish lies, well-intentioned lies – as in “white lies” – and malicious lies. Human beings are flawed, even the best of us. But what of the way we often lie to ourselves? Our false memories are a sort of lying. “Like the albums on rotate in your first year away from home” deals with the bric-a-brac of memories, of things left over and misunderstood.

But it would be quite misleading to suggest that Emma Neale is plucking only one note. There are tragedies, as in “Terribly Involved” wherein a new-born baby is cruelly being neglected in a hospital ward. There are sad let-downs – in “Wanted to believe in the butterfly event” a mother is aware that she wants to save the world… but her sons ask if that’s so, why did she have them? “Night-call” is essentially a lamentation for somebody who has died, but given to us in terms of multiple harsh or lowering images. In fact in this collection there are a number of poems that have the terror of night and dreams. “Sleepless” is literally nightmare-ish in its imagery, while “My Blank Camouflage”, also frightening, may or may not be read as a real event being told, or another nightmare. It appears to be related the fear of rape. In similar territory, “Scapegoat” has a woman who has a birthmark and who knows that her forebears once would have superstitious-ly regarded such a birthmark as the sign of a witch. One could also say “The Night Shift” is a fantasia. One poem, again nearing to dreams, is called in full “Dreams are the dark glasses and heatproof shell the mind wears when the truth is a hot, burning ball of plasma and at least sixty-seven known elements”

Emma Neale gives us a number of poems about 19^th century colonialism : “Tricks of Trade” suggests, in an almost jocular way, that white traders routinely cheated the Maori people; while the long poem “Genealogy” questions in detail how Pakeha genealogies gloss over things, especially forgetting the great help by iwi that had been given to white settlers. And in “Histology Report” there is an ambiguous memory of the poet’s family and its events in the past… perhaps another case of the mind telling untruths.

What is one to make of the poem “#notmetoothanks”? Is this poem based on a real meeting the poet had? At any rate, the first-person narrator refuses to honour a crass poet whom she once admired. There must be many cases like this in the poetry community. And what is one to make of “If you saw a miracle, would you speak of it?” It begins with the delight of seeing an unusual creature – but it turns into a call to leave creatures alone before that become categorised and examined. There is a strong conservationist idea here.

I have, of course, not mentioned every poem in this collection. It would take many pages if I did. Emma Neale has a very robust and sure way of expressing herself. This time, she encourages us to consider our own habitual ways of thinking, especially when we become complacent and assume that our lies and distortions of memory are the truth. Yes, we are flawed. But balancing a very questing collection, there is also Neale’s skill with the nightmare-ish, the dreams, and all the imagery that holds it up.

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When you first open Jo McNeice’s debut collection Blue Hour, you might think you are in for a romantic perspective on the world. Blue Hour begins with the poem “Aro Valley”, almost an idyll under the moonlight with delightful romanticism. And so too with the second poem “This Summer” with its “Millions of stars / in the emerald sky.” But this has simply lured us in. With great skill, with detailed images and metaphors, McNeice presents us with a tortured and generally unhappy world. One of the collection’s longer poem “An analysis of us as a film” begins with “Light & dark, / deception & betrayal…” and “Ordinary world, / conflict, / change / failure.” It goes on to tell us that drunkards never really reform and that there are “A swarm of killer bees & / a psychopath waiting in the woods.”… at which point the poem morphs into a movie of a discontented young man and his buddy, apparently having been dominated by his mother.

Many poems are presented in the first-person voice – not that this means the poet is necessarily giving us her autobiography. Some poems draw on images of the more sinister fairy tales, as in the nightmare setting of the poem “Wolf”. The macabre persists in “Not out of the woods yet” which is a distorted version of Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf. Presented more in the present age is “Candles squint into the sun” wherein dead bodies lie on the street and “I walk the narrow road / between them / tiptoeing to avoid / the blood splatter / on the pavement.” Often we are presented with what amount to unhappy and despairing situations. Three “Mermaid singing” poems appear to refer to a young woman medicated and being dealt with by a psychiatrist. There is the image of the tide… and in the third “Mermaid” poem, the mermaids sings “we burn in this dark weather / & we drown in this dead weather”. “Laura” has a young woman with migraine and under a psychiatrist’s care… and yet in this case there is the redeeming factor of a wider perspective on nature in the background. Returning to the despairing, “Schizoaffective in spring” decides “You are just / molecules erasing / themselves, / a collection of / moments & dust, / a melted bullet, / an empty cartridge…”  The poem “Ghost Heart” appears to be dealing with bipolar disorder. “She’s feeling old” is not a poem of despair but of resignation to the fact that things change – in this case in terms of architecture inevitably changing. “Admission” begins “Admit nothing. / Your mind is a blizzard. / All the eyes of the creatures / from the bottom of the ocean / are on you. / You have planted rue & honesty / in a patch of black earth, / ingested doubt, like / a daily dose of arsenic.” And the poem ends “poison is the only cure for madness”. However, “Maybe” has the poet apparently unhappy in love or having lost love, but this time not despairing with the determination “I will wear an armour made / of misery & mania, / delusions & hallucinations, / fight my way out of this.”

I have, as I so often do, essentially given you a sort of synopsis, telling you of the contents of this collection. On the whole, these poems deal with moods; and the moods sometimes verge on the nihilistic – almost suggesting that life is not worth living or that life is only painful. But this does not negate the fact that Jo McNeice writes forcefully, presenting compelling images even in despair, and does, after all, understand what is the fate for many people.

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            The blurb tells us that Doc Drumheller’s Hotel Theresa is named after the New York hotel in Harlem which was frequented often by many famous jazz players and fighters, from Duke Ellington to Malcolm X. Drumheller has dual citizenship as American and New Zealander, and the famous hotel becomes eventually the cornerstone of all the countries he has visited.  He is very disciplined in this collection of 79 poems. All are written in seven couplets [with one exception] and all deal with place and local atmosphere. The poems are divided into nine sections, each having seven poems.

The seven poems of Psalms for a Broken City begin with ancient Maori concepts of how the Earth was formed, and then give us a part jocular and part lament for scenes in New Zealand – the end of a performance poet, the clogged city, a broken rural town and yet happy moments with rough mates.  The Treasured Places again begins with Maori lore but moves into almost idyllic images of New Zealand shores and parks. My Republic is more personal, dealing with how he prefers to raise carrots et al. [none of your chemicals please!], how he regards the Earth, and remembering both his mother and father in their gardening. The Swamp of My Childhood takes him more to his roots in America – the different flora and fauna like snapping turtles in the streams and the different mores with memories of old Dixie and also how his daddy used to speak. Hymns Behind the Iron Curtain do deal in part with his visits to countries that were once Communist, but not exclusively, and there is much irony in the way he deals with the different cultures he meets. And irony looms large in the next section called The Death of Irony, which deals more with sex and disgust at censorship. Learning Mandarin deals respectfully with the Chinese culture Drumheller has experienced, but he also writes ironically about Mao. The Oracles of Delphi moves from Greece and its antiquities to India with its great wealth and immense poverty. Viva La Vida is naturally about Mexico and leans towards its revolutionary side but with some jests as well. And finally the last collection of poems is Hotel Theresa itself. The mean streets looking for the remnants of the long-gone hip and beat days. The wild cactus centre of the U.S.A. A memoir for those killed in the Mosque massacre in Christchurch. And finally a peaceful poem reminding us that most people are our friends.

As I so often do, I have given you an account of this collection without examining the quality of the work. So I will be brief. I enjoyed this collection. I liked the way many of Doc Drumheller’s lines read like epigrams – straight forward, brief, sharp, accessible and very readable. And often enough there are some wild imagery and metaphors. A good sock on the jaw.

Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“SHE’S A KILLER”  by Kirsten McDougall (Victoria University of Wellington Press, $NZ55); “THE PINK JUMPSUIT” by Emma Neale (Quentin Wilson Publishing, $NZ35)

 

Kirsten McDougall has written a novel which kept me reading into the small hours, so eager was I to find out how it would end. The mere size of the thing surprised me. Her first two novels were both taut and relatively short. [See reviews on this blog of The Invisible Rider from 2012 and Tess from 2017] But She’s a Killer is epic in comparison, all 400 pages of it - a detailed and exuberant story, filled with dark humour and comic invention but also suggesting personal tragedy and sounding out an only-slightly-exaggerated version of major problems that are already worrying New Zealanders. As I have often asserted, the best comedy is always serious at heart.

She’s a Killer is set in the dystopian New Zealand of just a few years away. Waterways are befouled, so clean water is both rare and rationed. Climate change is taking its toll. Yet compared with other recent full-on dystopian climate-change-nightmare New Zealand novels (see James McNaughton’s rambling Star Sailors  and Lawrence Patchett’s more focused The Burning River ), She’s a Killer’s references to ecological disaster are discreet – mainly a few “noises off” with one-line references to riots in Auckland or a shooting in Palmerston North. The real social issue is the overwhelming and largely malign presence of “wealthugees” – incredibly wealthy climate “refugees” who have bought their way into New Zealand as a convenient bolt-hole. They are able to buy up prime land and in the process push up prices of everything from real estate to everyday food-stuffs. From Kiwis both Maori and Pakeha, a rising chorus of dissent is turning into rebelliousness. And of course there are demagogues to stir people up such as “Norman Brailey, an anti-immigration politician who had been in and out of government for aeons.” (p.55) ( I can’t for the life of me think who he could possibly be based upon…)

While this may be the novel’s context, and a necessary motive for the plot, it isn’t really the focus. Its focus is the psyche of the first-person narrator who is not just an unreliable narrator but a pathologically unreliable narrator.

Consider what sort of person Alice is (and by the way, I had to look up the blurb to remind myself what her name is, so rarely does it appear in the text).

Alice - presumably in a mental wonderland of her own – is in her late thirties, single, without any “significant other” despite having bonked various men, and a self-proclaimed genius. At least she repeatedly tells us that she once had an IQ test which placed her just one point below genius level. Her mother thinks she has never become the person she ought to have become, and has never fulfilled her genius potential. Alice herself is always allowing people to assume that she is one day going to use her genius to become a psychologist.

As she relates in a number of flashback memories, she had a turbulent and unruly childhood. Part of it involved apparently befriending a vulnerable little girl called Amy, who had no friends at school, but then abusing Amy in a very callous way. More extreme, she managed to burn down her parents’ house when she was a kid. Her elderly mother, in whose house she still lives, has never ceased to make excuses for her. Also as a kid, Alice had an imaginary friend called Simp who used to take over her brain and talk to her. Simp disappeared from her mind for years, but has recently returned now she’s in early middle age. Often when she speaks to others, Simp butts in to make clever comments, which occasionally reflect more common sense than the things Alice says out loud.

Amy is still Alice’s only real “friend”.

In a rare moment of self-criticism, Alice says : “I wasn’t into talking, especially not about myself. What was there to say? I lived in a dingy flat beneath my mother’s house. I’d been in the same job for nearly fifteen years. My childhood imaginary friend had just come back.” (p.75)

Like many people who border on the psychotic, Alice is extremely manipulative. She used to manipulate colleagues at an advertising agency. Now she tries to manipulate colleagues in a university’s clerical staff. She’s also absolutely cocksure about her own judgements. Without considering the consequences, she self-righteously walks out of one job when a colleague gets fired. Worse, she intervenes in, and effectively tries to break up, the marriage of her “friend” Amy. Of Amy’s husband Peter she declares: “Neither of us approved of the other. I thought it an enormous mistake for Amy to have children with him and I’d tried to stop it.” (p.49)

Now all this is told to us by Alice herself, which brings us to the dominant paradox of this novel.

Mentally unbalanced, perhaps delusional, self-centred, manipulative – Alice is somebody you’d never want to cross paths with in real life. And yet her narrative is intoxicating in its forthrightness, no matter how off-centre she may be. She has the energy of one who lives infallibly in her own head. This is Kirsten McDougall’s greatest skill. We begin to identify with Alice because she’s often funny, because her reading of other people can be acute and because her sidelight satire is often spot on.

She is wrong to intervene in Amy’s and Peter’s marriage, and yet her description of the couple convinces us that he is a materialistic jerk and she has become a craven house-slave. Of universities she declares “We were in the bowels of the university corporation, modern shovellers of figurative shit.” (p.27) A crude and rude statement, but then elsewhere there is reference to a university’s Russian department being closed down (pointing to the utilitarian minimisation of the humanities in so many universities) and she comments accurately on kids doing pointless courses and building up nothing but debt for themselves. She takes an equally crude – but funny – kick at drama schools, saying of one: “Many of New Zealand’s acting and dancing greats, famous people the rest of the world had never heard of, had trained here.” (p.224) Sadly, one has to admit that actors egos often outrun both their talents and their fame.

Perhaps (like Jonathan Swift, like William Blake) real satirists can be at their most incisive when they are troubled in the head and very ready to call out the faults of others.

There is another reason for us to sympathise with Alice. Well into the novel, she meets Pablo, a smoothie who seems to be wooing her but who conveniently finds an excuse to buzz off and leave her looking after his 15-year-old daughter Erika. Not only is Erika more manipulative than Alice, but she is far, far cleverer; perhaps a real genius as opposed to a self-proclaimed one. This spells real trouble for Alice.

At which point I hit the wall that all honest book-reviewers hit. Where newly-published novels are concerned, it is not my role to introduce “spoilers” and sabotage those twists of plot (and characterisation) that the author has devised to surprise us. Suffice it to say that the trouble Erika leads Alice into has to do with hitting back at “wealthugees” and some eco-terrorism. The last quarter of the novel has the tension of a good thriller and a sort of metamorphosis - or at least some self-realisation – in the mind of Alice.

In Alice, Kirsten McDougall has created a great tragi-comic character. This is a very accomplished novel, giving a unique viewpoint and polishing it in a strong narrative. Readers looking just for a good story will find it here, but readers interested in the complexities of the mind with also find that here. I recently had the pleasure of dubbing another author’s work as “compulsive reading”. I do the same for She’s a Killer. 

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Emma Neale is best known as poet, novelist and erstwhile editor of Landfall. She has never before published a collection of her shorter prose fiction. Comprising twenty-eight tales and reflections, The Pink Jumpsuit is her first collection of short stories.

Reviewing collections of short stories presents the same problem as reviewing collections of poetry. Each story (or poem) is a separate and unique text and deserves analysis of itself. But the reviewer is compelled to discuss, more generally, the flavour of the whole collection. So here I go once again name-checking and making generalisations.

None of Emma Neale’s stories is very long. But many of them are very short, being a paragraph or a couple of pages. These offerings are very much in the mode of “flash fiction” and are epiphanies, reflections or moments of inspiration, each making one dominant point. Thus “Mothian” and “Courtship” which are almost prose poems; or the anecdote “Obitchuary” about journalistic revenge; or the vignettes, “Cabaret”, “The Apocalypse Shelves” and  “Faery lights”, the last of which becomes a sort of miniscule horror story.

            In both the “flash fiction” and the longer stories, there are some dominant concerns. When Neale deals with families, there is a strong sense of stress or crisis, especially in married or sexual situations. In “Old, New, Borrowed, Blue” three different sorts of relationship are presented, one of them gay, and two of them suggest a relationship coming unstuck. “The Leopard Skin print handbag” suggests the subtle codes that can show a marriage disintegrating. Without being preached to, we are often shown that men exploit women as in “Off-casts”, “Ditched” and “Deep Liking” which are all about men’s fickleness in either dumping, cheating on or abusing women.

There is concern with pregnancy and birth, with a weird take on childbirth in the semi-surreal story “The fylgja” and a more troubling one in the reflection called “Braced”.

Inevitably, this is linked to motherhood and children. “Party Games” is almost a frustrated and angry woman’s wish-fulfilment fantasy as she attempts to control an increasingly unruly children’s birthday party. “Rack” displays a mother’s deep concern for her sick child, but (like other Neale stories such as “My Salamander”) it moves into surrealism.

It interesting to note how frequently fathers who are scientists appear in many of Neale’s stories, as in “The Spirit Child”, “The Pink Jumpsuit” “My Salamander” and “In Confidence”. Often the scientist father is related to childhood memories of living in California. There are also childhood memories of swimming in “The local  pool”, “Freestyle” and elsewhere. I am not so literal minded as to confuse first-person narrators with the author, but I do find it hard not to read some stories as autobiographical or at least partially-autobiographical, such as the meditation “Braced” or the story of uncertain identity “In Confidence” where the protagonist is called Emma.

There are some stories in this collection which really intrigued me and showed Neale’s mastery of the genre.

“Stray” is a pungent mood piece. It conveys perfectly the subtle changes in a young woman’s perspective and feelings when she attends a party in a student flat. She is at first alienated, then intrigued, then anxious. This is a tale that is also perfectly completed.

“Spirit Child” dares to have a male as first-person narrator and attempts to nail down the origin of men’s competitiveness, sheeting it home to the example of fathers and strongly implying that “man hands on misery to man.” (Another story, “Apples and Oranges”, also has a male narrator and encodes a whole family background in 12 pages – including trauma and heartache.)

Neale’s strongest suit, however, is the moral ambiguity in her best stories, where we are left to work out degrees of rightness and wrongness for ourselves.

Only a superficial reading would see “Trypanophobia” as the straightforward story of a racist getting her comeuppance. We are left wondering if the apparently sympathetic, but also somewhat self-righteous, character has behaved ethically. Similarly one of Neale’s more anarchic stories, “Worn Once”, seems at first glance to be a street-wise satire on marriage. It involves a young woman making an anti-marriage art project after she’s been jilted at the altar. But its outcome is pensive, ambiguous, not at all clearly satire only.

Like the stories of Elizabeth Smither, Neale’s stories must be read carefully and closely, though the preoccupations of the two authors are quite different. A very strong collection.

Something New

   We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“CRAZY LOVE” by Rosetta Allan (Penguin, $NZ36); “STRONG WORDS #2 – The best of the Landfall Essay Competition” Selected by Emma Neale (Otago University Press, $NZ35); “BEACHCOMBING – A guide to seashores of the Southern Hemisphere” by Ceridwen Fraser (Otago University Press, $NZ30)

Here’s a problem for me as a reviewer. How do I categorise Rosetta Allan’s third novel Crazy Love? At the very least I can say it’s very different from her first two novels (both reviewed on this blog) Purgatory and The Unreliable People . They were both carefully-researched and scrupulously-plotted novels with historical settings, one in nineteenth-century New Zealand and the other in Russia both during and after it was the Soviet Union.

But Crazy Love?

It is written confessionally in the first person. The back-cover blurb tells me it is “based on the author’s own experiences”. At the end of the text, there’s a photo of Rosetta Allan and her husband James shortly after they were married in 1984. In her acknowledgements Rosetta Allan thanks, inter alia, “Billy-bold - my James”. “Billy” is the husband of the first-person narrator “Vicki” in Crazy Love, and most other characters are simply given generic names such as “sick dolly-bird” or “highwayman” or “divorced of Mt Eden.” The fact is, Crazy Love does not read like a novel, but like a memoir. In some respects it resembles recent confessional memoirs by other New Zealand women such as Caroline Barron’s Ripiro Beach (medical and physical trauma) and Charlotte Grimshaw’s The Mirror Book (personal and family trauma). I’ll respect the author’s choice and refer to Crazy Love as a novel. Perhaps Allan has added a few fictitious moments to the record, softened things here,  excluded things there. So just for this review a novel it is, and Vicki and Billy are its people.

What trauma is recorded here?

The first part of Crazy Love is called “Before”. This is Vicki in 1983-84, in the years of Robert Muldoon to whom she writes some angry letters. She is eighteen-going-on-nineteen. She regards the town she lives in – Napier – as a joyless, provincial dead-end. She cohabits with a guy she calls only “loser-boyfriend”. Together they just scrape up enough money to live in a seedy boarding house she calls Dire Straits. They have plenty of sex. She has an abortion. The effect of this messes things up for her when she’s trying to find a job. “Loser-boyfriend” can be violent, takes plenty of drugs, hangs out with thuggish hoons, gets involved in pub brawls, burglary and other petty crime. There’s much sordid grot in this life. Vicki does drugs too. Once she goes into a psychedelic frenzy on cactus juice and smashes things up.

Vicki comes across as a young woman who is intelligent enough to know that her life is going nowhere, but doesn’t yet know how to make it go somewhere.

Enter Billy. He has a room in Dire Straits. He’s a punk who can lose it, rage, and do brawls when provoked. He takes part in burglaries, forges cheques, steals. He has false teeth because his teeth were all rotted out by the drugs he took. But he’s a stylish punk. A cool punk with drainpipe black jeans and blonde hair standing up with gel. And he is clearly going somewhere. He’s halfway to being an artist and he has a foot in the door in either advertising or marketing. And (with “loser-boyfriend” raging and wanting to get her back), Vicki moves in with Billy.

In all this, note that Vicki does most of the active wooing. In fact, this part of Crazy Love is one of the most delicately expressed as she becomes more and more interested in Billy. The tone can only be called Romantic, with a formal proposal, moonlight on the sea and all. And there’s this major turning point in young Vicki’s life when Billy says “You’ll be our next Katherine Mansfield.” Vicki comments: “I had no idea who Katherine Mansfield was any more than Tennyson, so I had no gauge of this vast and ridiculous compliment. But it felt so lovely having someone beside me, believing in me like that. I’d heard big talk before to get me in the sack. You and me, we’ll do this and this. I’ll take you there and there. It was always the benchmark to know when to get the hell away from a guy. Only, I didn’t want to get away from this Billy and all his promises. Something in his words wrung [sic] true – not the Katherine Mansfield part, but the writer part. And I liked the idea of that.” (p.99)

They marry soon after, when their first child is on the way.

And at this point you are raging at me, aren’t you dear reader? All I’m doing is giving you a synopsis when we both know that mere synopsis is the enemy of real critique. Fear not. I’ve walked you through only the first third of Crazy Love. The set-up. For the deeper trauma comes only in the second section, “During” which takes up the bulk of the novel.

I won’t labour over this. It is 2012. Vicki and Billy have been married for nearly 28 years. They’re middle-aged and their two adult kids are gone. They’ve had their ups and downs, had a lot of money, lost a lot of money, had flash cars, lost flash cars, had an art collection, had to downsize houses, sometimes lived a life of Auckland bourgeois success with him heading for an arts degree and doing corporate advertising and marketing work and her getting on with her serious writing and helping out with his firm.

Sometimes she suffers severe depression, but that’s not the trauma. The trauma is Billy’s “mood swings of undiagnosed mental illness” (p.152). Billy is severely, severely, severely manic-depressive. This is the real crazy love. Love is a crazy, irrational thing and Vicki loves Billy; but Billy is mentally sick and literally crazy. He sells off some of their assets for no rational purpose. He threatens to commit suicide and makes plans to do so. He contemplates running off with another woman then weeps about it. He may not have been “physically unfaithful” but he has been “spiritually, emotionally and cognitively unfaithful.” (p.242) He carries out silly pranks like stealing road signs. He hides under the house. He shouts. He has huge, unrealisable, irrational plans. Violence is always potential. When Vicki manages to get him into psychiatric care, a nurse says Billy has “bipolar mania delusion.” (p.293)

Yet Vicki remains devoted to Billy for all the hurt. When a woman (called only “no-longer friend”) mocks her for being financially dependent on Billy, Vicki reflects “Billy changed me for the better right from the start. I am not made weaker because of our relationship. I am made more substantial.” (p.189) Billy gives her life meaning and she sticks with him, trying to weather out his mental storms and doing her best to help him overcome his sickness. Vicki loves him.

Okay, okay cynics. I know what you’re thinking. Expressed as I have expressed it, this sounds dangerously like one of those uplifting, soapy disease-of-the-week shows they used to have on Sunday evening television. Love conquers all. Plucky, devoted wife brings troubled husband back from the brink. Roll credits. But Crazy Love is not like that. Vicki’s version of love is hard and realistic. So is the author’s terse style. “Love is endurance” says Vicki (p.166), which in a way means love is commitment, even through the craziness and verbal abuse. And the book’s coda, called “After”, bringing the story up to date in 2020, does not suggest a happy-ever-after. Even the best marriages are constantly negotiated and re-negotiated. Does anybody now remember a piece of horse manure from the 1960s called Love Story? It was marketed with the slogan “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” Bollocks! Love means having to say you’re sorry ten thousand times and then another ten thousand times. Love endures but marital peace is always provisional.

So Crazy Love is candid and uncompromising as it charts both a wild, self-destructive youth and a marriage made difficult by mental health issues. But it nowhere falls into self-pity. Rosetta Allan’s optimism, practicality and commitment are infectious. So’s her style. It’s compulsive reading.

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Strong Words #2 is the second collection of long-listed essays from the Landfall Essay Competition, once again selected  and introduced by Emma Neale.

It follows on from the first Strong Words collection reviewed on this blog in 2019. In her introduction to the earlier collection, Emma Neale emphasised that essays come in many different forms. There is no set template for the essay. Her introduction to Strong Words #2 begins with her referencing an angry letter she received from an unnamed reader, who said that too many Landfall essays were solipsistic, by which the reader presumably meant that too many essays were self-obsessed, personal and confessional. Emma Neale does not dismiss the reader’s complaint out of hand, but does argue that many good essays may begin with the very personal, but then work their way to connecting the personal with the public. Major human issues emerge from very personal observations.

I can certainly see how this works in many essays but perhaps not in all. In these very varied 25 essays (18 by women, 7 by men – about the same gender balance as in the earlier collection), there are at least a few that really are solipsistic in the pejorative sense. But I won’t dwell on them. Nor will I attempt to synopsise or comment upon every essay. Two of the best essays appear elsewhere in print – Siobhan Harvey’s wrenching account of an abusive childhood “Living in the Haunted House of the Past”, which also appears in her poetry collection Ghosts (reviewed on this blog ); and Gilian Sullivan’s “The Art and Adventures of Subsistence”, about trying to survive on very little income, which appears in her essay collection Map of the Heart (also reviewed on this blog). Two essays are, in effect, very engaging book reviews, both of them referencing in some form climate change. In “The Certainty of Others”, John Horrocks looks at recent New Zealand novels that posit apocalyptic outcomes from climate change. In “Water Says Things So Clearly”, Wendy Parkins gives the best analysis I’ve yet read of Robin Hyde’s novel Wednesday’s Children, which was written way back in the 1930s, and pairs it with Pip Adam’s recent novel The New Animals. Both novels immerse themselves in the sea and suggest a different way of looking at it. (Wendy Parkins’ memoir of depression, Every morning, so far, I’m alive, is reviewed elsewhere on this blog .)

If I were to nominate the quirkiest essay in this collection, it would have to be Matt Vance’s “Lines of Desire” with his mapping of human behaviour by noticing the directions in which people walk. Ultimately the cheerfulest essay must be Emily Duncan’s “Character-Building”, an account of not making it in a New York drama school. We at first expect a tale of failure and woe, but it moves towards a resilient shrug of the shoulders. And the essay that provoked the most thought for me was  Tan Tuck Ming’s somewhat postmodernist “My Grandmother Gliches the Machine”, a complex and intellectually satisfying essay sounding out the rationalist idea that apparent reality is simply a structure created by language. You don’t have to agree with this concept to enjoy that subtleties of Tan’s argument.

At this point, I could list the essays that didn’t appeal to me – the one that tried too hard to be funny; the one that overdid the punnery and cheap shots in denouncing colonialism; the one that pleaded for public expression of emotions while telling us about the author’s love-life etc. etc. not to mention the ones that really were solipsistic. But then I realise other readers might find these very essays the cream of Strong Words #2.

To be thoroughly solipsistic, I learnt some things about myself in reading all these essays. One discovery was that I really like essays that make a case, or express a preference, clearly and without too many digressions. So to conclude this review, here is my personal selection of the most outstanding essays, all of them marked by their uncompromising clarity of expression.

·      Ingrid Horrocks’ “Ordinary Animals”  (a modified section of her book Where We Swim). Her narrative of a family’s experiences really does move coherently into a general address on climate change and rising sea levels.

·      Tim Grgec’s “Drinking More Fruit Juice Won’t Help”, a stately elegy for his late mother, taking in the experience of living with cancer.

·      Sarah Jane Barnett’s “Unladylike”, part polemic, part memoir, arguing that femininity (and masculinity) are just performative. Not a wholly convincing asrgument – it runs into the wild territory of assuming that gender and sex are not the same – but clearly stated.

·      Anna Knox’s “Ziusudra & the Black Holes” – quite daring of her to submit an essay on such an esoteric topic, but a really engaging piece querying whether the first authentic writer of essays, thousands of years ago, might have been a woman.

·      Himali McInnes’s socially engaged “This Place”, at once celebrating the South Auckland community where she is a GP, but also examining and criticising the reasons for the area’s poverty.

·      And finally my choice for the best of the best, Shelley Burne-Field’s “If the words ‘white’ and ‘sausage’ in the same sentence make you uncomfortable, please read on”, based on personal experience and a blistering attack on casual racism. It’s not only the subject matter that buoys it, but the no-nonsense way in which it is expressed.

Very well. Other readers will judge differently, but all criticism is subjective. Please remember that.

Pedantic and Nitpicking Footnote: I do not wish to denigrate John Horrocks’ enlightening essay, but I was taken aback by the fact that the same central character in a novel he analyses is called, on different pages, Zac Hobson, Zac Hudson and Zac Hodson. Were the typesetters fiddling around or am I missing something?

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I’m not an expert on marine biology or on littoral life-forms and therefore I can’t make a scientific judgment on Ceridwen Fraser’s Beachcombing – A guide to seashores of the Southern Hemisphere. But I do know that this slim (114 pages) book gave me great pleasure and will continue to do so for a long time. Ceridwen Fraser is an associate professor of Marine Science at the University of Otago. I’m one of those useless humanities people who took degrees in literature, languages, philosophy and history. But I’m now also a volunteer guide at Tiritiri Matangi, one of New Zealand’s open-bird-sanctuary islands, and I’m rapidly beefing up my knowledge of native birds and plants.

In my guiding, what I’ve aways lacked is an account of what lands on, or is left on, the shore. Now I’ve got it.

In Beachcombing – A guide to seashores of the Southern Hemisphere, Fraser takes us systematically through the dynamics of currents and waves; the things that are left on the shore (including – alas – much plastic); the life forms that exist or survive on southern shores; things that rise to the surface from the depths of the sea; seabirds; large sea-creatures (like squid); and the way seeds and plants migrate from shore to shore. And it is all written in non-specialist language for non-scientists like me. Beachcombing is designed for the general reader with all unfamiliar names of plants and creatures duly explained. Because this text deals not only with New Zealand shores, but with the whole Southern Hemisphere, there is also a glossary page giving Australian Aboriginal, Maori and Chilean equivalents of sea-releated terms.

One of its chiefs assets is, of course, its many illustrations – everything from a big, fat sea elephant resting on kelp to the tiny structure of grains of sand, some of which have biogenic material; from sea tulips to shark-egg capsules; from seahorses to ambergris.

            This isn’t the type of book I’d give away after reading.

Something New

We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“STRONG WORDS – The Best of the Landfall Essay Competition” Edited by Emma Neale (Otago University Press, $NZ35); “CATCH AND KILL” by Ronan Farrow (Little-Brown / Hachette, $NZ 37:99); “MY PENGUIN YEAR” by Lindsay McCrae (Hodder and Stoughton / Hachette, $NZ34:99)

What is an essay? When we were in the first years of secondary school, an essay was a little narrative of personal experience, in the notorious “What I Did in My Holidays” mould: so basically a first-person story. Call it confessional. Then in the senior years of secondary school, an essay was meant to argue a case like a lawyer, on such topics as “Was King Lear the author of his own misfortunes?”, to be written with a neat introduction, a neat final paragraph drawing a conclusion, and in between these, five or six paragraphs, each making a point, each beginning with a “topic sentence”, and each using evidence, usually in the form of quotations from the text. Call it forensic.

But as soon as we were free of school, and free of undergraduate essays on Eng. Lit., we discovered essays that were neither confessional nor forensic, though some were. Essays could move in many directions, and didn’t have any firm template. Personal experience, sure. Arguing a case, sure. But also reflecting or reconstructing the past; or trying to get a handle on personal relationships; or venting dyspeptic or euphoric feelings; or imagining a possible society; or God wot. Trying to define what an essay is, the best I can come up with is “a, usually short, piece of non-fiction prose, reflecting personal experience, personal convictions or personal interpretations of the world.” Clumsy, but at least comprehensive.

The difficulty of defining an essay is reflected in Emma Neale’s Introduction to Strong Words - The Best of the Landfall Essay Competition. She quotes with approval Virginia Woolf’s statement that whatever it deals with, anything “from the immortality of the soul to the rheumatism  in your left shoulder”, an essay “is primarily an expression of personal opinion.” Having quoted this, Neale herself describes the essay form as “protean”. 

As judge of the Landfall Essay Competition in 2018, Neale had the unenviable task of reading her way through the 90 essays submitted, and choosing three winners – 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd place. But she knew that many which were not so awarded were also interesting, intelligent and engaging pieces of work. Hence this anthology, which gives us fully 21 of the essays that were submitted, with the three winning essays as the opening items in the book.

On the very rare occasions when I have been called on to judge writing like this, I know (once the real duds are set aside) that there is a final wrench when winners have to be decided on. There is always that nagging thought that you might have made the wrong decision, or that you are not honouring work which other experienced judges might have considered the best. As I read Strong Words, I found a few essays which I might have given the top spots instead of the three winners, but this is not to denigrate anything in this anthology. In their own very different ways, each essay is engaging in the real sense of the word – involving the reader by getting and holding the reader’s attention.

Of the three winning essays, Alice Miller’s “The Great Ending” is a lively reconstruction of how it felt, at the time, to be in New Zealand at the end of the First World War. Its sense of immediacy strips away later interpretations we may have imposed upon that time. But Susan Wardell’s “Shining Through the Skull” and Sam Keenan’s “Bad Girls” are both in the more confessional mode. Wardell deals with having been misled in the most personal and embarrassing way. Keenan deals with the brutal death of a teenage friend. Both are inevitably led to reflect on the way young women are seen in a defective world.

As I read the other eighteen essays, I found some that had a similar intention to the three winners. Louise Slocombe’s “The Thorndon Esplanade”, for example, essays the same effect as Alice Miller’s “The Great Ending”. It attempts to reconstruct a vanished past – though in Slocombe’s case, the past is part of the Wellington of Katherine Mansfield.

Just as essays are idiosyncratic, so is the reader’s response. I was attracted by some essays here simply because I shared experiences with the authors. Why was I so interested in Bryan Walpert’s “One Eye Open”, his painful account of having Bell’s Palsy? Because it’s an affliction I had never heard of, until I was rushed to hospital two years ago, and found myself lying on a gurney with two doctors standing over me and making preliminary diagnoses. They speculated that I might have Bell’s Palsy, and described it as something that has the apparent symptoms of a stroke, but isn’t one. As it happened, I was suffering from Miller-Fisher Syndrome, which had me on my back in hospital for a month, and then about three months recuperating at home. But at least I’d learnt what Bell’s Palsy was!

Why was I attracted to Jocelyn Prasad’s essay “Uncut Cloth”? Because she has written a charming reflection on saris (or “sarees” as she writes it). Married to a man of Indian parentage, my eldest daughter has adopted the sari as wear for formal occasions, and we have heard many tales like those Prasad tells of the complexities of donning a sari correctly.

Cait Kneller gives a fragmentary, mildly surreal, sketch of (the North Shore Auckland suburb of) Glenfield, which is the suburb in the next valley from where I live; and Kneller apparently went to the same secondary school as my three youngest daughters. And oddly enough Kirstten Ure’s essay “Puriri Moth”, wherein she sees the ephemeral life of the “adult” moth as an image of loss, rang bells for me. I regularly guide tourists around the bird-sanctuary island Tiritiri Matangi and stop to examine a stately puriri tree and discuss the puriri moth’s life-cycle to explain the black blotches that they leave on the trunk.

You see, there are personal as well as literary reasons for being interested in an essay.

The most directly confessional essays in this collection are Toby Buck’s “Aquae Populus” giving a wry view of the habitues of a small community sauna; John Allison’s “The Way it Is”, a sketch about being old; and P.J.Stanley’s very sad “Anatomy of Belief”, about being cut off by her father when she ceased to be a Scientologist. The essay that comes closest to being poetry is Madeleine Child’s “Loess”, with its evocation of the windy heights of Otago as experienced by her father.

There are what amount to polemics in this collection, but none of them are strident. There is nothing that is overtly political, and even versions given of the battle of the sexes are muted.

Those essays that are closest to (good) polemic are by Mikaela Nyman and Jane Blaikie. In  “Language Means Belonging” the Swedish-speaking, Finnish-born New Zealander Mikaela Nyman weaves in much personal experience of minority languages, their uniqueness and ultimate untranslatability, before arguing strongly for their conservation, especially in promoting the teaching of Maori. Jane Blaikie’s “Mrs Wakefield Unknown” concerns the caddish, deceitful  Edward Gibbon Wakefield and his opportunistic scheme to kidnap and marry a rich young heiress. Much of this story is already familiar to a wide readership, but Blaikie emphasises the fate of the young woman, largely disregarded by history. From this she segues, not too convincingly, into an argument that Wakefield’s name should be expunged from all public places.

In line with the general “linguistic turn” that much philosophy (and poetry) has taken in the last half century, language itself is the essence of two essays: Building on her own experience of suffering, Tracey Slaughter, in “Notes on a Scale of Silence”, elaborates on the idea that language is simply inadequate to convey the sense of pain. She quotes many sources to reinforce her insights here (I am surprised that, among others, she didn’t quote Robert Graves’ “The Cool Web”), though her ending, asserting the need to write about the experience of pain, somehow compromises her premise.  And in an odd way Tim Upperton’s “A Lifted Stone” also turns on the matter of language itself. He first plays variations on the unknowability of other creatures; then on the unknowability of other people; and ends up considering the limits of language in connecting with the world. Somewhere in the same ballpark  - language and its impact on the world – is Fiona Clark’s “Off By Heart”, on the therapeutic power of poetry.

So here I am once again name-checking just about every item in a collection and being careful not to make glib or dismissive comments. But I do admit misgivings about, and a disconnection from, some selections. Derek Schulz’s “Not a Maori Name” seems to me to examine too minutely (i.e. over-think) the texts he quotes as he considers the meaning of a story, written about New Zealand, by an author (Penelope Fitzgerald) who had never been here. Justine Whitfield’s reflection on the sense of touch, “The Klimt Bubbles”  is a bit nebulous and unnecessarily circumlocutious in some of its expression. The essay that first excited me, but ended up baffling me, was Jessica Maclean’s “Strange Harbours”. Articulate and replete with erudite, sophisticated vocabulary, “Strange Harbours” seems to be calling for some sort of radical re-alignment of New Zealand spirituality with a mix of Maori and Christian references and theologies. But it becomes a rant, shooting off in all directions. I tried very hard to find a crowning coherence here, but was foiled.

And the positive conclusion to this essay of my own? The real stunner in Strong Words is Becky Manawatu’s “#Mothersday”. It is so powerful because its memoir of family tragedies is written in a deadpan, sometimes almost ironical style: un-demonstrative and with no self-pity, and therefore convincing us more fully of the traumas being reported.

One little footnote to this brief assessment of varied and interesting essays: For the record, of the 21 essays, 16 are by women and only 5 by men. I won’t complain about gender bias or some such. I’m sure that Emma Neale isn’t the type of judge who would make selections by any such criterion – so this means nothing more than that more women submitted essays. This does, of course, reflect a big cultural turn-around. Once upon a time, anthlologies of essays tended to be all-male affairs. (To check this, I pull off my shelf a copy of W.E.Williams’ Pelican Original A Book of English Essays  dating from the 1950s, and find that the 25 authors represented are all blokes.) But the dominance of women writer does seem to have one effect – there’s much quoting of Virginia Woolf in many of these Strong Words.

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Very clumsily I move from a New Zealand book to two books from elsewhere. First, Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill.

            You have to wait until over three-quarters of the way through this 400-page book (page 347 to be precise) before you discover what exactly the title Catch and Kill means, although the idea behind it has appeared often enough. “Catch and kill” is a phrase used by the grubbier and more dishonest news outlets. They buy, as an exclusive, a story that has been filed, but do not ever publish it and find ways of gagging the author, who is prevented from publishing elsewhere. Usually this means that the news outlet has been either threatened or bribed by some powerful person to bury the story, because it contains negative things about them.

            Ronan Farrow (who, for what it’s worth, is the son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen) is the dogged journalist who bit by bit, in 2017, uncovered the whole Harvey Weinstein mess. The powerful Hollywood producer had for decades sexually harrassed, violated and blackmailed women – especially actressses who appeared in the films of his company Miramax. The blackmail meant threats (often carried out) to ruin the women’s careers if they ever reported what he had done, or if they refused his (sometimes violent) advances. Farrow gives all the details relating to the many women who trusted him enough to go on the record and be interviewed. There were dozens of them, and most of them had indeed had their careers destroyed by Weinstein and his confederates.

            As a film reviewer for many years before 2004, I remember seeing some actresses (Mira Sorvino, for example) making a big splash in a couple of films, seeming on the verge of a major career, and then suddenly disappearing from the screen. At the time I thought this was just standard Hollywood ruthlessness – it chews ‘em up and spits ‘em out – but now I understand what was really going on for some of them.

            And yet while this whole horrible scandal is properly detailed for us, it is not the major focus of Farrow’s book. Farrow is really concerned with how his attempts to get his story published were constantly blocked by the higher executives of the TV network that employed him, NBC. This is not so much a book about Weinstein’s crimes as a book about how Weinstein was able to twist influential people’s arms and keep his sordid affairs unreported.

            There was a paper trail of “non-disclosure” agreements whereby aggrieved women could be threatened by the law if they made public what had happened to them. America’s sleaziest publication, the National Enquirer, not only kept “kill” files of stories they had never published, but was complicit in publishing negative stories about many of Weinstein’s victims, the better to damage their credibility. In this they were helped by the Black Cube company of “private investigators” who had been hired by Weinstein and his lawyers, who spied on people, dug up as much dirt as they possibly could on Weinstein’s accusers, and tried to infiltrate Farrow’s investigation.

            Farrow was repeatedly prevented from presenting his findings on NBC, so he finally went elsewhere and got the story published in The New Yorker.

            Farrow is, of course, on the side of the angels and the detail given here is necessary. Yet I admit I did not like this book as much as I wanted to, for all its worthiness. It is not just the (inevitable) breathless, journalistic style, but it is a matter of its sheer length. Names are named, as they should be in a legal submission, but in such profusion that it is easy to forget which informant, which executive or which lawyer is being referred to at any given time. To be blunt, Catch and Kill would have been punchier, and could have said as much, at half the lengtth.

            Just a few closing remarks: Hillary Clinton is mentioned three or four times, usually in a negative context. It is not simply because Harvey Weinstein was a prime donor to her campaign for the presidency, but because she had clearly heard of his repeated crimes long before the story broke, but chose not to distance herself from him.

            There is also the obvious, but daunting thought, that the Harvey Weinstein story is neither unique nor new in the history of Hollywood. Once upon a time the “casting couch” was both a joke and standard operational procedure. All that is happening now is that it is being challenged. Look, for example, at the story of Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures in the 1940s and 1950s, and see that Weinstein is no aberration.

            Very briefly, Farrow refers to Jeffrey Epstein, who is the current best-known villain in stories of sexual abuse – so much so, in fact, that the Weinstein story is beginning to pass out of the collective consciousness. Sad but true - but don’t worry. Other scandals of sexual abuse will doubtless obliterate thoughts of Jeffrey Epstein, and we will forget the days when the jolly exploits of Prince “Randy Andy” were as much a joke as the “casting couch.”

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            I enjoyed Lindsay McCrae’s My Penguin Year more than Catch and Kill, probably because of its subject matter. It’s equally journalistic in style, but written by a man with real enthusiasm and therefore conveying some of the excitement that he himself must have experienced.

            As a schoolboy in the north of England, says Lindsay McCrae, he was fascinated by wildlife and was a compulsive photographer of animals. Over many months he photographed the lives and habits of badgers, and submitted some of his work to producers of wildlife documentaries. He was readily accepted as an emerging talent. So, avoiding university and formal tertiary education, he went straight from school to a position with the BBC’s wildlife department. He gradually became a skilled cameraman.

            He was addicted to David Attenborough’s Planet Earth series and, he says, as soon as he saw emperor penguins in a sequence of one of Attenborough’s documentaries, he knew that he wanted to see them for himself. His dream job turned up. He was commissioned to stay in the Antarctic for eleven months, observing and filming emperor penguins to record their entire life cycle. One problem – he had just married and his wife was pregnant; so there was a wrench in parting; but off he went to a German base in the Antarctic, where he shared his eleven months with German colleagues, he himself being kitted out with German equipment.

            One major strain of My Penguin Year has to do with the difficulties of shooting the desired footage. Before the emperor penguins came back from their months at sea, McCrae had to wait through weeks of endless, and often sleepless, Antarctic daylight. The penguins marched onto the ice in late March, in the Antarctic autumn. Extreme temperatures had effects on even the most advanced cameras; weather (such as long autumn and winter storms) made much filming impossible. There are two months (62 days) when the sun is always beneath the horizon, and sometimes there is complete darkness although, as this book’s many illustrations show, interesting shots can be recorded in the bright moonlight. McCrae wanted to create intimate images of the emperor penguins’ lives, but there was the difficulty of getting at close quarters with them. He tells stories of his perilous climb down from the ice shelf, where his base was, to the sheet of sea ice, where penguins gathered and mated.

            In the midst of this tale, there are the family moments. His son was born when most of his mission was completed. McCrae tried to be in daily contact with his wife and son, and he recorded for his son his readings of all the Beatrix Potter stories.

            But in the end, the most engaging element of this book is his interaction with the emperor penguins themselves, and his verbal record of their life cycle.

            It begins with courtship rituals when the males and females come ashore.

Even before the females are impregnated, the males practise how to incubate eggs by holding balls of ice on their feet and under their feathery bellies. McCrae found it difficult to film the most intimate detail – the actual laying of the eggs. Transferring the eggs from female to male is a delicate process. If the male is too slow in getting the egg safely to the top of his feet, the egg could quickly be frozen on the ice.

            As soon as the transfer is done, the females head out to sea to fish and live for some months, fattening themselves up while the males exclusively do the incubation of the eggs. They brood for about 64 days during the winter months. Even in good weather, the temperature is usually minus 40 degrees Celsius. For mutual warmth, there is the well-organised and tight tribal huddle of the males until the chicks break out of their eggs. By the time the plump and now well-fed females return, the males, having not fed for two months, are emaciated and near starvation, and now it is their turn to go out to sea and fatten up.

            Not too surprisingly, McCrae finds that emperor penguins suffer a high infant mortality rate. He tells many sad tales of observing eggs mishandled in the transfer from female to male, or prematurely cracked open, or frozen on the ice. Some penguins are trapped in a deep gully where, as a last resort, they have to abandon their chicks before they themselves freeze to death. Nature is prodigal, the mass production of offspring is the obvious strategy to ensure the survival of a species, and such deaths are to be expected. Still, for the individual, nature is cruel.

            There are no frills to the style of My Penguin Year. It is good journalism, an easy read, informative, and well illustrated, as well as having the human factor. Can’t ask more of it really.