Aku arotake pukapuka / my book reviews: 2023

I started off 2023 writing my one hundredth arotake pukapuka (book review). I was commissioned to write a review of A Runner’s Guide to Rakiura: A novel by Jessica Howland Kany for Landfall Review Online, which they published in April. It’s a buried-treasure adventure novel set on Rakiura (Stewart Island).

A Runner’s Guide to Rakiura is a debut novel with all the associated pros and cons thereof. Despite its flaws—too long, too autobiographical, stuffed too full of every little thing it occurred to the kaituhi (author) to include—I do recommend it. Kany’s enthusiasm for storytelling and love of language, along with her particular gift for dialogue, win the day. Buy it from the publisher or your local toa pukapuka (bookshop).

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My second arotake pukapuka of 2023 is also of a new author’s first pukapuka. I was commissioned to write a review of There’s a cure for this: A memoir by Dr Emma Espiner (Ngāti Tukorehe, Ngāti Porou) for Kete, which they published in July. Rather than being a memoir, it’s a series of essays about training to be a doctor as an adult and starting work during the pandemic.

This pukapuka reminded me very much of Ghazaleh Golbakhsh’s The Girl from Revolution Road (another first-book collection of essays that I also reviewed for Kete). Both pukapuka have the uncomfortable sense of having been the publisher’s project, rather than the author’s, and consequently of having been pushed into print prematurely. Rather than reading Espiner’s pukapuka I instead recommend listening to her excellent podcast, Getting Better—A Year in the Life of a Māori Medical Student, which won a media award in 2021.

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My next arotake pukapuka of 2023 investigates one of the most disturbing pukapuka I’ve ever read. I was commissioned to write a review of Crazy Love: A novel by Rosetta Allan for Landfall Review Online, which they published in July.

Like the previous pukapuka, this one suffers from a subtitle that misleads the kaipānui (reader) as to the book’s nature. Instead of being a pakimaero (novel), this pukapuka actually is a memoir, telling the story of the author’s violently dysfunctional marriage. Horrifyingly, it ends with her concluding that her relationship is Good, Actually and that she’s going to stick with it. Do not recommend.

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By this point in the year I was starting to get a little gun-shy. Happily, next up I was commissioned to write a review of Āria by Jessica Hinerangi (Ngāti Ruanui, Ngāruahine, Ngāpuhi) for Kete, which they published in August.

Āria is a gloriously bisexual debut collection of toikupu (poetry) weaving together pop cultural and ancestral influences in a conversational tone that welcomes kaipānui in. Hinerangi is a celebrated visual artist and my arotake pukapuka considers the book’s artistic influences as well as literary ones. Buy it from the publisher or your local toa pukapuka.

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My next arotake pukapuka considers another debut collection of essays—happily this one is just superb. I was commissioned to review Articulations by Henrietta Bollinger for Kete, which they published in October. The essays are about disability, queerness, love, sex, ableism, activism: all the joys and hardships of life.

I usually keep a strong dividing line between my publicity mahi and my reviewing mahi, for obvious reasons. However, this one turned out to be an exception. I had put my hand up to review Articulations months prior, based on having seen Bollinger speak at the Same Same But Different queer literary festival, and because I always have an eye on the pukapuka coming out Tender Press, a small local whare perehi (publishing house) doing some really interesting stuff. Separately, as part of my membership of the disabled writers’ collective Crip the Lit, I had also made an offer to run a publicity campaign for one kaituhi whaikaha (disabled writer) putting them forward for literary festivals. I was going to do some publicity mahi for Bollinger but it hasn’t ended up happening yet.

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Next up I was commissioned to write a review of The Words for Her by Thomasin Sleigh for Landfall Review Online, which they published in November. It’s a thriller based on the premise that people all around the world have started ‘going out’—disappearing from photos and video, and becoming unfilmable.

I was a bit unsure about this one because I’ve known Sleigh socially for many years, and that always carries a risk of awkwardness if I turn out not to like the pukapuka. But I needn’t have worried: The Words For Her is excellent. Don’t be put off by the atrocious cover—this one’s a real page-turner. Buy it from the publisher or your local toa pukapuka.

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I’ve also written a piece reflecting on my decade of book reviewing: what I love about it and why I do it (as well as the weird backlash I get whenever I write less than glowing reviews). I haven’t yet found a home for this one so sing out if you’d like to publish it.

Book review: Pet by Kathryn van Beek

This review was commissioned by and originally published in the NZ Herald on 5 September 2020

Pet, the new collection of self-published short stories from Pākehā author Kathryn van Beek, manages to be both charming and brutal. I laughed out loud at the first story, about an emotional support ferret who causes chaos when she gets loose on an aeroplane. But then the ferret dies, crushed by her anxious owner who is undergoing IVF. The darkness and the humour twist around one another. Van Beek does not allow the reader to have one without the other.

Each story is themed around a pet – with accompanying illustration – and I enjoyed guessing how the drawing of the animal at the start would turn up in the narrative. But as I read I began to understand that the real theme underlying these stories was not pets but dead babies.

Pet is dedicated to Wilhelmina Elizabeth Armstrong “who was never born”, and this sense of grieving those who might have been haunts the pukapuka. Van Beek seems determined to explore all the ways in which reproduction and parenting can go painfully wrong: infertility, miscarriage, post-partum psychosis, eerily lifelike dolls, ghost babies, starving babies, murdered babies – even a rogue AI entering the soul of an unborn baby. The babies who survive to be children are still up against it: in “The Nor’wester” three children are living in fear of their abusive father, until one day they lure him gradually deeper out to sea and watch him drown.

Despite this bleakness – or rather, hand in hand with it – Pet is also very funny, employing an unmistakeably Kiwi humour. I was particularly entertained by “Best-Dressed Possum”, set at a school fair that is running a competition in which the corpses of possums are dressed up as celebrities. Local single mother Devon has hers on ice: “Last year had been unseasonably hot.” The entries are hilariously grotesque: “Possum Diana was accessorised with a pearl choker, Jacinda Furrdern sported a set of fake teeth and MAGA had a red tie and a giant hairpiece of teased wool.” Devon has put together a Hugh Hefner dead possum with “two rabbit carcasses, each dressed in lace … Hugh and his Bunnies.” But not everyone is following the rules: “an elderly man [was] holding a stiff cat dressed like a rugby player. ‘Sorry mate,’ said Pete. ‘Beautiful job, but I can’t accept a cat … You can’t be seen to be shooting people’s pets.’ The elderly man tucked the cat under his Swanndri and shuffled off, swearing under his breath.” The climax of the story comes when an interfering middle-class urbanite cops a banoffee pie in the face. It’s a slapstick moment but there’s still a thread of wrongness and loss, as Devon and her kids “of uncertain pedigree” are subtly made to feel unwelcome by their neighbours.

Pet – which is available in print and as a podcast from Otago Access Radio – casts an unflinching but also tender light on the kinds of private griefs that often go unacknowledged. I highly recommend it.

Book review: A Trio of Sophies by Eileen Merriman

This review was commissioned (in April 2020) and originally published by the Sunday Star-Times.

Eileen Merriman’s latest YA novel is pretty dark. It’s written for and about Kiwi teens but feels like it ought to have some of those “if you’ve been affected by the issues raised in this story…” freephone numbers at the end.

A Trio of Sophies is a murder mystery set in Tāmaki Makaurau about three high school friends all called Sophie: Sophie Abercrombie, who has gone missing; Sophie Twiggs; and Sophie MacKenzie aka Mac, the narrator. Their ethnicities are not explicitly stated but, given that whiteness is culturally assumed ‘normal’ in Aotearoa, it seems safe to say they’re Pākehā. The entire pukapuka is written as a series of Mac’s diary entries, so everything we know – or think we know – is filtered through Mac’s consciousness.

It becomes clear quite early on who the murderer is, so this is more of a howdunnit than the classic whodunnit. Merriman ramps up the narrative tension through an unusual three-part structure. Part one, which comprises about four-fifths of the pukapuka, counts down from day 64 after Sophie A went missing to day zero. Part two takes the story up again at day 65, and part three is set the following year. The very last page has an excellent twist.

The main drama stems from Mac’s slow realisation that her boyfriend James is abusive. If you’ve ever wondered why the victims in such relationships don’t just leave, this is a good illustration of how the abuser twists the intensity of sexual chemistry into a series of excuses for physical violence. James’ refrain of “no one will ever love you like I do” becomes increasingly creepy as Mac’s eyes are opened to his true nature.

James is an English teacher at Mac’s school, which both makes their relationship even more abhorrent and gives Merriman an excuse to make a series of nods and winks to her own craft. James and Mac discuss narrative structure, and Mac not only writes an English essay on unreliable narrators but also comments repeatedly on her own unreliability as a diarist: “Memory is fallible, and malleable.” It’s a bit heavy-handed and I was half expecting Merriman to somehow use the NCEA English curriculum to bring Mac to the realisation that teacher-student relationships are inherently abusive. But the creeping tension of the plot meant I was turning pages too fast to worry that much about it.

The immersiveness of Merriman’s writing makes A Trio of Sophies a good escapist read for lockdown – well, apart from the bit where Mac gets the flu and doesn’t self-isolate. What a bad citizen! In fact I found Mac pretty unlikeable overall. She cheats at school, is a bad friend, and is generally tiresome – plus I could have really done without the fat shaming. But she doesn’t deserve what James does to her.

Merriman is one of our finest YA novelists and this pukapuka will be available from school libraries around Aotearoa. If you see one of your teens reading it, perhaps use it as a starting point to kōrero about bodily autonomy, power dynamics and consent. No one should be a Mac.

Book review: All the Way to Summer by Fiona Kidman

This review was commissioned by Stuff and published on 19 April 2020.

I realised recently that the thing I most urgently want the literature of Aotearoa to do is to explain whiteness to me. I have lived all my life in majority white countries (Aotearoa and the UK, where my whānau is from), but because whiteness is assumed to be both natural and neutral, my racial identity remains largely unexamined. I am on the alert for hints and glimpses, for signs that those who have gone before me have pointed and said: here. He Pākehātanga tēnei. This is who we are.

One such sign pointer is Fiona Kidman. To celebrate her 80th birthday she has released All the Way to Summer: Stories of Love and Longing, a collection of short stories both new and previously published. Kidman, who has been publishing since the 1970s, has a string of prestigious awards and honours to her name, and last year won our top book award for her latest novel, This Mortal Boy.

All the Way to Summer, which is also available as an ebook, is a good lockdown read: the stories are short, suitable for frazzled attention spans, and largely deal with love and human connection, often in very trying circumstances. (Be warned, however, that “Silks” features a character who becomes dangerously ill with an infectious virus.) Many of the stories take place safely in the past, which these days can feel like a pleasant escape. Most of the protagonists are white women, and as I read I could feel the tug of my own cultural whakapapa. Something important was being shown to me without being explicitly described.

In her preface, Kidman writes: “Some of these stories are written in the first person. If my readers think they recognise me in these … they are probably close. We all have our own histories of love”. One such story, “Silks”, is about a Pākehā woman who travels from Aotearoa to visit her husband in Vietnam. While there, she complains about a Vietnamese taxi driver who overcharges her; then regrets her actions as she realises they may result in his loss of livelihood, or worse. “I looked at myself in the mirror that night, Western and virtuous and deadly.” It is a rare moment of a white character consciously reflecting on their racial identity – but even so, the euphemistic ‘Western’ is used in place of the stark ‘white’. It is not a coincidence that this only happens when the Pāhekā character finds themselves in an unaccustomed racial minority.

Kidman, who is Pākehā, was for many years married to a Māori man, Ian Kidman (Ngāti Maniaopoto, Ngāti Raukawa), and I began to wonder to what extent her understanding of Pākehātanga was shaped by this relationship. After all, as Pākehā we have a cultural identity that has been named by Māori, and as writers and storytellers we live on a whenua already alive with pūrākau. Perhaps whiteness can best be understood in contrast; or perhaps, at least, this is a good place to start. All the Way to Summer is a glinting piece of the puzzle – and a thoroughly good read.

Book review: Me and White Supremacy by Layla F Saad

This review was commissioned by and originally published in Stuff on 22 March 2020

Layla F Saad has written this workbook for white people to help us understand the nature and reality of racism, and what we can do to combat it. Even before you open the pukapuka it’s a challenge: surely ‘white supremacy’ and ‘me’ don’t belong in the same sentence?

But yes, she does mean me. And if you’re white, or Pākehā, or Caucasian, or New Zealand European, or white-passing, she means you too. In fact, if you get uncomfortable even saying “I am white”, you need this workbook. Saad breaks down the different ways racism operates and sets journaling prompts designed to be addressed one day at a time over a period of 28 days.

Not gonna lie, it’s bloody hard. Saad strips away the comfortable fiction that racism happens “out there” and is done by other people; that it is possible to grow up as a white person untouched by white supremacist ideas. I know! It sounds awful. She’s calling us all racist! She doesn’t even know us! How can that be right?

Saad writes: “this idea that white supremacy only applies to the so-called ‘bad ones’ is both incorrect and dangerous, because it reinforces the idea that white supremacy is an ideology that is only upheld by a fringe group of people ... [In fact,] in white-centred societies and communities [such as Aotearoa], it is the dominant paradigm that forms the foundation from which norms, rules, and laws are created.”

As I read Me and White Supremacy I could feel the pillars of my racial comfort crumbling and I did not like it one bit. It filled me with an unpleasant nervous energy. I blushed. I sweated. I could feel the white supremacy within me shapeshifting to try to protect itself. And each new form it tried, Saad calmly demolished.

A form of white supremacy to which I discovered I am particularly susceptible is white exceptionalism. This is when I recognise the fact that Aotearoa is a racist society while believing myself to be uniquely immune from it. This is dangerous because, as Saad writes, “If you believe you are exceptional, you will ... continue to do harm, even if that is not your intention ... you are not exempt from the conditioning of white supremacy, from the benefits of white privilege, and from the responsibility to keep doing this [anti-racism] work for the rest of your life.”

This has led me to engage in two other forms of white supremacy Saad identifies: white silence and white apathy. I have been silent in the face of racism, and apathetic in failing to challenge it. I am now trying to figure out how to change this about myself.

None of us asked to be brought up in a white supremacist society, but since that’s where we are, it is the responsibility of us all to challenge it. If the anniversary of the mosque terror attacks have got you wondering what you can do: start with this workbook. This is mahi worth doing – especially if you think you don’t have to.

Book review: Scented by Laurence Fearnley

This review was commissioned by and originally published in Landfall Review Online in February 2020

This pukapuka made me feel really hard done by. The core premise of Laurence Fearnley’s novel Scented is that the smellscape of the world we live in is as rich, complex and omnipresent as that which we experience by any other sense. I kept stopping to sniff the air while reading and could rarely smell anything at all – let alone analyse the different layers, tones, and ingredients of scent. I started to feel that either I was lacking, or was being duped.

Scented, set in contemporary Aotearoa, is the story of Siân, a middle-aged Pākehā woman of English descent. In childhood she develops a lifelong passion for analysing scents and creating perfumes. Siân grows up to become an academic specialising in American Studies – a job she loses when her university department is disestablished. This comes as a significant blow to Siân’s identity, and so she decides to rebuild by creating the perfume of herself. Scented is the story of this process, told in the first person both in the present and through flashback.

It took me a long time to warm up to Scented. This is partly because Siân, the protagonist and narrator, is neither particularly warm nor much given to seeking warmth in others. Her father died when she was a child and she isn’t close with her sister, nor does she have any contact with her English whānau. Siân has some romantic relationships with men and women for a while as a young adult but then gives up dating altogether. ‘I realised that sex, for me, was largely irrelevant … I didn’t long for intimacy’. Siân professes herself ‘quite satisfied with the broader social contact I enjoyed through colleagues at work, flatmates and friends’ – yet seems unable or unwilling to do the work necessary to maintain even these relationships. Siân lets an important friendship drift out of her life because ‘We were both too naturally solitary and inward-looking to maintain regular catch-ups and conversations. We needed a bridging friend … Left to our own devices, we would … never quite muster the energy to meet.’ Being friends with Siân frankly sounds like a lot of work for not much reward. I started to wonder whether Siân’s passion for scents was a replacement for her apparent lack of interest in people.

Some characters in novels dance into your brain demanding attention; in contrast, I found Siân a cool, self-contained presence in my head. I kept thinking of the egg-like Eva robot in the film Wall-E when she snaps shut to guard the sapling: no way in, no way out. A smooth, uninterruptable surface. Contributing to this sense was the fact that Scented is a work about one sense (smell) that I experienced with another (sight). The whole way through reading I felt disconnected from the heart of the story; the smellscape of Siân’s world. This is incredibly detailed and complex: for Siân, smells have base, heart and top notes; they change over time; they have their own history and language. Siân can sniff a perfume and pick out the individual ingredients. She has a mental database of a massive range of different scents. For example, this is what she smells when she sits at her table: ‘The smell was muted, but I could detect some of the notes: the incense-like smell of frankincense, the beautiful rich Bulgarian rose, the smooth amber, the forest floor of oakmoss. I’d missed these smells. It felt so good to feel their presence once more.’

I cannot smell as Siân smells – although I took so many big lungfuls of air through my nose while reading that I made myself lightheaded. It was different from, say, reading a pukapuka about a character who loves music. Although I am only a casual listener, my ears function well enough that I can hear music just fine. I can tell which instruments are playing, and can experience the emotional and sometimes physical impacts of the art. But with smell – not so much. I’m not keen on perfume because something about it often makes me feel a bit ill. In fact, a lot of my reactions to scents are negative. I avoid taking the car to the petrol station because the smell makes me gag. My shitty high-school boyfriend used to wear a very popular cologne. Every so often I’ll catch a whiff of someone else wearing it and will be reminded of times I’d rather forget. 

Eventually I worked out that the main reason I was having trouble with Scented is because I resented the fact that Siân lived the main part of her life in a world that feels physically inaccessible to me – and the fact that, until I read this pukapuka, I had been happily unaware of my own limitations. This hadn’t happened with Perfume: the Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind, the only other novel I have ever read that is primarily about a person’s sense of smell. Perfume is so fantastical and creepy that I had no trouble believing that the main character’s olfactory superpowers were entirely made up. But Siân feels real. I did a bit of googling and discovered that Fearnley herself has a sensitive nose. She wants to set up a society of people who go places and sniff them in order to appreciate the richness and complexity of the smellscape in that particular location. This is a society I cannot join.

Or could I? Perhaps, if I work at it, I could learn. Scented ends rather unexpectedly with Siân becoming aware of her racial privilege as a Pākehā person in Aotearoa, a member of a colonising race. She starts researching the lost ‘Grand Māori Perfume’ with a view to recreating it, before realising that it is not her place to do so. ‘Despite spending years of my life focused on scent and perfume culture, I was ashamed to admit that I knew absolutely nothing about Māori perfume … I was born in New Zealand, had lived here all my life and valued notions of the unspoilt landscape, the bush and sea, and yet, when tested, my instincts and preferences sent me sniffing back to Britain. I felt as if my nose had betrayed me … The realisation that I was somehow perhaps not of this land filled me with a sadness I hadn’t expected.’ Siân realises that her scent education has been influenced so heavily by overseas perfumes that she does not have enough of a sense of what Aotearoa smells like. So she sets out to learn. ‘My aesthetic is all wrong. I don’t know how to smell native plants because my nose keeps drawing me back to smells I already know and appreciate … I have to teach myself a new way of smelling’. Being the solitary type, Siân wants to do this as much by herself as possible. So, rather than reaching out to kōrero with tangata whenua, she moves from the city to the countryside and … smells it.

Reviewers often criticise Fearnley for the exactness and quietness of her writing. It is certainly true that her work is finely controlled and crafted, but I don’t find this to be a disadvantage. The self-contained-ness of Fearnley’s writing left lots of room for my own emotional responses, which I felt I was pouring over this pukapuka in great waves. Having felt initially that Siân was in some mysterious way giving me the cold shoulder, I ended up respecting and rooting for her. ‘The heart notes of my signature scent are deep and dark, like a pool of still water in the bend of a river … I need to look and feel and taste and sniff. I need to capture a sense of place, this place, not some land that lies across the ocean … So now the top notes. The final addition to my perfume, the bursts of energy, my here and now, and the way ahead.’ Scented ends on a feeling of hope. If you’re after a deep dive into the feeling of smelling, I recommend it.

After I had finished reading, I lifted my print copy of Scented up to my face, opened it at random, pushed my nose right into the gutter of the pages, and inhaled. I smelled paper and ink. It’s a new pukapuka so it doesn’t have that dusty smell that makes second-hand bookshops seem slightly mysterious. But it’s not so freshly new as to have that sharper, more chemical ‘hot off the press’ smell that I associate with the excitement of opening a box of books straight from the printer. My copy has been hanging around for a few weeks, so its scent has settled into the softer, more comfortable smell of a pukapuka in the prime of its life. I think Siân would approve.

Book review: Auē

This review was commissioned by and printed in the New Zealand Herald in October 2019.

Ārama is eight years old. His parents have died, and his elder brother Taukiri has abandoned him. He is stuck living with his Aunty and her abusive partner on their farm.

Auē, Becky Manawatu’s first novel, is a difficult but rewarding read. It deals with the cycles of violence, poverty and addiction set against the traumatic intergenerational effects of colonialism and racism in Aotearoa. ‘Auē’ is a wail of distress. That might sound grim – and there certainly are many heartbreaking moments – but Manawatu (Ngāi Tahu) weaves threads of aroha throughout. 

 Auē is told in short chapters from different viewpoints, including Ārama’s and Taukiri’s in the present, and their parents’ in the past. Teenage Taukiri is running away, horrified that there is no one to stop him doing so: “The bottomlessness to my life was dizzying.” He stops wearing his bone carving and spends the money he earns busking on substances to numb the pain.

Ārama – Ari for short – is also grieving, seeking comfort from adults who are in too much pain to help him: “I was scared to go running out in the world when no one might notice because they were too busy keeping themselves from being sucked down the plughole”. Ari develops instead a touching faith in plasters. Whenever he misses his brother, he puts on another plaster.

Ari’s best friend is Beth (also eight). She too comes from a troubled background but, whereas Ari’s instinct is to try to heal, Beth leans into the violence. One of the first things we see her do is bash an injured baby rabbit to death. She makes Ari watch her favourite movie, Django Unchained, and they get into the habit of pretending to be characters from the film. The frequent references to this ultra-violent story of racially motivated revenge killing ramp up the tension.

Manawatu balances this with moments of joy and humour. A Pākehā woman in Ari’s rural district arranges for the school bus route to include Ari and Beth as a PR stunt to support her campaign for mayor. The kids spoil her white saviour photoshoot by pouring a cowpat down her back.

But what really kept me reading was the pull the characters have towards one another. Underneath the trauma and cultural alienation, Taukiri, Ari and their whānau are bound together. Maybe Ari’s plasters will work after all.

Book review: The Sound of Breaking Glass

This review was commissioned by Fairfax in July 2019.

On one level, Kirsten Warner’s The Sound of Breaking Glass is about a first-time author trying to figure out whether she’s entitled to write a book. As with so many first novels, it’s deeply autobiographical and includes writing about writing: “The only stories I can think of writing involve me, which doesn’t count.” Usually this kind of hand-wringing navel-gazing would put me off, but The Sound of Breaking Glass is something special.

We meet the book’s protagonist, Christel, as she’s spraining her ankle while rushing to drop the kids off before getting the bus to her job in reality TV. Someone on the bus who no one else can see is jeering at her. “He’s like my own critical voice, always going blah blah blah. The Big Critic. The Big C.” It’s our first hint of the expansiveness of Christel’s inner life; of the ways in which the forces shaping her psyche are so huge and demand so much attention that they warp the world around her. Big C follows Christel everywhere, changing shape and size, shouting warnings and hissing insults.

It is clear that something has to give: “I feel like I might leak out of my skin.” The whatever-it-is that’s inside Christel is coming in between her and her ‘real’ life. She is only able to call those closest to her by their names; everyone else is relegated to a cartoonish nickname: Fat Controller, Celebrity Yoga Teacher, Doll-Maker, Car Couple.

The action of the novel is split between the 1990s and Christel’s childhood in 1970s Auckland. Christel’s father Conrad was a German Jew who survived the Holocaust and passed some of the wounds from that trauma on to his daughter in ways neither of them understand. Christel also has trauma of her own – readers should beware that The Sound of Breaking Glass contains scenes of rape. The pain Conrad and Christel both feel is compounded by their inability to share their suffering.

There is a deep sense of struggle throughout this book. Christel’s emotional pain and inherited trauma wrench themselves out of the depths of her subconscious and embody themselves in the ‘real’ world in order to demand that she address her psychological needs. At one point Christel builds a large male figure out of old milk bottles as part of a protest against the use of surplus plastic. He starts out as a sculpture that others can see but then becomes Milk Bottle Man; a surreal character like Big C who acts independently of Christel. He starts expressing Christel’s tectonic anger, tracking down a man who assaulted her and writing ‘RAPIST’ in red paint on his house. “Somehow I’m making it happen but I don’t know how.”

The Sound of Breaking Glass is a book I had to read slowly and in several stages. There is a pervasive sense of dread and danger throughout, and I came to understand that Christel’s various psychological manifestations are part of her self-defensive coping strategy. Her reality is awful, so she slightly removes herself from it. “There were hooks and eyes in the air around us, hidden zipper teeth I couldn’t see.” But the reality of being a second-generation Holocaust survivor cannot be eluded forever. “I’ll never be normal and I’ll never be free … if I could write I would write them all to death … None of the other kids had grandparents who were sent to the crematorium … it’s my job to remember, all my responsibility.”

iN 2019 The Sound of Breaking Glass deservedly won our national book award for best first book. Warner’s prose is lucid and assured, despite the repeated references in the text to feeling insecure about one’s writing ability. She manages the balance between realism and surrealism beautifully: it’s never entirely clear, for example, how much of Milk Bottle Man is ‘real’, but it doesn’t matter. There’s an essential, urgent truth at the heart of the book that supersedes such questions; and the point is well taken that the ongoing emotional toll of the Holocaust cannot be communicated without moving beyond the realm of the easily comprehensible. The Sound of Breaking Glass is an unsettling, warm, strange book, and I highly recommend it.

Book review: Winged Helmet, White Horse by Karyn Hay

This review was commissioned by and originally published in Stuff (and associated newspapers) in June 2019

In her latest novel, Kiwi journalist and author Karyn Hay has created characters who are determinedly unlikeable. It makes for a dissonant reading experience: the writing is excellent but spending time with these people is grim.

Winged Helmet, White Horse is a novel about a middle-class London couple, Tim and Natasha; unhappily married parents to four-year-old Marigold, who is refusing toilet training. The story is framed by Hermes, the ancient Greek god of literature, who in the first and final chapters addresses the reader directly. “Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name, etc. OK, settle down, I’m not Satan, I’m Hermes. Psychopomp. (I escort souls to the Afterlife, basically.)” Hermes sets the tone of chatty with an undercurrent of viciousness that continues throughout the book.

Hermes introduces us to Tim with a warning: “Some of you won’t like him that much, so feel free to loosely interpret the word ‘hero’.” Tim is an alcoholic who has recently joined AA and stopped drinking; one of many secrets he keeps from his wife. He has written a book of poetry that was well received, but is failing to write another. He has also developed tinnitus, an inescapable sound that seems to act as a constant reminder of his shame and self-loathing. One day Tim randomly follows a stranger off a train, picks up her discarded receipts, and begins stalking her; kidding himself that this behaviour is harmless and maybe even counts as love. “Yep, that old quest for pure and untroubled love. Winged helmet, white horse. Where’s me pigging chalice?”

Natasha, who stays at home to look after Marigold, is desperate to get the little girl out of nappies in order to save face when Marigold starts at the fancy school they can’t afford. Natasha watches a lot of true crime shows, where she picks up tips for her half-hearted fantasy of murdering Tim. Much like Marigold, their pet cat has responded to the rife tension in the household by stress-peeing all over the place. Faced with the possibility of having to actively care for their pet, Natasha starts scheming instead how she can get the cat put to sleep. She has a best friend, Claire, who she also doesn’t really like: “Natasha wondered why Claire was wearing lipstick. It was a bright pink colour that didn’t suit her … ‘I love your lipstick,’ Natasha smiled at her.”

A sticky film of unpleasantness coats every page of Winged Helmet, White Horse. There are many sentences I loved – “The rest of the day lay twisted in his mind like a basket of wet washing” – and there’s an energy to the writing that keeps the reader engaged. But it’s an energy fuelled by spitefulness and increasingly tinged with desperation. When the book reaches its third-act twist and final decisive event, which are presumably intended as the emotional climax, both left me cold. In the end, I went where Hermes led me: standing aside from the action, and commenting from afar about how dreadful these people are.

Review: Guardian Māia

This review was commissioned and published by Stuff in April 2019.

Your name is Māia.

You are a kaitiaki, although you're not sure yet of what or whom. You are a skilled fighter and speak the language of birds. You are in the bush when you encounter mangā – ferocious humanoid monsters named after the barracouta fish they resemble. Do you draw your patu to fight the mangā ,or leg it back to the pā to warn the rest of your iwi?

Interactive fiction is a relatively new form of digital storytelling, like a cross between an e-book and a computer game. The reader (or player) makes a series of choices that affect the narrative outcomes and the development of the point-of-view character. Imagine those old pick-a-path books for kids, but published as an app, rather than in print.

Interactive fiction is often solely text-based, but Guardian Māia, the first such work to be set in te ao Māori, benefits from more video-gamey elements, as seen in the visual and sound design. Each page has illustrated borders that reflect Māia's current environment, drawing on recognisably Māori designs and each new chapter begins with a full-page illustration. I found the sounds of native birdsong and traditional Māori musical instruments particularly evocative.

As you play through the narrative, you learn that Māia's iwi in Fiordland are being terrorised by a taniwha named Moko who demands young wāhine as tribute. Gradually more of the world is revealed as you explore. The environment seems both familiar and strange: here are the wildlife and atua of Aotearoa, but something isn't right. The land seems… odd.

One of my pet peeves with interactive fiction is that you often can't go back and make different choices without completely restarting. Guardian Māia has an elegant in-world solution to this: if your choices end up with, for example, the mangā killing you, you can negotiate with Hine-nui-te-pō in the land of the dead to return to various previous points. If, like me, you were the kind of child who used to read through the whole pick-a-path book in order to reverse engineer the "correct" ending, this is extremely satisfying.

Guardian Māia is an excellent work of Māori speculative fiction. It is written in English with frequent use of Māori words. If you come across one you don't know, you can just tap on it and a definition will pop up. The narrative is engaging, and I found Moko genuinely frightening as the story's antagonist. The characterisation of Māia is up to you – her health and mana increase and decrease according to the choices you make. There are three possible endings.

Guardian Māia is the first episode of a larger, planned story from Metia Interactive, an Auckland studio that has won various awards including the United Nations World Summit Award for Cube. Episode one is free, and is up now on Google Play and the iTunes App Store. Guardian Māia is not one for the littlies, but I recommend it for teens and anyone old enough to remember pick-a-path books.

Book review: The Vanishing Act

This review was originally commissioned by the New Zealand Listener.

The Vanishing Act is a murder mystery set in 1960s Auckland. Glamorous Rosemary, who is gay, has been forced by homophobic parents to emigrate to Aotearoa. There she meets Rita, a lesbian who owns a brothel called The Gentlemen’s Club (also the title of Jen Shieff’s first book, for which The Vanishing Act is a standalone sequel). Soon a local doctor turns up dead, and scandalous intrigues ensue.

Initially The Vanishing Act feels like a bit of a mess. Several characters are introduced very quickly in very short chapters (sometimes only a page or so long), each of which is headed with a specific date. This requires the reader to flick back and forth to remind themselves who’s who and how the chronology fits together, which is annoying.

But it’s worth sticking around. Some of the characters are so unlikeable that seeing them get their comeuppance is deeply gratifying. The murder victim, George, is a villainous sex pest, and practically anyone could have killed him. The Vanishing Act will be enjoyed by lovers of the Yeah Noir genre (Kiwi crime), particularly those who are weary of the tropes of the troubled white male detective as the protagonist, and an abused woman as the murder victim.

Another strength of The Vanishing Act is as a work of historical fiction. Shieff has really done her research, and the novel wears this hard work lightly, making the setting seem natural rather than laboured. Shieff handles the mystery well and, although the resolution is a bit of stretch, it does keep the reader guessing. Once you get a handle on who’s who, The Vanishing Act is an entertaining read.

Book review: The New Ships

This review was originally published in The Reader in July 2018.

This book is just superb. Kate Duignan’s The New Ships is a novel set mostly in Wellington about Peter Collie, whose wife Moira has just died, and his relationship with their son Aaron. Aaron is biologically Moira’s but not Peter’s, although the two of them have raised him since birth. A lot of the book is told in flashback, and we learn that Peter’s daughter from a previous relationship may or may not have died as a toddler. Part of the reason we don’t know is because Peter has chosen not to investigate. It’s a pretty huge thing to be uncertain about.

There are a lot of huge uncertainties in this novel, and I suspect it’s not a coincidence that the ‘present’ of the book is set in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Peter and Moira are white but Aaron’s unknown birth father was a man of colour, and Aaron’s ethnic identity is another source of uncertainty that troubles Peter. Moira says he was conceived in Australia – might he be Aboriginal? As a child Aaron befriends some Māori and Pasifika kids and declares his ‘real’ dad is Rarotongan. When Aaron boards a plane for London after Moira’s funeral but doesn’t arrive there, Peter starts to panic. Airport security and Islamophobia are peaking, and Aaron is ethnically ambiguous enough to be mistaken for an Arab and labelled a terrorist.

One of the things I really like about The New Ships is that it’s easy to read and also full: of ideas, of story layers, of exceptional writing. Here are a few sentences that I particularly loved: when describing a sailor Peter admires: ‘I’d trust this man to put down a dog I was fond of.’ At the tail end of a family holiday when Peter just wants to go home: ‘I was sick of … sitting like a damp, agitated ghoul at my wife’s side.’ When Peter is facing his first Christmas after Moira’s death: ‘It’s intolerable, summer ahead, all the days fat with beauty, useless.’

Peter is a flawed protagonist. We are in his head the whole way through the book so our sympathies naturally flow towards him, but there’s no denying he’s done some pretty dodgy stuff. Why doesn’t he lift a finger to find out for sure whether his daughter is alive or dead? There’s also a very uncomfortable narrative thread wherein Peter, who is middle-aged and a partner at his law firm, sifts onto a young, attractive female intern while trying to convince himself that he’s “helping” her. I found his behaviour distressing, especially in light of the real-life stories about the way female law interns are treated here.

Duignan resolves some of the uncertainties in The New Ships but not all of them, giving the reader a pleasing sense of narrative satisfaction without anything feeling pat or contrived. I highly recommend The New Ships to lovers of NZ fiction and of good books in general.

Review by Elizabeth Heritage

The New Ships
by Kate Duignan
Published by VUP
ISBN 9781776561889

Book review: Feel Free

This review was commissioned and published by the New Zealand Listener in May 2018.

In the foreword to her collection of essays, Feel Free, Zadie Smith starts with her anxiety about this artform. “It’s true that for years I’ve been … wondering if I’ve made myself ludicrous … Essays about one person’s affective experience have, by their very nature, not a leg to stand on. All they have is their freedom.” Including the freedom to be of wildly varying quality.

Smith’s insecurity pulses throughout the book. A lot of the essays in Feel Free are works of criticism: of books, films, and artworks. Some are the texts of talks Smith has given, often while receiving awards for her writing. Some are personal essays reflecting on Smith’s life as a woman who grew up poor in North London with a black mother and a white father, and who is now a successful middle-class writer teaching on a prestigious MFA course in the US, and what that transition means. As with Smith’s novels, themes of immigration, racism, multi-culturalism, and feminism abound.

The essays I liked the best – and at her best Smith is truly excellent – were the ones where she addresses a central uncertainty that is worrying her. In “The I Who Is Not Me” Smith considers why she avoided writing fiction in the first person until her latest novel, Swing Time, whose protagonist’s life in some ways resembles Smith’s own. “It became important for me to believe my fiction was about other people, rather than myself, I took a strange pride in this idea, as if it proved I was less self-preoccupied or vain than the memoirist or the blogger or the Bildungsroman-er. No one could accuse me of hubris if I wasn’t there.” But then Smith is inspired by Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint: “By saying ‘I’ in a certain mode, an ambivalent, fictional mode, Roth made possible through Portnoy a new kind of ‘I’ in the world, a gift of freedom … The offer was not: You, too, can be like Portnoy. The offer was: Portnoy exists! Be as you please.”

The essays I liked the least were the ones where Smith seems to be trying to cover up her insecurity with intellectualism. From an exhibition review: “For us, the image-map that has been made of the world is not exactly the same as the territory itself, or rather, we can still remember — if only vaguely — a moment in time when the seams were still partially visible.” When Smith writes in this impersonal, academic style, often leaning towards pomposity, I found my interest waning.

My favourite kinds of book reviews to read are enthusiastic ones, where the reviewer dives headlong into a work they admire and holds up to the light all their favourite parts to share. Smith reviews the Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St Aubyn: “Writing reviews, you spend quite a lot of your time typing out the sentences of other people, i.e. quoting. Usually this is dull work; with St Aubyn, it’s a joy. Oh the semicolons, the discipline! Those commas so perfectly placed, so rhythmic, creating sentences loaded and blessed, almost o’erbrimmed, and yet sturdy, never in danger of collapse. It’s like fingering a beautiful swatch of brocade.”

The essays in Feel Free get much better as the book progresses, so I recommend starting at the back. Overall the book feels more like a compilation of all the non-fiction Smith happens to have written over the past few years, rather than a curated collection of her best essays. But the best bits of Feel Free are worth reading in order to spend time with Smith when she’s being vulnerable and honest. “I feel this – do you?”

Book review: When They Call You A Terrorist

WHEN THEY CALL YOU A TERRORIST: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele (Canongate/Allen & Unwin, $25)

This article was first published in the April 7, 2018 issue of the New Zealand Listener.

Patrisse Khan-Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, grew up “between the twin terrors of poverty and the police”.

Although only 257 pages long, this Black Lives Matter memoir is a big, big book. Co-written with journalist Asha Bandele, When They Call You a Terrorist is mostly the story of Patrisse Khan-Cullors’ life. The final quarter of the book is devoted to a history of the Black Lives Matter movement, of which she is a co-founder.

Khan-Cullors is a black woman, “a mother and a wife, a community organizer and queer, an artist and a dreamer” from Los Angeles. She grew up “between the twin terrors of poverty and the police”, who threatened black children and routinely tortured black adults. But this is no sob story: Khan-Cullors is one of those extraordinary people able to transform anger and grief into effective action.

As well as her experience of state violence, she’s motivated by the history of anti-racism campaigning in the US. “The stories I learnt as a small girl who read about civil rights, black power and black culture flowed everywhere in me and through me.”

Her personal narrative is backed up by startling statistics: in California alone, “a human being is killed by a police officer roughly every 72 hours” and “63% of these people killed by police are black or Latinx. Black people, 6% of the California population, are targeted and killed at five times the rate of whites.”

The odds are stacked against all people of colour in the US, especially under the present Administration, but Khan-Cullors brings to light the special hatred and fear that white-supremacist Americans have for black Americans in particular. She draws a direct line from slavery to Jim Crow to today’s epidemic of mass incarceration and institutionalised police brutality. “We have to talk very specifically about the anti-black racism that stalks us until it kills us … There is something quite basic that has to be addressed in the culture, in the hearts and minds of people who have benefited from, and were raised up on, the notion that black people are not fully human.”

Khan-Cullors is clear about what needs to be done – and is doing it. “The goal is freedom. The goal is to live beyond fear. The goal is to end the occupation of our bodies and souls by the agents of a larger American culture that demonstrates daily how we don’t matter … And I know that if we do what we are called to do … we will win.”

Black Lives Matter is an explicitly feminist movement founded by black women that seeks to engage queer, trans and disabled black women in particular. Among their guiding principles are: “Being self-reflective about and dismantling cisgender privilege and uplifting black trans folk … Asserting the fact that Black Lives Matter, all black lives, regardless of … ability [or] disability … Fostering a trans- and queer-affirming network … freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking …”

Founded in 2013, it’s having an ongoing effect. “We have created space for us to finally be unapologetic about who we are and what we need to be actually free, not partially free. … We make everyday people feel part of a push for change.”

Reading this memoir put me in awe of the exceptional strength and compassion that US anti-racism campaigners must possess to face up to the scale of the problem and make positive changes. Although this book is about the US, it made me look at race relations here in Aotearoa with new eyes. When They Call You a Terrorist will stay with you for a long time.

Book review: Chaucer's People

This review was commissioned by and published in the New Zealand Listener in February 2018.

To enjoy this book fully, I recommend pretending it’s being read to you by Maggie Smith when she’s playing her Downton Abbey character Violet Crawley.

Chaucer’s People, like Violet, takes no prisoners and surges forward at all times with a serene sense of its own rightness. It’s nominally a medieval social history centred around The Canterbury Tales, a long poem about pilgrims travelling to Canterbury written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century. If you don’t already know and love the Tales, and have a solid grounding in medieval European history, this is not the book for you. Author Liza Picard refuses to stop for beginners.

From almost the first page, I fell for Picard’s Violet-like charm. Here’s the opening sentence of the chapter on the Wife of Bath: “She really came from ‘beside Bath’, probably one of the Cotswold villages, not Bath itself, but she has gone down in history as the Wife of Bath, and it seems pointless to correct her address now.” And from later that same page: “Hose are always shown in contemporary pictures as smoothly encasing the leg, which I assumed was an artistic licence until I caught sight of a modern young woman whose jeans were tighter than skin-tight, and certainly encased her legs smoothly, leaving little room for wrinkles.”

Chaucer’s People is an idiosyncratic history. It eschews any kind of academic authority or appeal to popularity in favour of a brisk trot through those parts of medieval English life that Picard happens to find personally interesting. In different hands this could have been dire, but Picard brings her eye for intriguing detail to bear with great effect. In an interview with The Guardian, she said: “I am not a properly trained historian. I am a lawyer by trade, and an inquisitive, practical woman by character.” She writes, she says, to please herself, and focusses on primary sources rather than other people’s research.

The result is a compendium of interesting tidbits. Chaucer’s People is grouped loosely around the different characters in the Tales to provide a much-needed framing structure, although even so Picard repeats herself a few times. This is not a book to be read in one sitting, but rather to be dipped in and out of. In the chapter on the Cook, Picard gives us several pages of medieval recipes. “I have tried to keep the feeling of the language … Medieval English used the word ‘him’ for he, she, it and them. The recurrent command to ‘smite him in gobbets’ is so much more vivid than ‘cut it into bite-sized pieces’ that I’ve let it stand.”

Chaucer’s People has, perhaps, a niche audience. But if you can find someone who’s studied the Tales and has a soft spot for English eccentrics, they will love every single page.

Book review: The Maid's Room by Fiona Mitchell

This review was commissioned by and originally published in the NZ Herald in December 2017.

The Maid’s Room is the story of Tala and her sister Dolly, Filipina women who have left their families behind to work in Singapore as maids. Their working conditions are atrocious: they are kept in wage slavery and bullied. The threat of deportation is constant. Tala and Dolly are intimately involved in their employers’ lives – living in their houses and raising their children – but are treated as less than human.

The tipping point for Tala comes when her employer tries to hide a camera in her room in order to spy on her. Enraged, she starts a blog to let the world know the truth about maids’ working lives, and it is the fallout from this that drives the plot. “Her friends call her ‘the rescuer’ … she knows how to play the system, to speak up and out.” A lot of the story is told from Tala’s point of view, and she’s a great character to spend time with: loud, loyal, and brave. I was rooting for her the whole way through.

If this is starting to sound like The Help by Kathryn Stockett, that’s because it is. (The Help is a novel and film set in the Southern US in the 1960s, in which a white journalist exposes the realities of the working lives of poor black maids.) British author Fiona Mitchell credits The Help as the inspiration for The Maid’s Room, and references it throughout her novel.

And this is where it gets tricky. The Help has rightly been criticised for being a white saviour fantasy that centres white feelings at the expense of the black experience. In her response to the film of The Help, US critic Roxane Gay says: “That question [of writing across difference] becomes even more critical when we try to get race right, when we try to find authentic ways of imagining and re-imagining the lives of people with different cultural backgrounds … I don’t expect writers to always get difference right but I do expect writers to make a credible effort.”

So – did Mitchell (a white writer) get difference right? And if not, did she make a credible effort? It’s up to Filipina critics to answer the first one. On the second question: hmm.

Mitchell lived in Singapore for a couple of years and interviewed some Filipina maids there, so she is writing at least partly from primary research. One positive difference from The Help is that Mitchell has Tala publish her own work, rather than having a white women write it for her. But there’s a very telling scene in The Maid’s Room where some of the employer characters read The Help in their book club. Their reactions vary from those who can see the parallels to their own situation to the more overtly racist characters who can’t. No one – not even the character Mitchell says is based on herself – asks the maids what they think, or questions a white woman’s right to tell the stories of women of colour.

I get the feeling that Mitchell has absorbed the lesson that racism is bad, but has yet to learn how to avoid cultural appropriation (Gay’s ‘credible effort’) or to question her own privilege. In her author’s note, Mitchell displays a damning lack of self-awareness by directly comparing the racism faced by Filipina maids to her own experience in London as the daughter of an Irish man. Although The Maid’s Room doesn’t replicate the missteps of The Help to the same degree, it suffers from the same aura of white saviour fantasy. This debut novel is one to avoid.

Book review: The Earth Cries Out

The Earth Cries Out by Bonnie Etherington (Penguin Random House NZ, 2017), 285 pp., $38
This review was commissioned by and originally published in Landfall Review Online in October 2017.

The Earth Cries Out is the story of young Kiwi girl whose family moves from Nelson to Irian Jaya (now known as West Papua). It is written by Bonnie Etherington, a young New Zealand author who, when she was a little girl, moved with her family from Nelson to Irian Jaya. Initially I feared this strong basis in autobiography was not a good sign, but Etherington manages to avoid a lot of the pitfalls of typical first novels.

The Earth Cries Out is narrated by Ruth Glass. In the main narrative Ruth relates her experiences as a child aged about eight. This is interspersed with scrapbook-like additions that Ruth has added later, vignettes themed around the flora of Irian Jaya: breadfruit and plane crashes in the Second World War, betel nut sold on the roadside by women in Apebura, Abok trading pandanus oil in the 1920s, ferns and witch hunts in the early twenty-first century, stories of environmental degradation and civil war. The risk of this kind of post-modern polyphonic technique is that you lose the flow of the narrative and thus the reader’s emotional engagement with the story. In this case, although it does slow things down, overall I found that it worked. It enables Etherington to give the reader a richer, broader sense of Irian Jaya’s culture and history than would be possible through the eyes of a child protagonist. And she keeps the vignettes brief enough that you’re never away from the young Ruth long enough to stop caring about her.

Most of the story takes place in the village of Yuvut in a remote area of Irian Jaya. Ruth’s father has brought his wife and daughter all the way out there to escape from the pain of their bereavement: Julia, Ruth’s younger sister, has died. Ruth’s father is trying to build a hospital. He is not a missionary, precisely, but his project is backed and funded by the Anglican Church. He gives out pamphlets about diseases:

“They were filled with black and white sketches of people who were supposed to look like the people in Yuvut, and the words were written in a language that was a cousin to their language but not the same … No one read the pamphlets about sicknesses. Susumina’s grandmother used them to start her cooking fire, and the woman who lived in the hut next door used hers to block a leak in the thatch of her roof.”

Ruth’s mother counts down the days until they can return to New Zealand and refuses to engage with local culture beyond the bare minimum. Only Ruth herself makes friends with the local children (particularly Susumina), becomes part of village life, and learns the language: ‘It was like one day the world was only one language, could be talked of only in black and white, and the next all was colour because the extra words made it so. I had been given the gift of extra senses.’

Ruth reflects on how she came to a sense of her own racial identity as a white person, and learned that her whiteness was not neutral.

“Susumina and her friends called … people from other Indonesian islands ‘straight-hairs’ because their hair was straight, while Yuvut and other Papuan people had curly hair … We are not Indonesian, said Susumina when I asked her about this. And I tugged at my own hair, in between curly and straight, and squirmed in my own lighter skin … I had to choose [which group I belonged to], but I was not from Yuvut and my parents were not from Yuvut and we did not mean to stay in this village forever either … We all had to choose.”

Etherington is obviously very conscious that she is a white person writing characters of colour and telling the stories of other cultures. It’s a hot topic in literary circles at the moment, and the point at which fiction becomes cultural appropriation is difficult to pinpoint. Etherington addresses this issue by having her protagonist explicitly consider where she fitted into life in Yuvut and who gets to tell which stories. ‘I felt like I was stealing the stories, using them to say something about myself … There would always be something missing that I did not know how to tell, could not know how to tell and should not.’ In an interview on Radio New Zealand Etherington said, ‘I know [my book] can’t speak for Papua and I don’t want to do that, but [I] just [want it] to give some suggestions of what we might see if we listen.’

Although The Earth Cries Out is centred around the white experience, Etherington is careful to acknowledge that Ruth and her family are largely incidental to life in Yuvut. ‘Susumina’s timeline was not my timeline and I was not a protagonist in her story or song – just a small girl fighting for space in some of her … chapters.’ Ruth considers Sonya, a villager who Ruth’s parents have hired to do domestic work: ‘I knew only a corner of Sonya’s life … She did not need me or her job to be Sonya, to exist.’

The difficulty in bringing these kinds of issues to the fore in the context of a novel is that you risk becoming stilted or po-faced, and there are times when the words Etherington puts into Ruth’s mouth come out sounding irritatingly pat. But overall the technique of having the protagonist deliberately and explicitly step back from interpreting the narratives of the indigenous characters works, perhaps because the whole novel is based on Etherington’s real-life experiences.

Another aspect of storytelling that Etherington has Ruth repeatedly bring up is this idea of narrating one’s own life, and blurring the line between what is remembered and what is invented. Because of the framing device of the novel – Ruth reflecting as an adult on the time she spent in Irian Jaya as a child – the main narrative of The Earth Cries Out comprises Ruth interrogating her own memories: ‘I forget which version is the truth.’ Throughout the novel she tries to make sense of her little sister’s death: ‘There was what was true and what I only thought was true about Julia dying, and I tried to sort out which was which. Piles of facts on one side; piles of possibilities on the other. But they overlapped and crossed, wouldn’t let themselves be neatly divided.’ Ruth craves – but is always denied – a neat ending; redemption for having outlived her little sister.

“Before I left New Zealand I was learning about plots in stories and how they might look like a mountain if you drew them out, and how stories usually finished once they got to the top of the mountain, their most exciting point, or soon after. I wondered if this … was supposed to be the Big Thing that happened during our time in Yuvut, the one that would … make us healed … [but] we were taking part in a different story.”

The Earth Cries Out is an ambitious first novel that seeks not only to tell a good story but also to consider and critique the process of storytelling itself. Etherington manages to weave in these intellectual themes without ever becoming dry or self-indulgent. Ruth is a sympathetic and engaging narrator, and the frequent breaks into other perspectives add to the story without detracting too much from the narrative tension. I am eager to see what Etherington does next.

Book review: Solar Bones by Mike McCormack

This review was commissioned by and originally published on Stuff in September 2017.

Solar Bones by Mike McCormack has been awarded many impressive literary prizes and is on the Booker longlist; however, be warned that the entire book is just one long sentence, appearing at first glance to be a poem rather than a novel: “the bell / the bell as / hearing the bell as / hearing the bell as standing here / the bell being heard standing here / hearing it ring out through the grey light of this morning, noon or night / god knows / this grey day standing here and” so as the pages went on I began to have a terrible longing for a fullstop, or for any punctuation mark more determined than a colon, as apart from anything else it renders Solar Bones woefully lacking in capital letters, with each new paragraph, if that can still be considered the correct term, beginning, or continuing, in lower case

              as Irish author McCormack tells Marcus Conway’s life story, all in one gruelling sentence, and as I read on I felt a deep weariness and a tired familiarity, since Marcus is a middle-aged Irish man; white, one assumes, and I realised that I have spent so very much of my life reading a particular kind of novel about the internal tribulations of middle-aged white men that it makes me wish to put down the burden of worthy literature and rest, but often entire pages would go by without even an indent in sight, so there was no stopping; the typesetter had tried their best but it was exhausting – at one point Marcus’s daughter creates an artwork that is “a continuous swathe of text … in crashing typographical waves” written in her own blood, I mean good god, who may blame her

              “stop / mother of Jesus stop / this is how the mind unravels in nonsense and rubbish / if given its head” but McCormack wouldn’t take his own advice so, constantly denied the punctuation I craved, I finished Solar Bones completely worn out and there wasn’t even a fullstop on the last page; thank god for commas and line breaks I suppose but really, bloody hell

              .

Book review: Hunger by Roxane Gay

HUNGER: A Memoir of (My) Body, by Roxane Gay (Constable & Robinson, $35)

This article was first published in the August 12, 2017 issue of the New Zealand Listener.

A raw, honest, painful and sometimes frustrating memoir on what it’s like to be fat.

Hunger is a memoir told in bright, searing prose of what an utterly grim prospect it is to be fat in this society. You can’t fit in the seats in restaurants, or movie theatres, or planes. You can’t buy good clothes. You can’t get anything out of the doctor except ‘you need to lose weight’, even if what needs treating is a sore throat . You are subject to socially acceptable fat-shaming from strangers, on social media, and even – disguised as concern – from your nearest and dearest. You are trapped in your fat body and in your brain that, influenced by your fat-phobic environment, tells you over and over again how ugly and repulsive you are. You believe intellectually in the body positivity movement that says all bodies are good bodies, but it’s not enough. You understand as a feminist that the beauty and diet industries are purveying unattainable standards and self-hatred as a deliberate strategy to extort money from you, but that’s not enough either. You know that you would be healthier if you could love – or at least not actively hate – your own body, but that seems every bit as impossible as making your fat body smaller. And you can never, ever get away from it. As Roxane Gay said at Auckland Writers Festival: “It’s just a shitshow all day every day”.

Hunger is a raw, honest, painful memoir. Gay is a US feminist and critic whose writing career is going from strength to strength. Her intellect and talents are formidable, and in Hunger she turns them on herself.

Gay writes powerfully about how her life was derailed by a horrific childhood event that led her to overeat and make herself fat as a self-protection strategy. Those events and actions have had an ongoing and profound effect: “My body is a cage of my own making.”

Gay speaks candidly about how, even as she understands this cause and effect intellectually, still, every time she starts to lose weight through diet and exercise (which she does repeatedly), some powerful urge kicks in when she gets below a certain weight and makes her overeat again. All her insight cannot fix the chronic after-effects of her trauma or her fraught relationship with food: “What I know and what I feel are two very different things.” It makes for painful and sometimes frustrating reading.

Gay acknowledges this frustration, and our thwarted instinct to want a happy ending for her: “I wish, so very much, that I could write a book about triumphant weight loss and how I learned how to live more effectively with my demons. I wish I could write a book about being at peace and loving myself wholly, at any size. Instead, I have written this book, which has been the most difficult writing experience of my life … Here I am showing you the ferocity of my hunger.”