Writers’ Round Table on Japan

 

A Taste of Clouds: New Zealand Writers Encounter Japan is a free ANZL bilingual sampler created in 2022 and available for download here.

The New Zealand writers sampled in this publication have all encountered Japan — in real life, on the news, through relatives and ancestors and friends, or in their imaginations. A Taste of Clouds features excerpts from creative work by Johanna Aitchison, John Tāne Christeller, Patricia Grace, Siobhan Harvey, Kirsten Le Harivel, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Ben Kemp, Colleen Maria Lenihan, Vivienne Plumb, Yeonghee Seo, Kerrin P. Sharpe, Carl Shuker and Yoshiko Teraoka.

This round table brings together Kirsten, author of the poetry collection Shelter (2021), who lives on the Kāpiti Coast; Colleen, author of the story collection Kōhine (2022), in Auckland; Carl, author of five novels, in Wellington; and Yuten Sawanishi, a fiction writer and lecturer in Japanese literature, in Kyoto. Paula Morris – project manager of A Taste of Clouds – asks questions and mentions Korea.

Yuten is on the board of the Kyoto Writers Residency, launched in October 2022: Paula took part in the inaugural residency, and the photos of Kyoto in this feature are from her time there. The other writers in the 2022 residency were Hubert Antoine, Ao Omae, Emily Balistieri, Alfian Bin Sa’at and Anna Cima.

Our conversation took place in February 2023, prior to Yuten’s first visit to New Zealand to explore possibilities of a reciprocal writers’ exchange.

 

 

Paula: Would each New Zealander talk about the time you spent in Japan and which of your works are set in Japan? You could also mention other places you’ve lived. Yuten, could you tell us a little about your own work, and also about the time you spent living in Germany?

Colleen: I first went to Tokyo in 1999 for a three-month stint. Upon my brief return to New Zealand, I accepted a marriage proposal from my Japanese boyfriend over the phone, and moved there in a matter of weeks.  At first I lived in Fuchu, a city in the Western Tokyo metropolis, then moved to central Tokyo: Shibuya, Daikanyama and Roppongi. On that initial trip to Japan I worked in the mizu shobai as a dancer in Kabukicho, Tokyo’s red light district. It was an incredibly stressful job and my first time overseas. I felt like a baby – everything was new and I didn’t understand anything.  It was all very overwhelming and I vowed never to return. 

But back in New Zealand, the pace of life was so glacial after the intense energy of Tokyo and I couldn’t stand it. I was in love and desperate to go back. Tokyo is so fascinating, thrilling, and addictive. I felt like I was in a movie. I hung out with strippers, models, money brokers, DJs, rock stars and yakuza. l stayed until 2014, and moved to New York for about 18 months. I much preferred Tokyo though and never really settled in New York. I came back to New Zealand in 2016 and started writing.

In my short story collection Kōhine , nine of the stories are set in Japan and draw on my experiences there. Losing my only child in Tokyo, working as a dancer and a hostess. The story ‘Directions’ is told from the point of view of crows living in Daikanyama. I was obsessed with the crows and often photographed them.  They are a constant, watchful presence and quite intimidating. They cause problems as they dig through trash, lay stones on train lines and sometimes attack people. I was intrigued to learn that in Japanese mythology they are divine messengers and a symbol of power. They are magnificent, clever birds. 

 

 

Yuten: Nice to meet you all online. I’m Yuten Sawanishi, a novelist. You can read one of my stories in English – ‘Filling up with Sugar’– on the Granta site. It is also included in The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories. I have not yet written a novel set in New Zealand, but I have written a novel set in a deserted island in Polynesia. The title is Rain and Crows. It’s a story about a World War II  soldier and an army nurse who survive on a deserted island and have children. It’s about their grandchildren as well. The story begins with the last survivor, Tadashi, found in a Harakiri state, and then their family story is told from Tadashi’s perspective. 

Colleen brought up the topic of crows: although crows are not supposed to be in Polynesia, they play a very important role in my novel as well. However, this is not based on a Japanese myth, but on an image of the raven as the god of creation.

Until I was six and a half, I lived in Germany because of my father’s job. When I played with my brother and friends, I spoke German and I used Japanese only when I was talking to my parents, so when I returned to Japan and entered elementary school, I was shocked to find that I could not understand what the people around me were saying. I could also hardly read or write, so Japanese appeared almost as a foreign language to me, not my mother tongue. I remember I was crying on the way home  on my first day of school. 

I picked up the Japanese language quickly, but even now, as a writer, I still find the Japanese language to be restrictive. On the other hand, Germany is not my home ground either. When I was a university student, I went to Germany for a short-term study abroad (I’d forgotten my German, so I studied it again from scratch). At that time, I realised that wherever I went, I was myself, and decided to do what I wanted to do. So I decided to become a writer.

Kirsten: I arrived in Tokyo in my mid-twenties with the intention of cycling from Japan to Europe with a friend. However, not long after I landed I was drawn into a spiritual eco-commune in the foothills of Mt Fuji, which turned the cycle tour upside down. Eventually I got back on my bike and we cycled around Hokkaido but that was where my tour ended! 

 

 

When my visa ran out, I sent the bike back to Aotearoa and went on to study meditation in Thailand. I continued west, to India, to visit a family I met in the Japanese commune, and worked in their hometown, Ahmedabad for three years. The city had a thriving network of social organisations (a world I was familiar with in New Zealand) and I was lucky to work for two local NGOs, the first supporting young Indian graduates to create social change and the second, an ethical travel guide in the style of Lonely Planet but developed by Gujaratis. 

Several poems in my first collection, Shelter, are set in Japan, some of which are included in A Taste of Clouds, and aspects of my time there continue to feature in my work. Japan was where I picked up a pen for the first time since my teens and when I returned to New Zealand, I was committed to being a writer, although it took me a while to call myself one.

I understand Yuten’s feeling of disconnection: I grew up in central Glasgow, moved to rural Palmerston North as a teenager and then lived for several years in Asia, before returning to New Zealand. For a long time, I felt like a real outsider here too. Migration, home, belonging are all themes that seem to come up in my work – how we connect (or disconnect) from the places and people we come from and how we find ourselves in the places we have come to. 

Carl: Wow, what an amazing set of stories: Japan really was and clearly is a locus for fascinating personalities. I overlapped with some of you in weird ways – I came to Tokyo in ‘99 too, Colleen! But age 24 with debts and needs for money and experience after finishing my first novel and wanting adventure. I returned to NZ to write up this experience in a book about gaijin decadence in Tokyo and Japanese history called The Method Actors, then 200,000 words wasn’t enough and I had to go back. 

The second trip I feel I may well have visited and stayed at that eco-commune near Mt Fuji, Kirsten! Couldn’t be the Earth Embassy/Solar Cafe place here could it? The place made a big impression on me. The floating forest of Aokigahara is one of those intense places with physical-spiritual loads like Jerusalem, Beirut, Nagasaki, Shimabara… I set part of Three Novellas for a Novel at the commune’s cafe/inn: I did a limited edition download ‘for free or more’ of the book for a while which you can still find on the wayback machine. Some cool photography from Japan courtesy of a friend and colleague there. The book imagines a future of concrete cancer where Japanese cement buildings can suddenly collapse, so an architecture of wood and plexiglass is growing.

Yuten, I’ve met many very interesting Japanese who find themselves caught somewhere between the world of other countries and never quite back inside traditional Japanese life and expectations. In my experience these people suffer somewhat for it, but become very interesting individuals. Japan’s closedness – 250 years of isolation, and intense immigration policies since – is a feature of the experience. Sometimes I never felt so free, others never so boxed in. I had to leave as I saw myself becoming shut in a gilded cage, but it has driven me to two books and a lifelong love-hate relationship with the place, not to mention the immensely important cuisine.

 

       

Carl in Shibuya, Tokyo, 2001                                   Mt Fuji. Photo credit: Anna Cima

 

Paula: Carl talks about a love-hate relationship with Japan. I wonder if we all have that with anywhere we live, as well as the place we come from.

Colleen: Great question! But first, Kia ora, Yuten – I enjoyed your short story on the Granta site and I’m intrigued by the premise of your novel, Rain and Crows. Sounds right in my wheelhouse! And ngā mihi to you all for sharing your experiences. I read them avidly and could empathise with a lot of things – as in Kirsten’s work, themes of the notion of home, and where is home anyway, emerge in my own writing. In my story ‘Mama’, the hostess protagonist is weaving through Ginza alleyways when it hits her: ‘How did she end up here? When she first arrived in Tokyo, everything was weird. Then it became normal. Now it was weird that it was normal.’

I absolutely love Japan and have a deep respect and admiration for the Japanese people and culture. Though as I mentioned, I struggled there, even hated it, at first. I recall catching packed trains all over Tokyo, commuting from various teaching jobs, and would be out in some suburb on the outskirts of the city in a sea of people and be the only foreigner. Everyone in my world for prolonged periods was Japanese, aside from my daughter. I was definitely an outsider. Gaijin literally means ‘outside person.’ 

It was hard on my daughter too. I was once summoned to her high school, to be confronted by the principal and all her teachers looking very serious. I didn’t know what had happened, Monique was clearly upset and I was alarmed. What kind of  trouble was she in? The principal said that my daughter’s hair was the wrong colour and unfair to the other students, who weren’t allowed to dye their hair.  She solemnly pushed a box of black hair dye across her desk and all the teachers agreed – this was the solution. I explained that dark brown was Monique’s natural hair colour, and pushed the box back. That wouldn’t do, and the box was presented to me again. We never did dye her hair black. 

My daughter made a lot of friends, and had many caring teachers over the years. Her first elementary school in Japan assigned Monique her own teacher to learn Japanese one-on-one, and she was fluent within six months. They were very kind to her and I, and did their best to make us feel welcome and included. 

I miss Japan but haven’t returned since I left nine years ago. I can’t wait to go back. Having spent most of my adult life there, it feels like my second home. Returning to New Zealand was rocky as I had reverse culture shock. For a while, I felt people here were quite rude because I was used to Japanese manners. It took me five years to settle. I love Aotearoa; this is my tūrangawaewae. But even now I still find some aspects of the culture challenging. I miss Japanese customs and ideas about the world. Sometimes, when people complain, I want to say ‘Shouganai’ [‘It can’t be helped.’]

Kirsten: It’s so really fascinating how many crossovers there are between us all, I love hearing everyone’s stories. I wonder if this feeling of ‘love-hate’ is almost an inevitable part of the experience of being a migrant and/or from a migrant family (or from a minority group in society), because we have this knowing that our familial way of life, isn’t the only way to be and that it can sometimes be antithetical to the values of the society we’re living in.

Like Colleen, I find there are aspects of each place I’ve lived that I cherish and ones that I am quite happy to have left behind. I also felt reverse culture shock when I moved back to New Zealand after living in India and if I’d had an equivalent of ‘Shouganai,’ I would have used it! I found the lack of information and awareness of the world outside of Aotearoa and—amongst middle-class-plus peeps particularly – the lack of awareness of privilege, inequality and the patriarchy really rattling. It took me several years to feel ‘at home’ here again as I didn’t feel that I fitted into the expected Pākehā, white, middle-class boxes, though I benefit from them, because of the way our society operates. 

I also experienced some of the isolation and loneliness that can come from being the only foreigner at work, home and in the community. Sometimes, I also found it kind of freeing – something I only realised when I came back to Aotearoa and all the ‘noise’ and expectations from media, government, socials and corporations was suddenly directed at me. I realise that being able to operate safely in any society is a situation of immense privilege. 

Had my background been different and my then in-laws and friends imposed more of the localised expectations on my behaviour, I would most likely have had a different experience. At that time, I was also really committed to assimilating. Now that I have kids, I know I would have been a lot less willing to take on values that didn’t align with my own.

Yuten: There are so many common topics and things I don’t know that it’s exciting for me too. Kirsten and Carl, I didn’t know there was such a spot on Mt.Fuji. I haven’t climbed Mt.Fuji yet, but now I have a place to stop before I reach the summit. Colleen, thank you for reading my work. Your story about your daughter’s school reminds me of my experience at swimming school when I was in elementary school.

I went to swimming school with my brother. When I was in Germany, I learned breaststroke first, in case I drowned in a river or the sea. For the same reason, I experienced swimming with clothes on. But in Japan, we learn crawl [freestyle] first. I don’t know why. The swimming school had a designated swimsuit made and sold by the school. One day my mother gave us each another swimsuit because the designated one hadn’t dried after the wash. When my brother and I were about to enter the pool wearing these swimsuits, the coach stopped us. We weren’t allowed in the pool because we weren’t wearing the school swimsuits.

Afterwards, the school called my mother and had her bring our school-specified swimsuit. Meanwhile we were standing at the edge of the pool. My mother was very angry. ‘Why can’t my children enter the pool just because their swimsuits are different?’ she asked. The coach said, ‘Your children are so embarrassed. It’s a pity.’ ‘It’s your fault,’ my mother retorted. My mother (especially after returning from Germany) is a person who speaks her own thoughts to everyone, as Carl said.

Now I know that my mother was right. But then I was really embarrassed. At the age of eight, I was trying very hard to fit in as quickly as possible. I was good at breaststroke and loved swimming, but in Japan I started as a beginner. At the same time, I was tired and hurt by the act of  worrying about my surroundings. In this country, fitting into a group was an important way of life. 

On the other hand, within the rules, if you show that you are excellent, you will be praised. The swimming cap has a place where a magic sticker is attached, and each time the swimming technique improves, the line increases one by one and the colour changes. Beginners have a white line up to three lines, then intermediate has a red line, advanced has a blue line, and masters have a black line. Aiming for each higher class, students master swimming. Such a kind of system tames children through rules. I think that there were a lot of small traps like that in Japan, and the mindset of ‘Shouganai’ was nurtured in this way. 

Kirsten’s words recall something Paula and the Belgian writer Hubert Antoine said at an event during last year’s Kyoto Literary Residency. Japanese people are very kind; if you ask for directions, they will show you the way; if you ask how to send an email, they will help you. However, there are few people who really care about the other person and follow through to the end in any situation. They check the rules, but if you’re not following the rulebook, they often won’t help you further. In the past, it was said that everyone was not kind in the way they are today in Japan. Instead, there were ‘really kind people’. Recently, I feel that the number of genuinely kind people has decreased.

 

 

Carl: I worked with a team of Japanese guys and one was a real loner, a bad boy, who raised hell, was always funny, individualistic and genuinely kind and really a free-thinker. I saw how his company treated him – the nail who stands up will be knocked down. He was sent out of his hometown, moved out to the sticks in Saitama. That really stung, watching the ‘wa’ assert itself over this unique individual. Literature to me is the assertion of individuality and it was a salutary lesson in the freedom I at least took for granted. 

 

Paula: What are your literary influences, from Japan and elsewhere?

Carl: I read a lot of – and about – [Yukio] Mishima before I wrote The Method Actors, to try to better understand the postwar shift in psyche, Mishima being a very complex reaction to this. The tension between the martial spirit and failure, loss, and how a culture transforms to accommodate this. I also loved Murakami Ryu’s Almost Transparent Blue (1976), set among a group of  teenagers on the fringes of a US army base: I loved the decadence and lostness set alongside complex political realities. I was interested in the space between decadence (mostly among gaijin in my book) and the past not being past in Japan. 

Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking had been recently published [in 1997], about the Japanese atrocity in China in 1937 and I found in Yaskuni Shrine – the controversial shrine to the war dead, including WWII – a strange little hardback called A rebuttal to the rape of Nanking where convoluted historiography and tortured data (and English) were used to assert that these events hadn’t happened. I was also influenced by shoujo manga, primary coloured emotions, deeply romantic and personal forms meeting with grinding bloody histories. It was almost an assertion of the purpose and rationale of what I thought literature should be in the face of histories documenting the deaths of hundreds of thousands – something to do with minutely observed human moments otherwise lost in the numbers of casualties. 

This was where I was at in Tokyo at the time – squaring this life of pleasure, decadence and (relative) riches with the epic scale of the loss and warfare just decades ago. Trying somehow to make the hundreds of volumes of the Tokyo War Trials transcripts sit alongside a nomihodai [all you can drink] menu in a karaoke booth in Shibuya after the trains shut down. 

Yuten: As Carl said, I think literature is something that liberates the individual. I recovered from my loneliness in ‘wa’ by reading Hermann Hesse’s novels and poetry. I rediscovered my lost homeland in literature.

As for Japanese literature, I was strongly influenced by Akira Kurosawa’s movie Rashomon. I was fascinated by the structure of the film, the camera angles, the music, and the movements of the actors. I especially like the composition, which requires the audience to mentally reconstruct the content of the film after viewing it, like most good literary works. 

The film is based on the 1922 short story ‘In a Grove’ [or ‘In a Bamboo Grove’] by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, whose work I research in an academic field, and of course I am greatly influenced by Akutagawa’s works. [Note: Akutagawa also published a story called ‘Rashomon’ when he was a student, but Kurosawa only used a few details from this in the film.] 

My debut work, Village of Flamingos, is set in Belgium. One day, the protagonist’s wife suddenly transforms into a flamingo. The villagers try to hide the bizarre fact, but other people find out. It turns out that most of the women in the village have turned into flamingos. In my work, I depict the disturbance of the villagers. One of the works that inspired me to write this is Akutagawa’s ‘Horse Legs.’ Akutagawa’s story is about a man who dies suddenly; is found – in the afterlife – to have died by mistake; and is brought back to life. However, the legs of his corpse are rotten, so his body is revived with the legs of a horse. The man is shy about the horse’s legs, and doesn’t tell his wife or colleagues, but gradually the horse’s legs take over his body. 

Kobo Abe’s 1962 novel The Woman in the Dunes [or Sand Woman] is also a work that I really like and was influenced by. In addition, I am fascinated by Yoko Ogawa’s narrative style, the sense of distance from the characters, and the allegorical nature of her works.

Kirsten: I’m currently exploring similar literary territory to your work, Yuten (and I enjoyed your piece in Granta too). I don’t know if you would – or would want to – call it magical realism, but I enjoy the possibilities that exist when elements of the fantastical become embedded in what is otherwise an everyday world. I’m in the midst of writing my first novel and I’m finding magical realism to be a really useful genre in which to imagine alternative realities, particularly when it comes to trying to break open traditional relationships and responses to trauma. 

Colleen: My story ‘Directions’, featuring multiple crow narrators, was directly influenced by the ghost voices in the novel Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) by George Saunders.  I attended a masterclass of his, and have seen him speak twice. He’s an incredible teacher and writer, and I wish I’d read his analysis of Russian short stories, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (2021), before completing my collection. I find his takes on the practice of writing comforting and inspiring, and enjoy his Story Club on Substack. He’s a practising Buddhist, which informs his writing. I have an enduring, deep interest in Buddhist philosophy sparked during my time in Japan, and these teachings helped me survive the loss of my daughter there. 

 

 

I have every book by W. Somerset Maugham. He grew up in France but moved to England as a child after his parents died. He was never accepted by the world of letters despite being one of the most successful writers of his time. I like his clear, plainly written storytelling. ‘Rain’ is a brilliant short story set in Samoa [which Maugham visited in 1916]. He wrote many short stories set in Asia, and was a wanderer, like me. 

I also love The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagan, in particular her lists: Elegants Things, Hateful Things, Things that Make One’s Heart Beat Faster. I listen to the New Yorker Fiction Podcast, where authors select and read a short story from the magazine archives and analyse it afterwards. ‘Barn Burning’ [from The Elephant Vanishes] by Haruki Murakami and ‘The Swimmer’ by John Cheever are faves. I love writing in the second person, so Bright Lights, Big City (1984) by Jay McInerney made an impact on me – I was impressed the author could maintain that voice so well over a whole novel. 

I just registered that you went to Japan in ‘99 too, Carl! We might have crossed paths without even realising. It was such an interesting time to be in Tokyo. 

Carl: Colleen! That’s crazy. There’s really such a small amount of foreigners in Tokyo at any one time. We may have even met eyes in Shinjuku – that assessing glance foreigners give each other. I’m psyched to read Kōhine now I’ve discovered you. I loved your self-portrait in Reading Room: ‘Who are you angry at?’  Many of us might benefit from being asked that as a young person.

 

Paula: ‘Barn Burning’ was a re-working of the William Faulkner story of the same name, published in 1939. Both were source material for the fantastic 2018 Korean film Burning, directed by Lee Chang-dong, who also directed Peppermint Candy (2000). Sorry: I have to insert something about Korea into every conversation.

And my final question: if you could transport yourselves right now to a particular place in Japan, where would it be? What would you be doing there? Yuten, this question is for you as well.

Carl: If I were back in TKO I would probably be eating, and probably at my favourite kaiten zushi in Ikebukuro, ordering o-toro, the fattiest of tuna cuts, made for me by hand by the stern old sushi chefs. But afterwards, I’d like to cross this bridge over the Shakujii river in heavy rain in blossom season as I did once when the river rose to fill this canyon up to the road, an endless violent cataract of seething brown blanketed in twitching white petals.

Hanami, or blossom viewing, is about as sad a Japanese cliche as there is but this was a profound moment in a profound place at a profound time for me. There are hundreds more places I’d go again: Nara; the high rail bridge over the river at Akabane at night and the endless ocean of peopled night; the viewing platform over the floating forest of Aokigahara; Nagasaki; Shimabara and the tokens I found there still placed today by the hidden Christians to commemorate a 17th-century massacre of 16,000 – places that gave me migraines and brought me to tears for their beauty.

 

 

Colleen: It’s too hard to choose one place. Like Carl, one of the first things I would do is eat ōtoro – it melts in your mouth and is my absolute all-time favourite kai. Tino reka! My favourite sushi place is in Nakameguro by the Meguro River (more of a canal really), and the chefs are notoriously surly. I went there so often they grudgingly accepted me and would serve up my regular order of amaebi (sweet shrimp) without me asking for it. Nakameguro is also a beautiful spot for Hanami. 

I would also go to Ukai Toriyama. It’s nestled in dense forest near Mount Takao and you dine in teahouse-style private tatami rooms surrounded by koi ponds and gardens where they grow a lot of their own produce, and make their own wasabi. The food is exquisite and the  atmosphere is sublime.

Finally, I would go to Shunkoin Temple in Kyoto for a Zen meditation retreat. I stayed here before leaving Japan. The temple is within a large complex of 50 temples, Myōshinji. Some of the temples are over 400 years old. The two oldest ones emanate a powerful mauri that is difficult to describe. They are so imposing; it’s a little spooky. I recall asking a taxi driver to take me there, but he insisted it would be closed to the public as it was after five. He was astounded that I was actually staying there. The priest at Shunkoin had opened his small temple for guests, in an effort to raise funds. When I arrived, I couldn’t believe I was staying there too. That’s one of my best memories:  entering the gates of Myōshinji at dusk, a chill down my spine as I passed by the Butsuden Hall, alone in Kyoto.

 

 

Kirsten: I am torn between wanting to be around the energy and vitality of Tokyo and the peaceful vibe of cycle touring through Hokkaido.

If I was in Tokyo, I’d want to go back to Shibuya and ride my bike through the little side streets and busy thoroughfares on the way to an izakaya, noodle house, coffee bar or stationery store.

I would also love to circumnavigate Hokkaido again by bike, but if I had to choose one area specifically, I would choose the coast near Wakkanai. The slow, de-habited feel of the many fishing villages, with their shrines, knots of fishing nets and elderly inhabitants, really reminded me of my childhood, visiting many of the Scottish Isles. As someone who is not particularly ‘practical’ in what they do for a living, I am always in awe of anyone who literally sustains themselves, their whānau and community.

 

 

Yuten: Wow, what a fun question! If I can go anywhere, not just in Japan, I will answer next to a sea turtle swimming in the sea. For me, sea turtles are sacred creatures. It moves very fast when it enters the sea, even though it moves very slowly on land. Its shape is completely different from that of a fish and I think the sea turtle is a symbol of diversity in the sea. The sea turtle swimming gracefully, seen in Hawaii, taught me the beauty of living. So I always want to jump in next to the sea turtle. (I like land tortoises too.)

When asked where I want to go in Japan now, I want to go to the Iruka Kissa-Bar in Kyoto. It was a spacious coffee shop and bar with very good music. There were only four tables near the handmade windows. The food was also good. The katsu-don and tomato sandwich were exquisite (and cheap) and could not be eaten elsewhere. The original cocktails included ‘Frozen Best Score (165000)’ – yes, the owner was a fan of Haruki Murakami. If you asked for a cocktail, the manager would change the music – for example, if you asked for the ‘Norwegian Wood,’ they’d play ‘Norwegian Wood’. It was just a few minutes from my house, and it was my favourite relaxing spot. Unfortunately, it suddenly closed at the end of last year. That’s why I want to go there now.

If I choose a place I can really go, I want to go to Beppu in Kyushu. Beppu is famous for its many hot springs. There are 27,000 sources of hot springs in Japan, of which 2,200 are in Beppu. I lived in Beppu for three and a half years, and I went to a hot spring almost every day. It’s a pity that the hot springs in Beppu are really very-very hot, so I can’t be in there for more than three minutes. There are so many sources of hot springs: in Beppu water from the hot springs flows in the groove of the road, and steam rises everywhere in the city. (If you search ‘Beppu’, you will see images of steam as if it were receiving a bombing.)  It was a very fun wonderland with a lot of energy.

I heard that the New Zealand that I will visit soon is a wonderful land too. While reading Taste of Clouds, I saw many of the sentences focusing on and describing nature in order to understand Japan. I am very interested in the land of New Zealand, which has nurtured such writers’ eyes. 

 

 

Taste of Clouds: New Zealand Writers Encounter Japan is a free e-sampler created by the Academy of NZ Literature. The design and translation team were Takako and Milton Bell. Please download and share.

Print copies are available in Japan from the Kyoto Writers Residency.

 

Best First Books

The Interview: Fiona Farrell

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Fiona Farrell was born in 1947 in Oamaru and her upbringing there has featured in a number of her books, most notably in the 2011 novel Book, Book.

She is one of few New Zealand writers who have been nominated for the NZ Book Awards in all three categories—fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Her first novel, The Skinny Louie Book, won the New Zealand Book Award for fiction in 1993 and four of her later novels were shortlisted for those awards. The Villa at the Edge of the Empire was shortlisted in the general non-fiction category in 2016, and her collection of poems written in Ireland, The Pop-up Book of Invasions, was a poetry finalist in 2008.

Farrell has also won awards for her short fiction and for her playwriting, and held many prestigious fellowships and residencies both here and overseas. She received the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction in 2007 and the ONZM for Services to Literature in the Queen’s Birthday Diamond Jubilee Honours list in 2012. Her 2018 public lecture, at the Auckland Writers Festival, on the political novel in New Zealand can be read in full here.

After many years living at Otanerito on Banks Peninsula, Fiona now lives with her husband in Dunedin. A new novel, The Deck, will be published in 2023.

 

This interview with Morrin Rout took place in November 2022.

 

 

You grew up in Oamaru in a home that valued books. Book Book gave us a real insight, albeit fictional, into the books that first intrigued and enticed you.

Yes, born and raised in North Otago. It was a lovely place to grow up: small, hilly, fantastic atmospheric old buildings — none of them specially cared for or labelled ‘heritage’ buildings. They were just there. The country round there was lovely too: lots of little winding white gravel roads, limestone outcrops, rivers and long sandy beaches where we could take our ponies swimming. Me and my sister and other kids just roamed about unsupervised. It was wonderfully free.

 

It was an interesting concept, using your life as inspiration for a novel. I’m not saying you were unusual in doing that, but I think it was the reason so many readers resonated with the book. 

I’ve never written a memoir — I don’t know if I ever would. I’ve always felt a bit reluctant to write about my family. It would feel intrusive I think and I know I’d get things wrong and it wouldn’t be true or fair.  Plus my sister would kill me. I changed things in Book Book — for instance, the funeral of the mother in that book is nothing like my mother’s funeral. My dad was a devout Catholic but my mother was an equally devout Presbyterian, very proud of her descent from Wee Frees who came out to Dunedin in the 1850s, helped build Knox Church and ran its Sunday School for years and years. So her funeral was at Knox, with ‘The Lord’s my shepherd’ (‘Crimond’) — very traditional, not like the funeral in the book where the mother makes a video and plays the piano for the hymns. That was someone else’s mother. I heard about her years later and thought it was funny. Book Book is based on my life but it’s fiction. I changed details and invented dialogue. But the books that Kate, the main character, reads – they are all 100% the books I’ve loved and been influenced by. They’re definitely ‘real’.

 

You often refer to the great opportunities offered by the welfare state, quoting the vast difference between the life of your great grandmother and yours. There’s a huge underlying sense of social justice or injustice in all your work.

I didn’t have a deprived childhood. Not at all. When I was small my dad had a job reading meters for the Power Board. My mum had given up nursing  to stay home and care for us. There wasn’t a lot of money but we had a big garden so there was lots of soup, lots of bottled fruit. We didn’t own many books: I got Arthur Mee’s The Children’s Encyclopedia for Christmas one year — ten volumes in their own little wooden bookshelf. Amazing. I loved it, read it over and over, cover to cover. Hundreds of pages of  British empire stuff, all those poems and tiny little black-and-white images of Great Art. And Enid Blyton, of course — hard core Famous Five, not wussy Secret Seven. But we borrowed heaps of books every Friday night from the public library so I never missed owning my own.

At mealtimes we sat round the table with our library books propped up against the teapot or the sugar bowl. It was how we avoided fights and arguments. My mum sat out in the kitchen with her feet (in Dad’s old socks) in the open door of the coal range oven, reading her religious books and pamphlets. My dad was injured at Alamein and got sick when I was about ten, a terrible painful arthritic paralysis that was a result of his war wounds. He’d sit up all night in bed, smoking and reading.

We weren’t deprived, but we weren’t well off either. We saved up for things like shoes or a winter coat. We didn’t get a car till I was ten, we lived in an old villa, and we voted Labour. Because of the first Labour Government —Michael Joseph Savage, Peter Fraser — my sister and I had been given this thing: ‘The Opportunity’. It was always said like that, as if it had capital letters. My dad had come out from Scotland in 1920 when he was eight, from the slums around the jute mills in Dundee.  His dad had been killed in France only a few weeks before the end of the First World War, but his mum somehow managed to bring her children out here to New Zealand — six of them, the youngest only five. She didn’t know anyone here, and she had TB or emphysema from working in the mills. But she got them here, and survived another eight years, working as a cleaning lady in Oamaru to give them The Opportunity.

My mum’s family had had a farm at Merton, near Dunedin. Her younger brother, Rob, went to university and would have become a lawyer — the first in the family — but he got TB in his first year. It spread to his brain and he ended up in the hospital at Cherry Farm, a gentle shambling wreck of a man. My mum adored him. She had trained as a nurse and went up to Waipiata to care for him when he got sick.  We used to visit Rob on Sunday afternoons. I hated going there, to Cherry Farm. The sunroom smelled of pee and the men were scary and unpredictable and it was all appallingly sad.

Neither Mum nor Dad got to go to the university. But there was absolutely no question that my sister and I would. And we would study arts, because that was what my dad would have studied if he’d had the chance: classics, literature, history. He said they were the only true education. There were studentships if you agreed to teach for three years on graduation. No student fees. No massive debt to repay. Fantastic. It still makes me mad seeing what was done to education in this country in the 90s. It should be free, funded by the state and staffed by professionals, all the way from early childhood to post-grad.

 

 

I suspect you were a clever girl at school. When did you first get the sense that you were or could be a writer?

I wasn’t particularly clever — good at English, that was about it. The local high school, Waitaki, had a great English teacher whose idea of teaching senior English was to have us read all of Jane Austen, which I think was pretty close to perfect. At primary school I had a teacher who let me read a chapter book I was writing to the other kids, week by week. It was an adventure story set on an island with a castle and I had no idea each week what was going to happen, but it was great to read it out.

At Waitaki I wrote poems for the school magazine, and an essay for a competition for North Otago schools commemorating Scott’s expedition to the South Pole. I think the news of his death had been telegraphed round the world from Oamaru or something like that — so they had this annual competition with a prizegiving and speeches in the Opera House. I wrote this total fabrication about My Visit to Antarctica, all very enthusiastic, when the idea of going to Antarctica, living in some container surrounded by snow and ice, actually made me feel nauseous. I still don’t think humans should be there. Just leave it pristine, to the animals who have evolved to survive without artificial assistance. But anyway, I won the competition for this total lie, which probably wasn’t the ideal encouragement.

 

It must have been a real lesson in the power of good writing and a testament to your skills of persuasion. I imagine it must have been a boost to your confidence when you went to university.

I went to Otago and did three years of English honours, a new course they were trialling with a small group studying English and American literature intensively, medieval to modern, with a little nod at the end to Janet Frame and a couple of New Zealand poets. I got married in my final year to another student who had a scholarship to Oxford to study medieval Icelandic literature. So we went there, and after three years, on to Toronto where I enrolled to do an MA then an M.Phil at the Drama Centre.

 

 

Theatre was your real passion then, wasn’t it?

Yes, that’s what I really loved at the time. I still wrote the occasional poem, but the main things I wrote were a couple of theses: one on a woman who was pretty much forgotten then, Aphra Behn, the first woman to make her living as a professional writer on Grub Street in London in the 17^th century; and the other on a pencil manuscript for a poetic drama by T S Eliot. I loved doing the research — but the Drama Centre was also a highly practical place, with heaps of productions in the student theatre, lots of opportunities to act and direct. I really loved directing. Had we stayed on in Canada, that’s probably where I would have headed. But we didn’t stay. We had our first baby, and we wanted to come home. I wanted her to run around barefoot and go to big empty beaches and be fussed over by her grandparents and go to A&P shows and eat hotdogs on sticks with tomato sauce.

 

 

Those years in Palmerston North with young children and busy jobs were a really productive writing time. I think you started off with getting a poem published and writing plays and then suddenly it seemed you had a book of poems, a collection of short stories and then your first novel, The Skinny Louie Book, the winner of the 1993 New Zealand Book Award for fiction, all published in a matter of a few years. And it wasn’t just getting published: you were winning prizes and awards in just about every competition, and for every genre that you were writing in – a pretty extraordinary achievement.

So yes, we came back. My husband had a job at Massey and I had another baby,  and when she was about five months old, I got a part-time job at the local Teachers’ College, teaching a new course for students learning how to use drama in the classroom. I knew next to nothing about teaching, but I had lovely colleagues and the best part was that I found myself writing little plays. The students were supposed to do some practical work, and there simply weren’t any scripts available for groups of 20 (17 women and three men) and certainly not with a New Zealand setting or content. So I began writing them myself. Adaptations of myths, a musical about the Waihi Strike of 1912 based on a book one of my colleagues, [Yvonne] Stanley Roche had written based on documents and interviews with old people who remembered the events well. I was writing plays, too, for children in an after-school drama class I was running in town.

I’d stopped writing poems at Otago when I showed a boy who had had a poem in Landfall one of my sonnets. I thought it was rather good: it was about being misunderstood and it was based on a poem we’d been studying: Thomas Wyatt, ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’. The boy laughed, probably rightly. It was a bit pompous, but it meant I pretty much stopped writing poems. Just concentrated on the academic stuff.

Then fourteen years later when we were living in Palmy, my dad died and I wrote a poem, the way people do when they are really sad. I was fiddling with it one afternoon in the tiny office I shared with Stanley. She glanced over as she was scrambling round my desk to get to hers and read my poem. ‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘You should publish that.’

It’s weird isn’t it, how little it takes.

 

And it was published?

Yes it was, I think in the Listener, but maybe Landfall, and I then began writing more until I had enough for a collection, Cutting Out, which AUP accepted and published in 1987.

 

When did you start writing short stories – at the same time?

I was pretty busy — two children, a job, producing plays and so on — but I could manage to finish a short story. I sent one in to a competition in the Manawatu Evening Standard and it won. Then there were all these other competitions: there were a lot at that time and they were a big deal, with good prize money and overseas judges and award ceremonies and formal dinners. The BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award, the Mobil Dominion Short Story Award, the American Express Short Story Award. I kept writing stories and sending them off and I won them all and I know it sounds clichéd, but it was the most fantastic encouragement.

 

This was a time when women writers were starting to become visible, wasn’t it?

I’d been made redundant from my job at the Teachers’ College — all the part timers were laid off in a single cost-cutting sweep. Mostly women, trying to juggle jobs with family commitments. Only six women were left on the staff at Palmerston, and it was one of those ‘clicks’ that feminists were talking about at the time, when you realise that systems make things difficult for women. There were lots of clicks that year. Looking through Landfall, for example, for some poems to teach the students and noticing there wasn’t a single woman writer.  Why not? Where were they? So writing the stories, writing female characters, seeing the stories published was a terrific buzz. It felt like a way that would cut through all this. I could write and be independent of any system. I could just write away on my own and no one could decide to make me redundant.

 

I understand it was Melvyn Bragg that supported your foray into novel writing?  

I was writing short stories — they came out eventually in a collection, The Rock Garden, in 1989 — and entering these competitions and at one of the award ceremonies the judge, Melvyn Bragg, said to me, ‘Why are you wasting your time on short stories? You should try a novel.’ So I had a go. I took the story that had won that competition and another story, unpublished, set in the future when New Zealand is turning into a desert and people are battling over water, and I wrote my way from one story to the other. It became my first novel, The Skinny Louie Book, which won the fiction prize at the New Zealand Book Awards in 1993. That was how I began writing novels.

 

And then came your move to Christchurch. I wonder if you knew how significant that would be?

In 1992 I had moved down to Christchurch for a writer’s residency at the university. My husband and I were in the process of separating and at the end of that year, I met the man who became my second husband and moved with him out to a remote bay on Banks Peninsula.

 

How did living on the peninsula affect you and your writing? It’s such a stark, bold landscape – there are no soft  green, rolling hills to ease the eye. The climate can be severe and you can be isolated for days at a time.

I lived at Otanerito for nearly 30 years. I never thought when I was younger that I’d live at the end of a gravel road: I’d always liked cities and towns with friends nearby and interesting buildings and lots going on — plays and concerts and people. But I loved living at Otanerito. I loved the peninsula. It’s a stunning landscape with all those deep indented bays and valleys. I loved walking over it, climbing up and down the hills, loved the weather: it did amazing weather. Great fogs that poured down over the hills,  huge Antarctic swells that surged into the bay so the air thrummed, you could feel it in your bones, and amazing rainbows — circular ones and vertical ones and multiples.  I loved the snow and being cut off for a few days — not too long, but three or four days of candles and quiet and cooking on the woodburner was lovely.

And though it was a long drive to Akaroa and Christchurch and seemed isolated, it wasn’t really. There were walkers every day from October to May. Around 54,000 stayed in our house in the time we were there and thousands more stopped in for a coffee or a swim at the beach, really interesting people. Plus friends visited and our family. And if I wanted to work, I had my hut up in the paddock. My husband set up my computer so it could receive a signal from down in the house and so long as the thistles in the orchard didn’t grow too thick, it worked really well.

I felt contained by the bay; I liked the rhythm of days there, and the shape of a year. I liked people coming down into the bay and being happy to be there. It felt good. I liked growing things, putting in fruit trees, and the writing was part of all that. I liked sitting at my desk and looking up from something I was working on, something I was imagining and seeing the bush up at Hinewai covering the valley all the way up to the skyline. I liked the sound of the sea, the rhythm of it, and the birds and the seals and that whole feeling of this beautiful world just ticking along. It was lovely.

We had to leave eventually. Age, energy, keeping the water running from a spring up the hill, a change in the way the track was routed that cut out the bay, all that. But for a long time it was really good.

 

 

You’d used historical settings for your plays and several novels you wrote over that period could be categorised as historical fiction, Mr Allbones’ Ferrets (2007) and The Hopeful Traveller (2013) —or do you not count them as such? 

Yes, I’ve written books that look like historical novels but they’re not really. I’m not really interested in trying to re-create the past. I don’t actually like historical fiction — I don’t believe it, for a start. It’s always fake, like those Pioneer Villages with bits and pieces piled into a room at random. I think all writing is contemporary. It’s completely bound up in the present. In the things we value right now.

So when I wrote Mr Allbones’ Ferrets it was because I was caught up in the debate around genetic engineering. I loathed the idea of fiddling with genes, and introducing these manipulated living forms into the world, specially here into this country, leader of the pack when it comes to species extinction. We were really aware of ferrets and stoats at Otanerito, trapping and so on, and watching the bird population recover.

I went up to Wellington and had a look at the papers of one of the men who had introduced ferrets to New Zealand back in the nineteenth century: a farmer, one of those arrogant knuckleheads who took no notice of warnings that it would be disastrous, just fixated on controlling the rabbits on his property. I came across his receipts for a shipment of assorted mustelids — ferrets, stoats, weasels. The agent who’d collected them and brought them out was called ‘Allbones’ which I thought was just such a great name for someone involved in helping trigger species extinction. I could have written non-fiction I suppose, but I don’t like coming at things head on. I like parables, and that’s what that novel is. It’s a parable that looks like a Victorian romantic novel. It’s even got a pink cover, a detail from a painting by Maryrose Crook that is exactly on the same wavelength. It’s a painting of a silk Victorian ball gown embroidered with images of all kinds of pests introduced into New Zealand, including ferrets. It’s called [The Sorrowful Eye of] The Pest Dress, and it’s absolutely beautiful, until you look closer and see what it is really about. It’s the perfect image for the cover of that book.

The Hopeful Traveller was a bit different. I was playing around with structure. I like doing that in a novel. I always think of books as objects. They are the perfect object to convey lots of complicated ideas and images in a compact form. When I’m beginning a novel, I start with the shape of it. I often have no idea what the book will be about, but I do know what shape I might play with: if it will be in lots of little bits — like the two quake books, all broken up, the way the city was post-quake and the way my head was dealing with reality at the time, all distracted and in pieces. Or maybe I’ll work with two related sections of six pieces each. With illustrations. That kind of thing.

Anyway, The Hopeful Traveller was about the idea of Utopia and it was written in two halves, both set on an island just off the coast with a little group of visitors, but separated by more than a century. So when the visitors come to the island it’s with different hopes. I wanted to write about this country — I always do. We’re living in such an experiment here, in a place where ideas of how people might live are being actively worked out. It’s a really exciting place to be writing. I remember thinking when I lived in the UK that it was lovely, with all that tradition and past and that long history of writers, but how much better it was to be here, working things out that hadn’t necessarily been written about before.

This country has been a massive experiment, right from the beginning probably — I don’t know, but I am guessing it has been like that since the very first waka came into shore. People coming from elsewhere who have to figure out how to live here, adapt, live alongside other people, determine where the boundaries will be, naming places and things. And since Europeans arrived, the experiment has become more complicated, and we’re still in the thick of it.  Trying to figure out how we can live in this place.

I wanted to write about that and the idea of the ideal community. I’d been reading this French thinker, Fourier, who was a commercial traveller back in the nineteenth century and clearly had a lot of time on his own in hotels in strange towns in the evenings. He seems to have spent his time devising this fantastic, notion of the perfect community where everyone would have a place appropriate to their personality. So the serial murderers and psychopaths, the Neros, would be the butchers, using their natural tendencies to kill to supply the community with meat. (Fourier was a big meat-eater.) I just loved it — and that there were actually people (I read about some in America) who tried to put his ideas into practice. So that’s what The Hopeful Traveller is about — not history exactly, but a story told in two halves. You tip the book over to read each one, and you can decide to read the contemporary bit first, then go back to history, or the old bit first then up to the present. It was a kind of game I was playing.

 

During this period, you also had a number of overseas residencies, like the Katherine Mansfield fellowship in Menton, and the Rathcoola residency in Donoughmore, near Cork, in Ireland. The Pop-up Book of Invasions (2007) came out of the latter and it seems that the poems you wrote during your time there led you back home in many ways.

Yes — I’ve had a couple of residencies overseas. Incredibly lucky.

Menton was long established. I was the 26th writer to have it. I was there in 1995, an odd time in some ways — France resumed nuclear testing at Mururoa that year and there was a lot of protest, a second peace flotilla sailing from New Zealand. There were a couple of signs on walls in Menton but it all felt weirdly distant. We lived a kind of detached ex-pat life there — very pleasant, lots of swimming, nice walks, met some interesting people and I wrote the short stories that were published eventually as Light Readings (2001). The one set most strongly in the hills round Menton turned out as a kind of fairy tale, a bit detached from reality — and really that was how it felt being there: a bit detached, slightly unreal.

Donoughmore was different. It was a new residency for artists as well as writers. The resident before me was the sculptor, Denis O’Connor, the sculptor. I’ve got strong family links with Ireland through my father, but I knew very little about the place, so it was a real process of discovery for me, about Irish history which I found totally compelling, painful but compelling. And colonialism: how it was worked out in Ireland, then applied to New Zealand and what that meant in each place, if you were among the colonised on the one hand, and one of the colonisers on the other. I wrote really fluently there, just caught up in the place and all the ideas it prompted.

 

 

But then the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 shattered the tranquillity of life at Otanerito. Poetry seemed to come first in your response to the huge upheaval that the earthquakes wrought on your life and, from my memory of the time, that seemed to be the genre that most writers used to respond to their experiences in the beginning. The poems ‘The Horse’ and ‘The poem that is like a city’ were two of the most powerful and evocative for me. Why did you choose poetry or did it feel as though there was no other choice?

Lots of people reached for poetry after the quakes. Making things up when the whole city of Christchurch was in turmoil, in a mess beyond anything anyone had imagined, seemed a bit unnecessary. Poems are from the heart and direct and besides I think everyone was simply preoccupied with getting through each day, cleaning up, moving somewhere else if the house was totalled, dealing with insurers and so on. Novels take weeks, months, and a degree of calm.

 

You were personally affected by the earthquakes and your frustrations with and anger at the injustices being inflicted on people by EQC and the insurance companies drove the decision to write two books on this experience, one non-fiction and the other, a novel, Decline and Fall on Savage Street (2017). I remember sitting in a plane as I read the opening of The Villa at the Edge of the Empire in which you describe a map and I was able to look out the window and see the topographical features that you were referring to below me – I was aloft and detached with the god’s eye view you were depicting. 

Well, I know I don’t have to tell you that the earthquakes were overwhelming! I mean, you’ve only just got your home repaired after what? Eleven years? They were utterly overwhelming and all consuming. I was completely caught up in the strangeness of them, the politics of the rebuilding, the way they exposed the reality of where I’d been living for twenty years. They also completely changed the way I knew people: suddenly people I’d known for years in one way, casually, as friends or colleagues or acquaintances were revealed as these extraordinarily brave and stoical and inventive human beings. Relationships simply shifted to a whole new level and they have never reverted from that. I don’t think they ever will.

I just fell in love with the people I knew and the city too. And all I wanted to do was write about it, try and examine what this place was where I had been living all that time with my eyes only half open. I loved meeting people through the interviews for The Quake Year (2012), and then I had this amazing piece of good fortune in being given a grant, the two-year Creative New Zealand Michael King Writer’s Fellowship to write a couple of books about the city. I wanted to write about it via facts but I also believe that fiction has a way of opening up reality too. I believe that feelings, which are at the core of fiction,  are an equally valid — maybe more valid — way of understanding a major event.

I imagined the two books in a single box set, balancing one another. That’s never happened — but I’d like it to happen sometime and if I ever win Lotto I might see if I can publish them together like that. They took ages to write, of course, but it felt wonderful doing it. A total exploration.

 

Tell me about the joys and difficulties of collating Nouns, verbs, etc: Selected Poems (2020). I know a collection like this is a significant work in a poet’s career, a time of reflection. You say in the preface, ‘It’s so difficult in 2020 to convey just how it felt to be in this world where men, past and present, stood about booming to one another like so many kākāpo on a steep hillside’.

I wanted to say at the start of that book how very different it was when the first poems in that collection were being written, that odd world of domination by male writers, that has shifted so totally, especially among poets. Though at my granddaughter’s high school, a co-ed, I can’t help noticing she’s been taught only male writers. Still jolly old Baxter. None of the recent young New Zealand women writers, for instance. There seems to be a  time lag at the universities where the teachers are being taught and that time lag and lack of research interest is affecting what’s being taught in schools. It’s hard to shift the monoliths.

I did love making a collected poems, gathering pieces together and seeing them come out in a handsome cover, with a ribbon. I’d always wanted a ribbon. I’m working on prose now — have been for the past two years, but that novel is almost due to be published and then I’m going to go back to poems for a while. I want to pay attention to the here and now and the fine detail, and poetry is the way to do that.

 

You take infinite delight in exploring language, the form, the use, the sound, the look, seemingly every possible permutation and combination. How we order and discipline it. There are those poems in The Inhabited Initial (1999) about punctuation marks, for instance. 

I’m fascinated by the strangeness of words, the way human beings have developed this amazing capacity for nuance from a base of grunt and squeak. And then that further development when those words are translated onto a page or screen. It really is magical. And punctuation was part of that, the way signs are used to signal surprise or query or a pause for breath or whatever. The history of those signs fascinated me — that an exclamation mark for instance is actually a word — it’s a letter ‘I’ over little circular ‘o’ and it means Io, or ‘joy’, a Latin word that scribes inserted into texts when something wonderful and miraculous occurred. I’ve always loved that sort of thing. I was the sort of child who liked writing secret codes in lemon juice on bits of paper, or writing my name using the futhark [alphabet].

 

It seems like you have mastered every genre. Was it a progression from one to the other, or were you writing all simultaneously?

Sometimes I just like walking round a theme in different media — like an artist sketching something in pencil, then switching to oils. You get a different effect with each way of arranging words. I also like the feeling that I’m learning a craft, developing a variety of skills, that I know what I’m doing professionally. I know I hop about, from poems to short stories to plays to journalism and so on, but I think I would be bored if I kept working in just one genre.

 

 

 

You wrote in The Broken Book (2011) about lying in bed as a child looking for faces and patterns in the paisley frieze in your bedroom. You said, ‘That’s what I do now when faced with the randomness of ordinary life: I insist that unrelated details arrange themselves in something I am capable of recognising … I try to write it down. Lines and circles forming in orderly rows across a blank white page.’

Writing for me is always exploring. I don’t plan. I simply sit down every morning and see what’s there. It’s a very peaceful meditative state. I’m constantly surprised by what my mind throws up. It’s a bit like dreaming really. I don’t usually recall what my dreams have been about, but those I do remember when I wake are always about a journey through unfamiliar territory. I’m usually on foot and I’m walking along tracks and roads through strange towns, in and out of unknown houses. It’s not an unpleasant sensation. I never plan when I start to write, nor do I consider an audience.  In fact, it always feels like a bit of a shock when the book comes out and people begin reading it. I never anticipate that, for some reason.

Every time that I begin writing something I feel like a total novice. I have to learn how to do it all over again. I write very slowly, taking months, sometimes years to finish a novel. I love the feeling of sitting at my desk every morning, seeing if I can make the words work today, if I can solve the puzzle I’ve set myself. It’s incredibly enjoyable. It’s a kind of childish pleasure, really and I don’t ever want to lose it.

 

 

 

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Morrin Rout has spent over 25 years organising literary events and festivals and producing and presenting book programmes on national and local radio. She is the former Director of the Hagley Writers Institute and is a current member of the WORD festival trust board.

 

‘The Award Changes Everything’

Paula Morris talks to Stephanie Johnson and James Norcliffe about their Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.

 

Neither Stephanie Johnson nor James Norcliffe were expecting the call from Malcolm Burgess from Creative New Zealand. Burgess, an affable former journalist, has the bureaucratic job title of ‘Arts Practice Director (Literature)’, and is usually the sounding board for writers’ complaints, demands and laments. Johnson says her ‘initial response was one of total disbelief.’ Norcliffe, working in his garden when the call came on the rarely used landline, thought that ‘someone had nominated me as a referee on a CNZ application of some sort.’

Both were ‘delighted’, they say, when they realised they were both being given one of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. Three—for poetry, fiction and/or drama, and nonfiction, each valued at $60,000—are awarded annually. Johnson was this year’s fiction recipient and Norcliffe was recognised for poetry. Nonfiction was awarded to historian Vincent O’Malley, winner at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards this year for Voices from the New Zealand Wars | He Reo nō ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa.

 

 

The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards will be thirty years old next year. In 2003 the prime minister was Helen Clark and the first recipients were Hone Tuwhare (poetry), Janet Frame (fiction), and Michael King (nonfiction). Tuwhare was in his 80s and Frame in her late 70s, their selection setting the precedent for giving the awards to writers senior in both years and status. King was in his late 50s, but had just published the landmark Penguin History of New Zealand. (His award, sadly, was just in time: he died in a car accident the following year.)

In the following decades, the PM’s Awards have recognised a number of writers born in the 30s and 40s, including Kevin Ireland, Vincent O’Sullivan, Bill Manhire, Elizabeth Smither, Cilla McQueen and Fleur Adcock, for their poetry; fiction writers Maurice Gee, Margaret Mahy, Patricia Grace, Albert Wendt, C.K. Stead, Fiona Kidman, Owen Marshall, Marilyn Duckworth and Witi Ihimaera; and nonfiction writers Philip Temple, Anne Salmond and the late James McNeish.

As high-profile career awards, they’ve inevitably been the source of controversy, particularly when older and more acclaimed writers seemed overlooked: historian Claudia Orange and Māori arts scholar Tīmoti Karetu, both only received the award (in 2021 and 2020, respectively) after nonfiction writers more than two decades their juniors, and arguably not their equals in prominence, had been awarded.

In 2018 Peter Wells, terminally ill, was widely anticipated to win the nonfiction prize; it went instead to Wystan Curnow for his art scholarship (rather than his poetry), leading to some accusations of malfeasance on the part of CNZ’s ‘expert panel’ who assess the public nominations: one of that year’s panel, Murray Edmond, had taught alongside Curnow for many years in the English department at the University of Auckland. It was also the second year in a row that the nonfiction award went to a fine-arts writer who had retired from the English department at the University of Auckland (Peter Simpson, in the same year another retired Auckland professor, Witi Ihimaera, was honoured as well.)

Still, Johnson says, the Prime Minister’s Awards are ‘unique and important’ because ‘writers are nominated by their readers and peers.’ (Disclosure: I have nominated Johnson myself more than once for this award.) ‘It’s validation and acknowledgement and makes an enormous difference to a writer’s state of mind and generally shaky self-belief.’

Norcliffe agrees. ‘Writing is of course a solitary act and if you are, like so many I know—including myself—something of a perfectionist you’re never completely confident in the worth of what you’re doing or entirely happy with the finished product. To have your work validated by others—readers, critics, reviewers—is both gratifying and necessary. This award is in many ways the ultimate validation.’

It may seem strange—to people who aren’t artists—that writers of such experience and pedigree still relish ‘validation’. ‘It is a sad truth,’ Johnson says, ‘but for most of us, even when we have written many books or plays or volumes of short stories or poems, imposter syndrome can still hold sway. I think New Zealand writers are particularly vulnerable to this, because we are (mostly) writing only for our small population. I remember years ago a publisher saying to me that if my books sold to the same percentage in a larger population, I would be a wealthy woman.’

New Zealand writers living in country must, Johnson says, ‘to some degree, embrace a modest lifestyle. Most of us have to teach, act as mentors, carry out manuscript assessments, review, drive buses, wipe bottoms, pluck chickens and wait tables. It worries me that many of our younger writers, particularly those carrying large student loans, anticipate that they will one day make a living from writing. A tiny percentage will, and mostly those are writers who leave our shores, and/or embrace writing genre. If you play your cards right, there’s money to be made writing crime and romance.’

Although the Prime Minister’s Awards are genre-specific, both Norcliffe and Johnson have published widely in various genres. Norcliffe says he wears ‘a number of writing hats: poetry, fantasy fiction for young people, fiction for older people, and editing. I sometimes wonder whether the poets regard me as a children’s writer who writes poetry, and the children’s writers regard me as a poet who writes children’s fiction. That’s one of the reasons this award was such a delight as I always felt I might fall between the stools when such accolades were being decided.’

 

         

 

Norcliffe has published 11 collections of poetry, a short story collection and the 2022 novel The Frog Prince, as well as several award-winning novels for young people. He believes that his ‘breakthrough children’s book’ was The Loblolly Boy (2011), winner of the 2010 NZ Post Award for Junior fiction and also had international success. His sixth poetry collection Villon in Millerton (2007) was an artistic turning point—‘I felt lifted my work to a higher level’—that served as a foundation for his subsequent collections.

 

..     

 

In 2023 Johnson will publish her fifteenth novel, Kind, and her fourth short story collection. She’s also the author of two volumes of poetry and two non-fiction books. ‘When I look back over them,’ she says, ‘the books I feel the fondest of are The Heart’s Wild Surf (1996), The Open World (2012), The Shag Incident (2002), The Writing Class (2013), Everything Changes (2021) and The Whistler (1998). These are variously historical fiction, satire, contemporary fiction and science fiction.’ She’s also proud of the 2019 nonfiction book West Island: Five Twentieth Century New Zealanders in Australia.

 

        

 

‘I didn’t start out as a prose writer. Like many of us, I wrote poetry first, and then plays. My play ‘Accidental Phantasies’ enjoyed two long seasons in Wellington and Auckland, and won me the Bruce Mason’s Playwriting Award, when I was twenty-four. I have had plays produced since, but none so successful.’

 

   

 

Both writers have also made major contributions to New Zealand’s literary scene and infrastructure. For the past twenty years, Norcliffe has worked with Glyn Strange on the annual ReDraft collections of the very best writing by teenagers. His fellow selector for some years was Tessa Duder, recently replaced by Michelle Elvy. ‘Each year we find upwards of a hundred prodigiously talented young writers whom Glyn publishes in a handsome collection. The best of the contributions are Landfall quality. Sadly, only a smattering of these young writers carry on to make names for themselves in the wider literary world. Perhaps events overtake them, perhaps they lose interest, perhaps the opportunities are not there.’

 

     

 

Norcliffe notes that despite our challenging times, ‘some adventurous new publishing ventures [are] entering the market’ along with new online journals. ‘Over the last few years, I’ve been involved in helping put together some major anthologies—most recently Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand (with Michelle Elvy and me). Such a range of voices and what depth and brilliance!

 

 

In 1997, with the late Peter Wells, Johnson founded the Auckland Writers’ Festival. ‘Penelope Hansen, Jill Rawnsley and Anne O’Brien in their capacities as festival manager/director made the festival what it is today,’ she says, ‘but I am fiercely proud of being there at the start, acting as director and serving on the Board, in various roles for around sixteen years.’ A number of other local writers and advocates ‘worked just as hard on the Auckland Writers’ Festival as we did over the first years,’ singling out the late Keith Stewart and Stephen Stratford, who ‘were supportive and inspirational.’

‘At the outset, Peter and I wanted to showcase New Zealand writers. We did not intend for the festival to become, in Peter’s words, ‘a landing strip for the Booker shortlist’. It was our great pleasure to introduce writers that had not necessarily ever won a prize, but whose books deserved relishing.

‘It was also our objective to build a bridge over the Tasman and introduce Australian writers to festivalgoers. We hoped that this would become a mutual exercise with the Australian festivals. To date, there has been some improvement but perhaps not all we hoped for. The immutable fact is that if we don’t celebrate our own national literature, our own writers and their work, no one else will.’

 

 

Like Norcliffe, Johnson continues to identify and mentor new voices. A long-time judge for the Sunday Star Times Short Story Award, Johnson is a fiction judge for the Jan Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, to be awarded in 2023 at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. ‘I can report that our fiction is in excellent health,’ she says. ‘I am continually surprised by the inventiveness, diversity, proclivity for lively language and the compelling story-telling skills of my compatriots.

In addition, this year alone, Johnson taught a semester in creative non-fiction at Massey University; worked for a production company as a hired writer/director on a podcast; assessed several manuscripts, both fiction and non-fiction; examined a thesis for the MCW at Auckland University; written a reader’s report for a publisher and reviewed many novels for several magazines and websites, including the ANZL. She enjoys the work by admits that ‘much of it is poorly paid. I perhaps wouldn’t have enjoyed driving busses and trucks, but just before I heard about the award I made enquiries about getting my HT licence. There’s a shortage of bus and truck drivers, and I was willing to give it a go.’

‘But the award changes everything,’ says Johnson. ‘Before August I had written about 30,000 words of a new novel. Now I will be able to go back to it because the Prime Minister’s Award has bestowed that elusive quality that eludes even senior writers: peace of mind. There is money in the bank and life is not entirely pointless. This new book is partly set on Waiheke Island. I think I might go overseas to do some research.’

For Norcliffe, the award reminds him of ‘being awarded the Burns Fellowship in 2000—another huge fillip to my confidence and feelings of security as a writer.’ He ‘cannot stress enough,’ he says, ‘the importance of such residencies and awards.’

 

 

Reading Dangerously

.

David Eggleton on the books he read in 2022

 

 

Around the World in 80 Books is the wannabe-enticing title of a new guide from Pelican by Harvard University’s David Damrosch, a series of short chapters on ‘masterpieces of world literature’, but I searched in vain for books from the Pacific region: nothing but a void between Japan and Mexico. How to Be Well Read: A Guide to 500 Great Novels by John Sutherland, first published in 2013 and reprinted in 2022 also came up zilch. Praised as ‘wise’ by the Times Literary Supplement, this ‘how to’ from Penguin failed to include even Janet Frame between Fowles, John; Francis, Dick; and Franzen, Jonathan — no Albert Wendt, no Witi Ihimaera, no Patricia Grace, and certainly no C.K.Stead.

 

    

 

This year I got around to reading last year’s What You Made of it: A Memoir 1987–2020, the third volume of C.K. Stead’s autobiography, truffling amongst the inadvertent comedy of so much self-serving reminiscence for the throwaway but incisive remarks of an undeniably perceptive literary critic, particularly on Modernism: ‘For Ezra Pound everything came back to language and language was unstable. It came in through the ear, in different accents and with different emphases and every word or phrase carried with it the shadow of other sounds, other meanings, a different history, another language. Pound’s base was scepticism — uncertainty, indeterminacy, and his talent lyrical not epic.’

 

   

 

In his latest book Critical Revolutionaries: Five Critics Who Changed the Way We Read, Terry Eagleton rescues from the dustheap of current neglect a quintet of Modernism’s most original and influential literary critics: T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, William Empson, F.R. Leavis and Raymond Williams. Eagleton’s witty, fast-moving text reads like pulp fiction with the pips left in and gives spice to the idea that 2022, one hundred years after the publication of ‘The Waste Land’ and Ulysses, could also be a Year of Reading Dangerously, with or without a Kindle:

 

Empson writes nonchalantly in conversational, even garrulous style, while Eliot occasionally writes as though he is preaching in a particularly resonant cathedral. Richards’s brisk, rather bloodless prose is quite distinct from the speaking voice. Like Empson, Leavis deliberately avoids the formality of academic prose. Leavis writes as though he were speaking, while Raymond Williams spoke ponderously as though he were writing.

 

Meanwhile, James Courage: Diaries, edited by Chris Brickell and just out from Otago University Press, is about decades of living dangerously as a gay man in twentieth-century London. Courage was the expatriate author of A Way of Love, the first openly LGBTQ novel written by a New Zealander. It was published in Britain in 1959. In 1927 Courage had moved from Christchurch (where he was born in 1903) to London, and writes of his exhilaration in arriving there: ‘Can’t you imagine the London streets in the dusk, full of lights and hurrying people — somebody flying past in an opera cloak and just around the corner coming on a beggar, one side of his face a great red scar, drawing with coloured chalks on the pavement the illuminated words “To Live”.’

 

      

 

His Diaries reports on a wide-ranging luncheon conversation with T.S Eliot, when Eliot was a director at Faber & Faber and considering publishing Courage’s work. Later, there are encounters with the eccentric D’Arcy Cresswell, the emollient Charles Brasch and the ‘crapulously obscene’ Denis Glover, as well as vivid reportage of occurrences during the London Blitz blackouts.

In his thorough-going Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia: the bizarre life of writer, actor, Soho raconteur Julian Maclaren-Ross, which came out in a revised paperback edition in 2013 and which I only caught up with this year, biographer Paul Willetts gives us the extraordinary story of a bohemian man of letters. Julian Maclaren-Ross was the original for louche bookman X. Trapnel in Anthony Powell’s great novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time. One anecdote will have to suffice. Maclaren-Ross was about to start a bar-room brawl in a Soho pub with the Invercargill-born novelist Dan Davin, then serving as a Major in the New Zealand armed forces Davin drew a copy of John Lehmann’s Penguin New Writing out of his greatcoat pocket and held it up like a talisman, explaining they were both in it. ‘Why didn’t you tell us you were a writer?’ Maclaren-Ross exclaimed. ‘We thought you were an army officer. Here have a drink.’

 

       

 

Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life, by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, is also centred on the turbulence of World War Two Britain, when all sorts of career possibilities became possible for women on the home front after the men marched off to battle. Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe and Mary Midgley were four student friends at Oxford University studying philosophy, and caught up in the spell exerted by Ludwig Wittgenstein. But they were also instrumental in bringing metaphysics back into moral philosophy, which had become obsessed with linguistic definitions. Three remained academic philosophers, but this book wonderfully conveys a sense of the life and times of the young Iris Murdoch as a rebel and self-willed amoral personality, before she emerged as an important novelist.

 

    

 

In his new book The Last Days of Roger Federer, Geoff Dyer shuffles aimiably from pop culture reference to pop culture reference while advancing opinions of lateness, ageing and last things. His self-centred, fingernails-buffing style is by turns exasperating and amusing. He has a nice line in snark, sneering at the later works of Martin Amis, and deriding Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time as snore-inducing. Of poetry-readings he says, ‘At any poetry reading however enjoyable, the words we most look forward to hearing are always the same: “I’ll read two more poems.” (The words we truly long for are “I’ll read one more poem”, but two seems to be the conventionally-agreed minimum.)’ Now that growing old disgracefully is out of fashion, the only vice Dyer owns up to is siphoning off all the shampoo and conditioner from the containers in hotel bathrooms to carry away.

The Elizabethan essayist Francis Bacon famously reckoned that: ‘Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed; and some few are to be chewed and digested: that is, read with diligence and attention.’ In Why Read: Selected Writings 2001 -2021, author Will Self asks the question why read at all, with so many other distractions and cultural delivery systems available? He answers: ‘Reading about diverse modes of being and consciousness is the best way we have of entering into them and abiding there is. To enter the flow-state of reading is to swim into other psyches with great ease, whatever their age, sex, sexual orientation, nationality, class or ethnicity.’

 

 

Asked why I read, whether 80 books, or, as this year, quite a bit more than that, my answer is that reading is a form of travelling, a way of expanding my horizons and gaining insights while hardly moving, except to put the jug on. At the same time, mindful of Francis Bacon’s admonition, I read as a stereotypical self-aware consumer, one handling and weighing up cultural packages, embellished with endorsements and gaudy covers and genre specifications according to taste. I go in like a prospector, boring core-samples. Some books I fast-read, skimming or stopping to graze; other books demand and often get full immersion; some books are read at glacial speed, meaning I’ve been reading them for years, a few pages at a time. Other books, many books, are on the carousel, ready to be read again and again, as the bookworm turns.

Yet the hospice shops and charity book fairs bulge with the clutter of the cleared-out shelves of the analogue era, when books, and their readers, seemed to positively hum with promise. Recently I was wandering through the Auckland University Library when I was brought up short by the sight of row upon row of empty shelving about to be disassembled to make way for more wi-fi enabled desks. In corridors, on wheeled wire cages, were the ancient tomes on Homer and company, all bound for the knacker’s yard, like battered gladiators of the old Graeco-Roman Empire awaiting the final sword thrust. Nobel Prize novelist Boris Pasternak, trapped in post-Stalinist Russia, wrote: ‘A book is a squarish chunk of hot, smoking conscience — and nothing else!’ But perhaps not every book.

 

 

I was enlightened by Black Earth: a Journey through Ukraine,  by German journalist Jens Mühling, first published in 2015 and hurriedly reprinted this year. It outlines, through the author talking to a diverse range of inhabitants, something of the push-me pull-you history of a borderland state that goes back a long way. As an antidote to the fatalism and bleakness I also read Kate Quinn’s latest best-seller, The Diamond Eye, a novelised account of the true story of an heroic Ukrainian woman. Lyudmila Pavlichenk was a young historian who became a formidable sniper, one of the most lethal in the Red Army during World War Two, defending her people from the invaders from Nazi Germany. She was wounded numerous times. After the War she returned to her job as an historian and raised a family. Quinn’s novel, though, is also something of a feminist rewrite in that it exposes the pressures on its heroine in a military controlled by men.

Another book for bleak times is This Life, published in 2021, a debut novel by Quntos KunQuest. This is the nom-de-plume of a black American who has been serving a life sentence without parole since 1996 in Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary. His protagonist Lil Chris symbolises the fate of many African-Americans in the United States, who make up 12 per cent of the country’s population but who form over a third of its prisoners. Lil Chris finds a kind of escape through rap-poetry as a ‘dope lyricist’ who can ‘spit mad flow’. He also survives by developing a Buddhist mind-set and by disciplined meditation — and of course by reading.

 

   

 

So, reading, is it really that powerful? The Subplot: What China is Reading and Why It Matters, by Megan Walsh is a short book published in 2022 by Columbia Global Reports, and offers a glimpse of the status of Chinese literature now. While a plethora of state-approved writing courses push writers in the direction of propaganda narratives beneficial to the state, and mainstream publishers toe the party line with books about communist history, a new generation has been navigating this unpromising terrain by subtly transforming facts inconvenient to the government into metaphorically loaded fiction, often science fiction, and publishing it online where legions of readers await.

With so many young writers embracing internet publication, the literary publishing establishment has been disempowered. But it is a balancing act. ‘Chinese online fiction is the largest publishing platform in the world,’ Walsh tells us. ‘It is also one of the most insecure.’ We learn that government censors police content tirelessly, as energetic freewheeling writers strive to keep ahead of them. Online platforms, on which Chinese women writers can publish anonymously, have also served to create subversive genres that, symbolically, have flipped the authoritarian patriarchal dynamic on its head.

 

 

In his 2022 book Imagine a City: A Pilot Sees the World, Mark Vanhoenacker, an international airline pilot constantly girdling the globe, essays a poetic travelogue reflecting on his two decades of repeated short visits to many of the world’s big cities. He muses that:

 

the suggestion that we all dream of the same city, though it may appear differently to each of us, making its reality sometimes tantalisingly unclear, is the loveliest idea in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Calvino’s cities and words reinforce my faith in the idea that behind all the real cities lies one that is archetypal, though our vision of it may be no less flawed and clouded than we are.

 

Another book about the traveller’s perspective that grabbed me by the sleeve and held on was Sneaky Little Revolutions: Selected Essays, by Charmian Clift, edited by Nadia Wheatley and republished this year. These essays were first printed in the Sydney Morning Herald in the 1960s, after Clift and family returned from living for years in Greece: ‘Australian suburban architecture is without doubt or question the ugliest in the world. There is nothing to come near it on the civilised globe — or uncivilised either, for that matter: grass huts are beautifully cohesive and harmonious.’

 

    

 

Australian globe-trotter Paul Dalla Rosa also pinned me down with his startling debut collection of ten stories, An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life, in which his cast of disaffected, abject and nihilistic millennials, spitting out a side-of-the-mouth comedy, trail from Melbourne to Tel Aviv to New York to the Gold Coast to Adelaide: ‘We had met in Melbourne at a large outdoor dance party. He was travelling. He stopped me as we danced, his eyes dilated, took my phone from my hand, typed in his Instagram handle and pressed follow.’

Kingsley Amis once asked: ‘Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart or squash it flat?’ James Brown in The Tip Shop, his latest poetry collection, does both. Laconic, wry, sophisticated, this is a book of considerable stylistic virtuosity, written in a confident tone but with a certain cryptic wistfulness. He’s an artist able to rhyme ‘home’ with ‘poem’ and not look back.

 

       

 

Robert Sullivan’s poems in his Tūnui: Comet are charged, mesmeric, trance-like. These poems dance and sing, fall over, get up, raise the roof, point to the stars. They feel animist, alive with small details, with colonial bric-à-brac muttering to itself, and the Māori language chanting its oratory.

Rotuman poet Mere Taito’s chapbook of poems, The Light and the Dark in Our Stuff, published a little while ago, but which I only encountered this year in the course of co-editing a forthcoming new anthology of contemporary Pasifika poetry, weaves garlands of words, acutely aware of the oceanic: ‘the sea/ gate-crashes your lunch/ through an opening/ in the bus shelter wall’. Samoan poet Faumuina Felolini Maria Tafuna’i’s debut collection My Grandfather is a Canoe, which came out in 2021, ranges across the Moana Nui ringing the changes on environmental damage and land loss in inventive ways, as in ‘green climate fund’:

 

Green dollars rolled thick like leather

Soaked in brine and aged so tight

It has meshed into itself

Unable to unfurl its cash liquidity

To compensate your sinking island

 

Coco Solid’s novella How to Loiter in a Turf War is both impassioned and confrontational; graphic and idiomatic in the way it explores a neighbourhood subject both to galloping gentrification and the unceremonious ousting of the disenfranchised. Three Pasifika underground besties, Q, Te Hoia and Rosina support one another in a gritty urban environment where it all mostly sucks, thanks to fickle, semi-anonymous corporate raiders. But casual street meetings hold promise: ‘Could this be her equally angry Pacific dreamboy?’

 

       

 

Maria Samuela, in her interconnected assemblage of nine stories in Beats of the Pa’u, too, doesn’t flinch from sharp clear-eyed realisations and measured depictions of complex truths about a particular neighbourhood, using demotic language articulated with an insider’s precision and radar-like ear, though her stories, taking time’s pulse, also have chiaroscuro carefully worked in.

Dominic Hoey’s new novel Poor People with Money has an urgent, staccato, street-wise rhythm to its telling, as well as an underlying sense of melancholy. Straight out of the beating heart of Tāmaki Makaurau, it traverses love, loyalty treachery and regrets, all centred on a young battler, Monday Wooldridge, who is a part-time bar-worker and also a part-time ring-fighter, striving to overcome heavy odds and people betting against her.

 

   

 

Books interleave with books to breed more books. This certainly seems true of a number of recent New Zealand non-fiction books that time-travel back to the 1960s, when there was something heady in the air. In his 2021 compendium Okay Boomer: New Zealand in the Swinging Sixties, musician and music historian Ian Chapman saunters down Memory Lane with a variety of nostalgia buffs who were there in the Sixties, albeit still at school, and can rustle up anecdotes to bear witness.

In his 2021 cultural history Time to Make a Song and Dance: Cultural revolt in Auckland in the 1960s, Murray Edmond informatively traces the spirit of the carnivalesque, from its tentative presence in the city’s sly-grog dens and coffee-shops in the early 1960s, to its flower power efflorescence in the late 1960s in the form of gambolling crowds of young people in parks and streets, and notably at the Jumping Sundays in Albert Park. In her 2022 memoir Raiment, poet Jan Kemp, from her perspective as a sometime golden girl of the Sixties — Kemp, like Murray Edmond, participated in those Jumping Sundays — writes about the expectations and pressures placed on her in spaces where woman poets were still a rare sight: ‘But who was I to tell (male poets) how to behave?’

 

        

 

Martin Edmond, in his autobiographical Bus Stops on the Moon: Red Mole Days 1974–1980, published in 2020, provides another connecting thread, with his account of the life and times of Red Mole founder Alan Brunton who, in the late 1960s and after, seemed to be everywhere as an instigator of the carnivalesque,

The best part of music composer Jonathan Besser’s 2022 memoir Around the Corners, Out to the Edges is about growing up in New York and studying music there; and then, immediately, the chance suggestion which led him to the New Zealand immigration office and a one-way air ticket to Auckland in 1972. The Auckland of that time, a sleepy subtropical backwater, as he saw it, is evoked with an outsider’s perspective, though he too flats for a while along Grafton Road, like Jan Kemp and Murray Edmond and Martin Edmond (who are cousins).

 

    

 

And finally there is Jumping Sundays, the book, by Nick Bollinger, memorably illustrated with photographs by Max Oettli and others, which gives us another twist on the whole sweeping panorama of 1960s and its long aftermath. Even though it unearths all sorts of curious incidents and stories and weaves them into an extraordinary almost psychedelic pattern, Bollinger’s cultural history too is not the whole narrative. We are not done with New Zealand in the 1960s, Jumping Sundays, nor the political radicalism winding from then till now.

 

 

Messages from God

Philip Temple on the books he read in 2022

 

It must be December, because Paula Morris asked, What have you read this year? Can I even remember? And did I really read that, when the book’s actually still sitting there, pressing my guilt button? Attached to the side of the first book-case in our library is this postcard from The Snooty Bookshop Fifty Literary Postcards by Tom Gauld, just to keep us honest. We have books in our library which fit every category except, surely not, Purely for Show.’

 

 

I get through 40-odd books a year, other than books consulted for research. These may be new books, recent books that have been waiting patiently, books remembered and re-read, or books that should have been read long ago. From all those, not so many remain clearly in the mind, ones that have registered with lingering import and enlightenment and, sometimes, joy.

 

 

First, the fiction. The most intriguing local work for me has been Vincent O’Sullivan’s Mary’s Boy, Jean-Jacques. The title work, a novella, is a marvellous imagining of what happened to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’s creature after he was abandoned in the Arctic. Here he is picked up by a passing ship and transported to Fiordland where he escapes into the bush, joining a fellow disfigured creature. It is a moving and intriguing parable for all outsiders rejected by humanity and centres a classic story in our own history. Mary’s Boy, Jean-Jacques deserves to be published separately in a small format, illustrated hardback edition but I doubt if the publisher has the equal imagination for that.

 

 

Richard Powers’ Overstory deservedly won a Pulitzer Prize for its fictionalised account of protestors who tried to save the great redwood forests, and the Canadian woman who first posited that forest trees supported each other in communal ecosystems. She was derided by male colleagues but eventually proved right. But it didn’t help the redwoods much. Good ideas and inspiration here for all those fighting to save our native forests.

 

                                     

 

Oh, those Irish fiction writers! I found Colm Toibin’s The Magician (about Thomas Mann) disappointing after his The Master (Henry James). But Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is a masterpiece.  It could refer to the length of what is strictly a novella and can be read within a couple of hours (I couldn’t help myself). But Keegan has produced something mighty, a work of such sympathy and sensibility around the people and 1980s social climate of New Ross and the convent on the hill with its laundry girls that one is brought to both tears and joy. It also rates as a Christmas story of such power to become a 21st century A Christmas Carol.

Diane [Brown] went down to the Regent Book Sale (one book in, one book out, she lies) and came back with William Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault, knowing how much I admire Trevor’s work.  It was shortlisted for the Booker (like Keegan’s novella) all of twenty years ago but I had somehow missed it. This takes a bit longer to read but is equally difficult to put down. Set a hundred years ago on the coast somewhere near Cork, it tells of a family forced to leave their estate under threat of house-burning rebels during the turbulent establishment of the Irish Republic, and of how a young girl becomes separated from her parents. To say more would be too much of a spoiler but the novel covers thirty years of change to a small town and rural community through the story of a house and its inhabitants. I once kissed the Blarney Stone near Cork but, alas, it did not produce for me the effortless lyricism of Trevor’s prose.

 

 

Biography: I found Patricia Grace’s From the Centre: A Writer’s Life humbling. Her unassuming and calm narrative reveals a life led by someone who has always known who she is and what matters, whose values have remained true and rewarding for everyone around her. And from that calm at the centre of the busyness and demands of whānau and community she has produced some of our finest literature. Tū, for example, remains our best war novel.

 

                                                            

 

Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig Brown. Yes, I know. But book club members assured me this was something different. Brown says he played a kind of ‘Where’s Wally? Or a super-snobby version of I-Spy’. He trolled through every account of Princess Margaret, public and private, to produce a different kind of biography that presents hall of mirrors views of someone who, one reviewer thought, displayed ‘utter rottenness’ of character (but blames it on her Mum). Yet Picasso wanted to marry her as did Jeremy Thorpe, along with many others among the line-up of vile supporting characters. I cringed, was appalled, laughed out loud—and was fascinated. After the Coronation in 1953, a friend said to Margaret that she looked really sad and she replied, ‘I lost a father and now I’ve lost a sister.’  So, in the end, I even felt a little bit sorry for her, too.

 

                                                           

 

Faber & Faber, The Untold Story by Toby Faber is a great writer’s read, telling the story of the most enduring London publishing house just knocking on its centenary door. T.S. Eliot (with his second wife Valerie) dominates but the book reveals his fallible judgments. He turned down Orwell’s Animal Farm (and consequently 1984) while William Golding’s first novel only made it through when a member of the secretarial staff suggested a good title for it would be Lord of the Flies.

 

                                       

 

The Bush by Don Watson is a no-holds-barred, and deeply informed, account of the destructive clearance of the Australian ‘bush’ by someone who grew up on an outback farm. A heart-breaking account of what has happened to the natural world across the Ditch. Unsurprisingly, it won the New South Wales Premier Book of the Year Award.

 

 

Over the past few years, I have been reading, researching and writing about our two Big Issues— massive resource depletion beyond Limits to Growth with its spawn, Climate Change; and Treaty of Waitangi matters and co-governance. This year I have read He Kupu Taurangi by Chris Finlayson and James Christmas, which covers Treaty settlements and cases of co-governance; and historical accounts and analysis in the form of The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi by Ned Fletcher (which I’ve reviewed for Reading Room) and Vincent O’Malley’s The Great War for New Zealand.

 

           

 

Discussion with others led me back to 2002’s Histories Power and Loss edited by Andrew Sharp and Paul McHugh. Its essays on ‘uses of the past’ by such luminaries as W.H. Oliver, Te Maire Tau and Judith Binney remind me that there has been much informed and wise commentary lost sight of amid current polarising arguments. Lyndsay Head’s ‘The pursuit of modernity in Māori society’, in particular, tells us that the current narrative around the attitudes of Rangatira towards British settlement needs a more rigorous and balanced examination.

 

                                         

 

By Christmas I expect to finish time-travelling with Bryan Walpert’s intriguing novel Entanglement and David Grant’s more plodding journey through the chronology of Anderton. For sheer pleasure and doses of wisdom I dip into 100 Poems: Seamus Heaney, selected by his family. The Faber & Faber biography reveals that when T.S. Eliot wrote to say he accepted his first book of poems, Heaney said: ‘It was like a message from God.’ Some of Heaney’s poems come across just like that.

 

 

P.S. Did I say we had nothing in our library ‘Purely for show’? Er … gathering dust in the corner is the large-format Timechart of Biblical History with old and elaborate images illustrating Bible stories. Another refugee from the Regent Book Sale, I think, and definitely messages from God.

 

 

The idiocy of the powerful

Brannavan Gnanalingam on the books he read in 2022

 

 

This year I released my seventh novel, Slow Down, You’re Here. The book was a horror novel, although Lawrence & Gibson adopted the marketing tactics of Hitchcock’s Psycho in not revealing anything about the book’s actual subject. But I can say this much: the book is about the fraught nature of pleasure in a world where things are increasingly becoming scarce.

 

    

 

It was fun to research too: I read a lot of horror. The main narrative inspiration was Stephen King’s Misery. The way King uses digression / parallel narratives to ramp up tension was masterly. It allowed the structure to do the opposite of the narrative, where pleasure is displaced. The reader doesn’t get what they want, and instead have to slog through a terrible romance novel, also knowing that the ‘success’ of the terrible romance novel is what is keeping Paul Sheldon alive. I also read two of the most horrifying and rigorous stories about thwarted pleasure—Gabrielle Wittkop’s The Necrophiliac and Taeko Kono’s Toddler Hunting. I read a number of horror / thriller books with a common theme (which will make sense if you read my book): Junji Ito’s graphic novel Uzumaki, Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door, Roland Topor’s The Tenant, Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright, and Charity Norman’s The Secrets of Strangers.

 

         

 

I was lucky enough to release my book with my friend and comrade at Lawrence & Gibson, Murdoch Stephens. Murdoch was the founder of Lawrence & Gibson, and I would not be a writer without him. Murdoch is also a very talented writer—intellectual without being pretentious, hilarious without being glib. His books have always featured a kind of romantic or emotional longing, and with Down from Upland, also published this year, he manages to build a poignant and hilarious account of people trying to find themselves and not realising their shortcomings along the way.

One advantage of releasing a book early in the year was that I could spend the rest of the year treating my brain as ‘fallow’ ground—I read for pleasure with no obligation to write.

 

 

 

There have been some fantastic books from Aotearoa this year. My favourite was Colleen Maria Lenihan’s Kōhine. The collection of short stories is just beautiful—all shimmering surfaces and mirrors and reflections, which belie the overwhelming central sadness that underpins the collection. On the back of 2021’s best local book, Whiti Hereaka’s Kurangaituku, Huia is definitely on a roll. I also loved Maria Samuela’s short story collection Beats of the Pa’u, which demonstrated such care and love for her characters. Many make mistakes but they’re just trying to survive and get by—it’s a gorgeous collection.

 

     

 

I thought Coco Solid’s debut novel How to Loiter in a Turf War was brilliant: it was funny and captured the messy drift of being young while the world around changes dramatically. I also thoroughly enjoyed Anthony Lapwood’s Home Theatre (an intelligent and often surprising collection), Sascha Stronach’s The Dawnhounds (masterly world building), and Rijula Das’ Small Deaths (a powerful novel about India’s various fault lines). In non-fiction, my favourites were Noelle McCarthy’s Grand, a beautiful account of a mother/daughter relationship, and Lana Lopesi’s thought-provoking essay collection Bloody Woman.

 

     

 

My favourite poetry was Khadro Mohamed’s luminous We’re All Made of Lightning and Anahera Gildea’s incendiary Sedition from new publishing kids on the block, We Are Babies Press and Taraheke respectively. I also caught up with a couple of brilliant NZ books I’d missed from previous years—Sam Te Kani’s Please, Call Me Jesus and Rupa Maitra’s Prophecies.

 

    

 

Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida was my favourite international novel. It was a brutal and caustic account of the chaos of the Sri Lankan Civil War. I was chuffed that it won the Booker Prize and—in keeping with the idiocy of the powerful depicted in the book—it was hilarious to see the very people mocked by the book celebrate the international triumph. With Anuk Arudpragasam’s shortlisted (and magnificent) A Passage North and Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand (the latter on my summer reading list), perhaps people are finally starting to realise that the region with the most English speakers in the world have books worthy of being published and read more widely.

 

   

 

I also loved Diego Garcia by Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams: it’s an example of how the political novel is a genuinely vital form of writing. It is a manifesto as to how to tell a tale about the ‘other’ through collaboration. It is also a mockery of certain critics who say that literature is in peril, or that self-censorship is ‘killing’ creativity. People will always find a way, provided they’re not lazy.

This year I was fortunate to interview a number of amazing writers, which allowed me to dive deep into their back catalogues: Val McDermid, Michael Robotham, JP Pomare, Shehan Karunatilaka, and Nobel Laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah. In hindsight, I have no idea how I managed to yarn with such an eclectic and dazzling array of writers. Gurnah’s books were a real revelation in terms of writing about the movement of peoples and history. McDermid, Robotham, and Pomare are simply masters of narrative.

 

      

 

Because reading doesn’t have to privilege the new, I’ve loved being able to fill in some gaps. I read a few 19th century novels that were new to me—Dostoevsky’s Demons, Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, and Jane Austen’s Persuasion. One of my other great passions featured heavily in my reading this year, as I continue my plan of reading the entirety of the Heinemann African Series: I read Bessie Head, Rebeka Njau, Neshani Andreas, and Binwell Sinyangwe. I’m also a big fan of the New Narrative movement and the assorted works published by Semiotext(e). I share a similar ethos of privileging ‘flat’ writing that deliberately tries to avoid drawing attention to itself. I really enjoyed Kevin Killian’s and Fanny Howe’s writing, in particular.

 

                                                  

 

I’m looking forward to making a dent in my TBR pile this summer.  I have Geetanjali Shree, Mahasweta Devi, Dambudzo Marechera, Ferdinand Oyono, and Octavia Butler all staring back at me, waiting for the long summer evenings.

 

Crazy, Sexy, Cool

 Maggie Rainey-Smith on the books she read in 2022

 

My year of reading kickstarted when, on the second day of January, I broke my wrist. This also meant that I missed out on a teaching contract. Instead I took up a lovely opportunity to co-edit—with Linda Burgess—Room to Write, the book celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Randell Cottage residencies. The book includes French writers who have lived in the cottage, but Linda and I were responsible for the 20 Kiwi writers and their submissions. All of the stories—some fiction, some not—have been translated from French to English or vice versa. I can’t lay claim to that part of the project.  But I have done a lot of close reading of stories evoking the shifting moods and inspiration of writers dislocated either by hemisphere or the gift of solitariness.

 

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One of my absolute favourite writers is the Australian novelist Michelle De Kretser. I rushed to read her latest book, Scary Monsters—it reads one way until halfway through, and then you turn it around and read another story. De Kretser writes so well about being ‘other’ and in this book she looks at racism, misogyny and ageism. I adored her Questions of Travel, which came out some years ago, as well as The Hamilton Case: I’ve been hooked ever since.

 

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Another highlight was reading Fiona Kidman’s memoir So far for now. I admired her courage and insight writing about widowhood. She never shies away from tricky topics. I am an avid reader of New Zealand literature, so also read the novel Loop Tracks by Sue Orr, and two other memoirs: Grand by Noelle McCarthy, and You probably think this song is about you by Kate Camp (whose mother is in my book group). I also helped to launch Jan FitzGerald’s fourth poetry collection, A Question Bigger Than a Hawk. But my focus in the early part of the year was on my own poetry collection, Formica. It has been a thrill to have a poetry debut published at last. I describe it as a baby-boomer memoir. It’s had very warm reviews and I’ve had the most delightful conversations with friends and strangers who have contacted me to say, ‘This is my life’. This is so interesting to me as, of course, we think our own lives unique.

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Most years now, I travel to South Korea: our youngest son has lived there for over 16 years. He is married with two darling children, my grandchildren. They live in Seoul, and I am besotted with this city, the people, the culture, and the writing.  I am known to binge on Korean Netflix and can highly recommend Our Blues, a delightful anthology-style series based on the volcanic island of Jeju and different from the melodramatic—though fabulously satisfying—Seoul-set dark dramas about greedy corporations or over-ambitious parents. I re-read The Island of Sea Women by the US author Lisa See, which is about the lives of the Jeju women divers known as haenyeo, and the brutal treatment suffered by islanders during the anti-communist fervour that followed the second World War.

 

                                

 

I also discovered the work of Hwang Sok-yong, one of South Korea’s foremost writers. His 2018 novel At Dusk, translated by Sora Kim-Russell, was longlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize.  It’s the story of a man born into poverty who escapes the slums to find success and wealth as director of a large architectural firm. Visiting his old neighbourhood and reconnecting with a lost love, he recognises the cost of modernity, the loss of an old lifestyle.  We see this when we visit Seoul, as our son has lived in some of the city’s less salubrious areas—Yeonsinnae and now Guro.  Almost overnight, whole blocks will vanish to be replaced by high-rise apartments.  There’s a gentle intimacy to At Dusk which I love about Korean writers, as well as the underlying darkness and the sense of outrage at injustice.

In Seoul, there’s a flea market near the Dongmyo shrine where ageing hipsters go to shop, to commune and to promenade.  In the metro I’ve often seen the mostly elderly men in their dated but colourful fashion, but until this year I’d never been to the market. My son took me, and we had the best fun: I purchased a book by Kim Dong-hyun called Mut–Street Fashion of Seoul. (Mut is his version of meot, the Korean word for cool). It’s full of glossy full-colour photos of men and women, nearly all wearing hats, and dressed in a wide variety of what might be called yesteryears’ fashion.  A delightful contrast to the hyper-conformist fashion of the younger people in the flash parts of downtown Seoul.

 

               

 

When I travel, I always take a book or two from my bookshelves that I haven’t got around to reading. This year it was Snow by the Turkish Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk and I was mesmerised. I’ve owned the novel for several years and there it was, waiting for me to uncover this fascinating fictional story of an exiled poet returning to Turkey. It is politically charged both overtly and obscurely. I’ve just been re-reading The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard, a book that had sat on my bookshelf for over a decade or two before I took it with me to Seoul one year and uncovered its brilliance. Re-reading is even more rewarding, and the book is littered with Post-it-notes so I can return to sentences and insightful descriptions of human motivation and character. Wow. It’s a grand love story with the backdrop of a post-war Britain, two beautiful orphaned colonial sisters and the men in their lives.

I share a passion for cold-water swimming with Kiwi author Paddy Richardson and I waited with anticipation for her new book By the Green of Spring. From my home, I look out towards Matiu Somes Island and some years ago I read Live Bodies by Maurice Gee. I enjoyed the historical details of the men interned on Somes but loved even more the post war lives in Blackball.

 

              

 

Most recently, on a road trip to the West Coast, in a Reefton bookshop I found Fay Weldon’s Leader of the Band, and I laughed uproariously at this crazy, sexy romp of a book. Sometimes it feels as though you will never catch up with all the amazing books that are written in New Zealand, let alone international authors. It was a treat to fossick and find a gem like this.

 

 

Baring our fangs

Bryan Walpert on the books he read in 2022

 

In Less, the Pulitzer-prize winning novel by American writer Andrew Sean Greer—one of the books I’ve read most recently, at the suggestion of my sister—the protagonist, Arthur Less, teaches a writing course he calls Read Like a Vampire, Write Like Frankenstein. This is not a course about horror writing. Rather, it is ‘based on his own notion that writers read other works in order to take their best parts.’

 

 

My own reading can be a bit vampire-ish, and though he overstates a bit, I tend to agree with Arthur Less (or perhaps it’s Greer) that many writers do read partly for instruction and permission (many readers of this essay will be writers, I presume). Not that I don’t also read like, well, a reader—I get happily sucked into plot and character. But the reader experience and the writer experience occur in parallel. That is, I am often at just a bit of distance as I observe the wires and strings, as interested in what I can learn from how the book works at the level of technique as I am in the journey it takes me on.

It is with this admission of such literary blood-sucking that, at the kind request of the powers-that-be at the Academy of New Zealand Literature, I have pulled together some thoughts on a year of reading. Since I don’t have room to discuss a large number of the books I’ve read this year (and no one would read it), I’ll use my vampiric reader tendencies as a central motif to mention just a few. Less is more. These are not necessarily new books (Less won its prize in 2018—there’s now a sequel I’ve yet to read called Less is Lost); they’re just books I’ve read, or finally read, over the past year.

 

 

One pattern becomes clear—an interest in how literary fiction can employ speculative elements. (I did the same in my novel Entanglement, and have an ongoing interest in links between science and literature in poetry as well, so perhaps this is not surprising.) Some will argue that there is, or should be, no distinction between literary and genre fiction. I take the argument, but I’m always more intrigued by the effort to create distinctions rather than the effort to elide them. (Both are worthwhile pursuits; which you choose is a matter of character.)

 

   

 

Three of those I read with interest over the past year are Bewilderment, an ecological novel by American writer Richard Powers that has at its core the relationship between a widowed father, Theo, and his troubled young son; Sea of Tranquility, a time travel novel by Canadian writer Emily St. John Mandel; and The Anomaly by French writer Hervé Le Tellier, in which a plane lands after going through a storm—only for the same plane, filled with the same passengers, to land a few months later. One speculative element in Powers’ novel (which, like his more sprawling The Overstory, has ecological concerns at its heart) is a neurological feedback device that permits the anger of the narrator’s troubled son to be moderated by his late mother’s brain patterns; another is the series of life-filled planets that Theo, an astrobiologist, imagines as bedtime stories for his son. Both Mandel and Le Tellier explore the ‘simulation hypothesis’ popularised by Nick Bostrom—the idea that we are all living in a simulation created by an advanced civilisation.

 

     

 

In each case, the speculative elements, though fun, point away from themselves towards issues of emotional and philosophical interest: Can we learn to look beyond ourselves and extend empathy to the world itself? That is what starts to happen to the son in Powers’ novel as his mothers’ brain patterns imprint on his and he becomes deeply concerned about the earth. As the poet Tracy K. Smith put it in a review of the book in the The New York Times: Bewilderment ‘invites us to ponder not only our dominance of the planet and the ways that the unjust power of a few dominates the lives of others. It also insists we ponder this: At what cost do we allow our capacities for fear, jealousy and appetite to trounce other equally intrinsic capacities, like empathy, courage and forbearance?’ And of course the imagined planets are used toward emotional ends—for Theo to soothe and bond with his son—rather than truly speculative ones.

Empathy is at the heart, too, of Mandel’s novel. Central to the time travel is a question of whether to break rules and sacrifice yourself for others. But in hers and Le Tellier’s another might be this: What does it mean to be ‘real’ and how important is ‘reality’ to a life well-lived? To quote another review (by novelist Laird Hunt) from The New York Times: ‘Mandel is interested in something other than limning the highs and lows of timeline trotting’; rather, the novel is ‘an attempt to make some sense of huge societal and existential crises and pose good old questions like what does it mean to be alive.’ As such the technology itself—the science—plays the role of lens, rather than focus, putting her book, as the reviewer put it, ‘more in common with tech-minimized sci-fi outings’ like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

 

 

Le Tellier’s The Anomaly is much more playful in its tone and form (it’s written—self-consciously, I think—like a Netflix series) and in its metafictional elements (a character is writing a novel called, naturally, The Anomaly). But it poses existential questions. To cite a third review from The New York Times (by Sarah Lyall—can you tell I’ve recently gotten a subscription?): the novel’s plot might have been borrowed from The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror, ‘but it movingly explores urgent questions about reality, fate and free will. If our lives might not be our own and we end up dying either way, how should we live?’ In sum, it is how these writers engage with speculative elements as a sort of lens on these questions—rather than, say, time travel being central mainly to plot, no matter how heart-stopping, or simply fascinating it itself (though I’m a sucker for that as well)—that interests me in these books.

The other technique that came up surprisingly often this year in my reading is how the writer helps us to see things about the character that they can’t see or won’t admit about themselves—e.g. issues of dramatic irony and unreliability. Less is about a gay writer who cobbles together an international tour of reading and teaching to avoid attending his former partner’s wedding. Along the way he deals with aging (he turns 50 during his travels) and meditates on his own only moderate success as a writer (he is told his books aren’t gay enough). There are many pleasures in this book—it is perceptive, hilarious, and touching, and it consistently provides quotable turns-of-phrase (description of a street in New York: ‘the toothache sensation of jackhammers in concrete’). But what I observed with the most writer-reader interest is how to use humour, along with the character’s failure to fully grasp his own strengths, to invite sympathy for a character who might otherwise come across as gloomily self-involved. It is precisely the gap between what Less thinks about himself and what others perceive of him—he is more sartorially awkward than he thinks but also more talented and attractive—that, via the affectionately mocking tone, makes him so complex and likeable.

 

 

But likability of the central character isn’t in itself so important to me. Closer to home was my pleasure in reading my colleague Gigi Fenster’s novel A Good Winter, another finalist at this year’s Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. It’s been characterised as a ‘literary thriller,’ and the literary part, for me, is the way Fenster gradually reveals the difference between how Olga sees herself—helpful, protective—and her true motivations for playing an increasingly prominent role in the life of her friend, Lara. If Greer crafts the perception gap in the third person, in Fenster’s book the first-person narration feeds my growing distrust of the narrator’s reliability.

The book opens with a kind of summary: ‘It was a good winter. I’m not ashamed to say it. For me it was a good winter. And for Lara even. I don’t care what anyone says. The facts spoke for themselves.’ Every sentence of that paragraph is deftly crafted to be taken quite differently if reread after the gap between Olga’s perceptions and reality widens.

Farther again from home (though the author in a bio says he lives part-time in New Zealand) are the novels Darke and Darke Matter by British rare book dealer, Booker Prize judge and retired academic Rick Gekoski, who published Darke, his first novel, in his early 70s. The protagonist, James Darke, is in some ways, or at least to some readers, unlikeable. Here is an example of his personality from Darke, when the character is looking for a ‘handyman’: ‘Most builders, handy or otherwise, are incompetent, indolent and venal.’ He goes on about his rules for interacting with builders: ‘I do not provide endless cups of PG Tips with three sugars, ta, nor do I engage in talk, small or large. Preferably no visits to my WC, though a builder who does not pee is rare. Tea makes pee. But if that is necessary, only in the downstairs cloakroom. Afterwards there will be piss under the loo.’

 

     

 

But the capacity for deep love and a sense of integrity lie beneath his stream of critiques and invective. The way that Gekoski creates that complexity, by having Darke unwilling to acknowledge his better angels, is masterful. Whether Dark is ultimately likeable or not is less interesting than how Gekoski manages Darke’s characterisation. In an interview, Gekoski said he found the debate over whether the character was likeable ‘a bore,’ adding, ‘The readers who loved Darke focused on the prose and thinking, rather than on whether they liked him.’ I can’t help but wonder whether disproportionately represented among such readers are writers, like you and me, donning our cloaks and baring our fangs in the dark.

 

 

 

 

The stories they brought us

Fiona Kidman on the books she read in 2022

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Late last year I spent some time in residence as the Irish Writing Studies Fellow at Otago University. Overall, it was a year of getting to know and understand my Irish heritage better. That has carried on into 2022 and much of my reading has been centred around Irish writers and writing. Not entirely new, for I’ve kept Seamus Heaney’s Collected Works beside my bed for years and soak up contemporary Irish novelists and short story writers as fast as new books appear. Still, there’s been special pleasure in two books this year, Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves and Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, Ireland unfurled. O’Toole is a distinguished Dublin-born journalist who writes for the Guardian and The New York Times. His book examines Ireland’s history from the year of his birth in 1958, each year ranging back and forth through the many and deep extremes of Irish nationhood.

 

 

Because Ireland has become, for the most part, a shining example of how an economy and a society should run, the reality, within living memory, of an impoverished, uneducated, badly housed people, its rural inhabitants often living in hovels hewn out of hillsides, is difficult to conceive. Yet O’Toole takes us from one era to another in fluid, absorbing strokes throughout a very big book. It’s part memoir and often reads like a novel. He doesn’t shy away from once taboo topics, acknowledging the hideous past of the Magdalene Laundries where girls and young women were effectively incarcerated by the church when giving birth to children conceived out of wedlock. Nor does he glamourise the IRA’s brutal history during the Troubles, as savage in its way as that of its Protestant counterparts. On 7 August 1979, O’Toole writes, ‘the IRA had what it would always regard as their best day. At Mullaghmore, on the Sligo coast, it murdered a seventy-nine-year-old man, a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, a fifteen-year-old schoolboy and an eighty-three-year-old woman. The ground for these executions (the word the IRA itself used) was that the old man, Louis Mountbatten, was a cousin of Queen Elizabeth.’

 

 

If that was a big book, Keegan’s Small Things Like These is a very slim, very powerful one, an evocation of those shameful birthing practices of which O’Toole writes so eloquently. Keegan has occupied a special place in my reading experience, ever since I came across her magnificent short story collection Walk the Blue Fields. She is the author, too, of Foster, on which the recent lovely movie The Quiet Girl is based. This new novella centres round Bill Furlong, a wood and coal merchant, faced one Christmas with his own history of loss, contemplating the desires of his over-reaching family of women who all want far too much of the occasion. When he encounters an abandoned girl, punished by nuns for grieving over her lost baby, he makes a profoundly moral choice. You find your heart riven, or mine was. Keegan and I, along with Edna O’Brien, share the same Paris publisher in translation, and I hope some day I will meet these writers in person to tell them how much their work has meant to me.

My fellowship got me thinking about writers of Irish descent in New Zealand Aotearoa, the number of us whose parents came on boats a long time ago, and the stories they brought us, their children. Much of my year has been spent writing essays that explore this theme, linking up a common experience. I’ve written about Dan Davin, Eileen Duggan, Maurice Duggan and others, as well as my own background, lived through my father’s immigration; one of these essays appears in a new book of mine, published last March, called So far, for now. These descendants keep busy. My New Zealand fiction title of the year (although I still have a stack of new titles to go) is Vincent O’Sullivan’s Mary’s Boy, Jean-Jacques , the title story a re-imagining of Mary Shelley’s  Frankenstein. And the Cuba Press acknowledged the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses with a collection of small stories called Breach of All Size (ed. Michelle Elvy and Marco Sonzogni), inspired by phrases from Ulysses. I was one of thirty-six contributors, along with writers like Lloyd Jones, Paula Morris, Becky Manawatu, Apirana Taylor, Emer Lyons, and Tracey Slaughter.

 

                                               

 

Was there anything else I loved this past rapid year? Well, yes. For sheer indulgence, French Braid by American writer Anne Tyler. At first, I thought it light, but that is an illusion. This family saga of ordinary people, simply doing their best, captured me.  Tyler and I are of an age and she’s been rewarding me as a reader for close to sixty years. For which I can but raise a Christmas glass and pay homage. She gives me heart, she gives me hope.