Academy of New Zealand Literature

.

.

The Stone Wētā
by Octavia Cade

Paper Road Press

$25.00

ISBN: 9780995135505
PUBLISHER: Paper Road Press
IMPRINT: Paper Road Press
PUBLISHED: April 22, 2020
PAGE EXTENT: 133
FORMAT: Soft cover

.

Reviewed by Angelique Kasmara

Sci-fi thriller The Stone Wētā follows an underground network of twelve scientists smuggling climate data across borders, risking their own lives in the process. In their fight to preserve the planet, they’re forced to take on governments and corporations who are doing their utmost to silence debate, stifle research, and crush scientific evidence.

This is Cade’s first novel for adults; she’s also published a number of stories and novellas, and the junior novel The August Birds. There’s a freshness and boldness of vision in The Stone Wētā, an intricately crafted, near-future narrative, which traverses Antarctica to Japan, the Chihuahuan Desert to the International Space Station. We’re introduced to the scientists by their code names (real names are never revealed), which are taken from an unusual living plant or animal; chapters begin with a few facts about each one in turn. There’s the eponymous Stone Wētā, the Antarctic Lichen, the Fish-eating Spider.

This cool compendium of weird flora and fauna inhabit traits echoed in part by their human counterparts — replacing the usual character descriptions of names and appearance. Instead, we discover quirks such as how our scientists hide, how they defend, how they attack. Stylistically, at first it can make the novel feel abrupt and episodic. It’s best approached as interlinked short stories, with a powerful cumulative effect.

The scientists are all women — selected in part because women are less likely to be noticed, working quietly away from the spotlight on their male colleagues. They use stealth and subtlety in order to survive. Their reactions to danger tend towards the pragmatic: ‘It disturbed her that her most compelling argument against murder was a practical one,’ the Glass Sponge muses at one point. Significantly, several are women of colour, from places such as Timbuktu and Tuvalu, communities likely to be far more affected by climate change than others.

Despite the characters’ vastly different locales and / or backgrounds, there is a lack of distinction between their dialogue, and also an absence of character development. As a result, one scientist’s ultimate decision didn’t move me in the way it might have. It had all the poignancy of a colleague moving from one floor of an office to another.

These quibbles aside, I highly recommend this novel. Cade never lets her clearly considerable scientific knowledge overwhelm the story, and her writing style is energetic and engaging.

Despite the hunt-and-hide aspect which forms the main driving narrative, ultimately this is not a story about identifying and cornering the enemy. At its beating heart are climate-change scientists themselves, the Cassandras of our modern world, doomed to remain unheeded. The Antarctic Lichen agonises over a multitude of what ifs — what if they’d been better teachers, communicators, activists. Her conclusion is that it’s ‘our fault … We failed.’

Therein lies the strength of The Stone Wētā — it’s not a black-and-white tale of heroes and villains, rather one which examines how the global hierarchy and structures are failing us when it comes to saving our planet. It’s an excellent, timely read in our current climate where environmental protection is continually shunted aside in favour of politics, power, and greed.

Angelique Kasmara is a writer, editor, translator and reviewer from Auckland. Her novel Isobar Precinct, winner of the 2016 Sir James Wallace Prize for Creative Writing, and finalist for the 2019 Michael Gifkins Prize, will be published in 2020. Some of her work will be appearing in the upcoming anthology Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand.

.

.

One Minute Crying Time
by Barbara Ewing
Massey University Press

$39.99

ISBN: 978-0-9951229-5-6
ESBN: 978-0-9951095-0-6
PUBLISHER: Massey University Press
IMPRINT: Massey University Press
PUBLISHED: 14/05/2020
PAGE EXTENT: 336
FORMAT: Soft cover
.

Reviewed by Catherine Robertson

Recent memoirs by New Zealand writers have set a high bar. Linda Burgess, Diana Wichtel, Adam Dudding, and personal essayists Ashleigh Young and Rose Lu have all produced writing that is beautifully executed, emotionally courageous and evocative of time and place. Does Barbara Ewing’s One Minute Crying Time reach that bar? Almost, but not quite.

The memoir begins in 1951, when Ewing was seven years old, and ends in 1962, when she is on the ship that will take her from New Zealand to England, to start what will become a long, distinguished career in acting. A good portion of the content is lifted straight from diaries that Ewing kept diligently from childhood. Sifting through them was a huge task: twenty-four notebooks, over two thousand entries, ‘and I’ve had to read every single bloody day of them!’.

Ewing presents the selected diary entries unedited, complete with spelling mistakes and youthful naivety and bewilderment. The diary writing has a spirited charm, but by keeping her commentary to a minimum, Ewing requires the reader to do much of the heavy lifting of analysis and interpretation.

This is most pronounced in the first two-thirds of the book, when we are whisked through events with such speed and apparent randomness that it’s rather like the boat-ride scene in the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, where images flash past, some bizarrely shocking — was that a chicken being beheaded? — and are gone before you can react. Straight after telling us what comics she used to read, Ewing reveals that her mother, Jean, ‘was found to have a genius IQ…and was sent, aged fifteen, to Victoria University to study for a science and maths degree [but] she had a breakdown and left.’ Between a description of the dental clinic and a boy who smiles at her ‘charmingly’, Ewing accidentally jumps on a kitten: ‘I saw its squashed insides’. These and other startling revelations are dispatched with casual brevity, causing this reader, at least, to shout ‘Wait – what? Tell me more!’

In the last third of the book, the pace is less frenetic, and we get to follow some of the narrative threads for longer. It is engrossing and moving to read about Ewing’s relationship with a young Māori man, and her commitment to learning te reo – both unusual and extremely challenging in the late 1950s. Ewing’s mother initially refused to have ‘a Māori’ in the house.

We also, finally, spend more time with Jean Ewing, that frustrated, bitter, racist woman, perhaps envious of her free-spirited daughter, perhaps convinced that toeing the societal line was the only way a woman could be protected from disgrace. Ewing describes her mother’s behavior, but skates over an analysis of its probable cause, which is a shame as this is fertile ground to explore.

Ewing’s life has been fascinating, and there is much to relish and enjoy in this memoir. But for it to have been completely satisfying, we needed greater access to Ewing’s heart and head. We never truly get to know her, and while you can respect an author’s desire for boundaries, it’s the deep emotional truths that resonate best and longest. A few more layers down, and Ewing might have struck pure gold.

Catherine Robertson is a fiction writer whose four romantic comedy novels have all been number one New Zealand bestsellers. Her fourth novel, The Hiding Places (Penguin Random House, 2015) won the Nelson Libraries Award for NZ Fiction. Catherine is a regular guest on Radio New Zealand’s The Panel and Jesse Mulligan’s Book Critic slot. 

.

.

High Wire
by Lloyd Jones and Euan Macleod
Massey University Press

$45.00

CATEGORY: Art, Literature
ISBN: 978-0-9951230-8-3
ESBN: N/A
PUBLISHER: Massey University Press
IMPRINT: Massey University Press
PUBLISHED: 14/05/2020
PAGE EXTENT: 96
FORMAT: Hard cover
.

Reviewed by Ian Wedde

High Wire is the first picture book in the kōrero series from Massey University Press. The endpaper credit announces this as inviting ‘new and exciting collaborations – for two different kinds of artistic intelligence to work away at a shared topic’. Here, the two collaborators are the writer Lloyd Jones and the artist Euan Macleod. I’d add the book designer Gary Stewart of The Gas Project (‘design and stuff’), a Central Otago-based design office with a remarkable books catalogue. The Jones/Macleod kōrero debut is an ambitious place to start and on the strength of this launch we can look forward to the series, which I hear on the grapevine will include a collaboration between the photographer Haru Sameshima and the writer Paula Morris, subject: Robin Hyde.

The Jones/Macleod book opens with a title page (HIGH WIRE) and moves to two vigorously sketched facing pages in which a figure with a beaky nose is supine on a line (a ‘high wire’?) with what might be clouds both above and below. Then comes a painted or ink-brushed page in which the figure is bent over on a sagging wire, its nose and the brush in its hand pointing down at a painting balanced on the wire. The painting is of a figure balanced on a wire, and the beaky-nosed one wielding a brush might be painting itself balancing on a wire – a feat at once daring in itself if ‘true’ but also a reflexive metaphor for the creative balancing act that we’re about to encounter.

The following page adds the names Lloyd Jones and Euan Macleod to ‘HIGH WIRE’ – a writer and an artist. Next we encounter the writer’s first page, and here the balancing act begins. This isn’t just between the collaborative shares of text and graphic languages, but of a concept stretched between an initial idea (‘a project about bridges’) and disillusionment with that idea (‘… a single life consisting of many bridges crossed, then re-crossed, one after another …’). Jones finds his ‘heady ideas’ collapsed by ‘the commonality of experience’. After two pages of drawings in which the tightrope walker is looking apprehensively behind itself while another is hanging from the wire, and on the next crawling precariously, Jones states simply that, ‘I was not where I thought I was. I was not alone. The art I looked for was not there.’ This is aloof attitude towards shared experience and audience (‘commonality of experience’) suggests that what Jones wants is an original – solo – act.

On the next page he, and we, find that act. It is Philippe Petit’s performance when, in 1974, ‘he steps out onto a wire linking the twin towers of the World Trade Centre.’ Cue a marvellous page by Macleod in which the beaky figure we now know to be the aerialist Petit is walking along a wire stretched through clouds, then two facing pages in which he seems to be walking at night among stars and a moon (below him), and next the slightly sagging wire above scumbled buildings with an aircraft flying past just above it. Jones’s text on the facing page confirms that, ‘There is a photo of him lying on the wire as a Boeing flies across the slot of sky above.’

At this point of tension between a solo act of individual daring and ‘commonality of experience’ – between high wire and bridge – Jones begins to rebalance his text. He had visited the Twin Towers ten years after Petit’s uniquely famous performance and, overcoming a fear of heights, had looked down from a top floor window and seen a small plane fly into low cloud below. In September 2001 he had seen the terrifying footage of people leaping from the burning towers. From this point on, Jones’s text – in effect a prose-poem – reverts to variations on the bridges concept dismissed at the outset as unoriginal. Only now, it’s as though the bridges – the childhood railway bridge crossed to reach the ‘chlorinated heaven’ of a swimming pool, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the complex bridges (or not) of relationship, the bridge to nowhere, many others both literal and metaphorical – as though these and ‘what the world would look like if it were to abandon its bridges’ have been readmitted to Jones’s imagination and to the experience-sharing pages of this book, but enriched and revalued by the example of the tightrope-artiste Phillippe Petit.

The confidence with which both text and graphics move on from here is both adventurous and plain. Jones abandons his aloof hesitation and steps out across the wobbly bridges of experience. ‘I walked on, one steadying hand on the balustrade now, as another space opened up before me, a space where art is made.’ Or, in the case of his collaborator Macleod, a space shaped by ‘The struts and wires of his imagination.’

.

Ian Wedde is a poet, fiction writer, critic, and art curator, and the recipient of well over 30 major awards, including New Zealand Poet Laureate and  Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit. His latest novel The Reed Warbler was published in May 2020, through Victoria University Press.