Book review: The Pacific Room

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

One of the biggest bunfights in the literary world at the moment is who gets to write who. Where is the line between imaginatively entering into the world of a character different from you, and cultural appropriation?

The Pacific Room is the debut novel of Australian journalist Michael Fitzgerald. It is the story of Robert Louis Stevenson’s final days in Apia, Samoa, in the late nineteenth century; and of modern-day art historian Lewis Wakefield’s journey to Samoa to research the portrait of Stevenson painted just before he died.

One of the reasons my mind was stuck on questions of identity and representations is because these are recurring themes in the book. Lewis’s twin was killed when they were children and he doesn’t entirely know who he is without him. Stevenson is, rather coyly, never referred to by that name, but instead goes by his Samoan cognomen Tusitala, or simply “the writer”. He is worried about the portraits made of him and how he is represented in other men’s art. Hovering underneath everything is Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Stevenson’s iconic work of split identity. It made me wonder about the identity of the author.

Fitzgerald’s bio does not include his race, gender identity, or sexual orientation, which is often an indicator of what is generally regarded as the default option: male/heterosexual/cisgender/Caucasian. Some of his characters, however, are not. The Pacific Room is set largely in Samoa and features Samoan characters, including fa’afafine. In the acknowledgements Fitzgerald thanks the Samoan fa’afafine community, presumably for helping him with his research. Does this mean it’s ok? Who gets to decide? These unanswered questions troubled me throughout the book.

Fitzgerald’s prose style is poetic and rather dreamlike, which is sometimes beautiful and sometimes irritatingly languid. “The heat softens [Lewis], as if his body is but a membrane porous to the stories floating through the air.” The multiple points of view structure is distracting: I found there were too many characters for me to become fully invested.

Overall, there’s something about The Pacific Room that doesn’t quite work. I recommend instead Black Marks on the White Page, a recent anthology of Pasifika writing and art edited by Witi Ihimaera and Tina Makareti. That’s the real deal.

Book review: Black Marks on the White Page

BLACK MARKS ON THE WHITE PAGE, edited by Witi Ihimaera and Tina Makereti (Penguin, $40)

This article was first published in the July 15, 2017 issue of the New Zealand Listener.

A collection of stories tells how colonialism is being resisted.

This book is many different things at once: hardback, artwork, storytelling, anthology. It is a beautiful object and a challenge.

Black Marks on the White Page, edited by Witi Ihimaera and Tina Makereti, is a collection of art and writing from Maori, Pasifika and Aboriginal Australian creators. In their introduction, the editors explain that this prose, poetry and visual art together is a talanoa, a conversation.

In The Vanua is Fo‘ohake, Jione Havea writes: “A talanoa must be shared … A talanoa can also pierce and transform, stretch and transcend … A talanoa is difficult to complete, or contain. It lives on, beyond each of its tellings.”

The nature of storytelling is a theme throughout the book. In her poem Pouliuli: A Story of Darkness in 13 Lines, Selina Tusitala Marsh takes a black marker pen to a copy of the novel Pouliuli by Maualaivao Albert Wendt, leaving just a few words uncrossed-out. Although the poem is formed by obscuring words, it is a call for more words to be written: “Wake up/Samoa and bring/a/New Zealand/storyteller/a pen.” In Famished Eels by Mary Rokonadravu, the protagonist’s illiterate father urges them to “Keep writing … As long as someone remembers, we live … My story is not mine alone. It is the story of multitudes and it will become a thread in the stories of multitudes to come.”

The creators here also comment on their use of the English language. In her extract from Freelove, Sia Figiel includes a Samoan-English vocabulary list. The protagonist, Inosia Alofafua Afatasi, says “[English] was a moody language. At times void of meaning. Empty. … It wasn’t like my geneaology could be traced through it. Or that the veins in my blood were to be found in its alphabet, the way it is found on my mother’s tattooed thighs.”

Black Marks on the White Page comprises, as the editors say, “the disruptive act that Maori, Pasifika and Aboriginal writing constitutes in the worldwide literary landscape – still the page is white, and still the marks we make upon it are radical acts of transgression …”.

Many of its works are concerned explicitly with resisting colonialism. In Whale Bone City, Alexis Wright writes: “See if you can find Aboriginal Sovereignty’s killer … You like the lightness of being an individual like white people, to be in a personal space where you can no longer feel the totality of culture, or feel any of its depth of connectedness, or of being reminded how you are related to the total country …”

In his satirical short story Rush, Nic Low inverts the power dynamic by making Aboriginal Australians the owners of the mining company and older white people the protesters.

Black Marks on the White Page showcases a multiplicity of voices and genres. It is, by turns, startling, beautiful, funny, challenging, forceful and delicate – a talanoa well worth joining.

Book review: Night Burns with a White Fire

This review was originally published in the 29 July 2017 issue of the NZ Listener.

Reading this compilation of Lauris Edmond’s poetry and prose can be unsettling. Edmond records her own experience so skilfully that she communicates something close to universal human truth. It’s almost like she knows you and is writing directly to you.

To put this new anthology together, editors Frances Edmond and Sue Fitchett asked various of Lauris Edmond’s family, friends and colleagues to nominate a piece of her writing that they felt was in some way quintessentially ‘Lauris’. The result is a compact collection – less than 200 pages – of poetry and excerpts from her autobiographies that feels intimate and personal.

Night Burns with a White Fire is split into thematic sections that are roughly chronological. They deal with common themes of everyday life: family, marriage, ageing, friendship. The first section is “Somewhere you are always going home”; poems and prose about childbirth, children, ancestors, and descendants. In “Square dance”, Edmond addresses her “five-foot legendary grandmother” Clara Eliza who died before Edmond was born: “I can see you, moving about / in the dim grey weather where history lodges”. Edmond then turns to her granddaughter Ruth: “You too … will likely give birth to a girl / who in turn will depart for a later, stranger time. … you will mature among women / with a larger pride in their powers.”

This theme of women coming into their own recurs throughout the book. Edmond was born in 1924 and died in 2000. She lived through most of the major events of the twentieth century, including the rise of second-wave feminism. She published her first book of poems, In Middle Air, in 1975 at the age of 51, and her writing career took off from there. 1975 was also the year Edmond moved to Oriental Bay, in Wellington, where her work is now memorialised in stone in the harbourfront Writers Walk.

In “Wellington letter XV”, Edmond writes: “In time … it will be as though / I had never lived; / but the earth will remain … and women I shall not know / will walk”. Night Burns with a White Fire is in part an attempt to stave off that time of when it shall be as though Edmond had never lived. We have her books; we have some of her words written in stone, past which ‘women I shall not know’ walk every day.

As the editors say in their introduction, “[Edmond’s] skill was to make her experience speak to ours.” Night Burns with a White Fire is a small book, but one that feels like it will last.

Book review: Gravity Well

This review was commissioned by and printed in the NZ Herald in June 2017.

I loved Gravity Well right up until the final dozen or so pages. But after reading the ending I nearly threw the book across the room. It made me wonder, how did I form such strong expectations about what kind of an ending this story seems to need?

Gravity Well is Australian author Melanie Joosten’s second novel. Set mostly in Australia, it tells the stories of two friends, Lotte and Eve. Lotte, who works as an astronomer, envies astronauts: “The responsibilities of the outside world had been removed for them. They were free to concentrate only on the task at hand: putting their lives on hold for something bigger than themselves.” Lotte has been putting her own personal life on hold, taking a job in South America for a year away from her husband, who wants to settle down, and avoiding getting tested for the same breast cancer that killed her mother.

Eve, an audio engineer, is also trying to escape. She has left her normal life and run away to a campsite in winter by the sea. There are hints she may be suffering from post-partum depression, as she punishes herself by refusing physical or emotional comfort.

Lotte and Eve, with their flaws, mistakes, and strained relationships, feel psychologically complex and entirely real. Their decisions – often selfish or based in wishful thinking – are believable, and this combined with the clever structure of Gravity Well kept me fully immersed.

Joosten sustains the suspense by splitting the narrative into two main timeframes; 2009 and 2015. Gradually we circle back to the central events that have pushed Eve and Lotte to run. Joosten handles the reveals deftly, delivering a genuine twist and a real emotional gut-punch. As the key events are recounted the prose seems to dry out, sentences getting shorter and plainer, as though words cannot contain the emotion. The characters’ lives are messy but Joosten is absolutely in control.

Or is she? “That was when it became art: not in its creation but its reception.” Gravity Well pulled me into its world so thoroughly that I became strongly invested in the kind of ending I thought it needed. Joosten’s novel has become art alright, but the Eve and Lotte in my head deserve better.

Book review: Smoke by Dan Vyleta

This review was commissioned by BooksellersNZ and originally published on their blog The Reader in June 2016

I chose to read and review this book because of its intriguing premise - what if sin were visible? What if, every time you did (or even thought) something ‘bad’, your body emitted smoke?

Dan Vyleta’s new YA novel imagines a Victorian England where smoke has become not just the visual manifestation of sin but a tool of class oppression: upper-class people never smoke, working-class people smoke all the time. Rich people’s white clothing remains white; poor people’s clothing is covered in soot. (The middle classes don’t really appear, apart from the odd mention: “Burghers may smoke, once in a while. One does not expect better of them.”)

I found the premise of human smoke to be utterly fascinating, and a good thing too, because plot- and character-wise Smoke is almost completely run-of-the-mill. Keen YA readers will find all their favourite tropes: young people who have to save the world, a teenage girl torn between two male love interests (one of whom is kind and openly in love with her, and the other of whom is a sexy bad boy whose attentions are more ambiguous), adults who turn out to be untrustworthy and/or dangerous, etc.

Smoke opens in a vicious upper-class boarding school near Oxford where the children of the rich are sent to have the smoke beaten out of them. Our heroes are two schoolboys: Thomas (brooding; dark past; possibly a ‘chosen one’) and Charlie (helpful; kind; faithful companion). They are tortured by an older boy, the prefect Julius (cruel; entitled; arrogant). Over the Christmas hols they’re sent to stay with Thomas’s uncle, Baron Naylor, where they meet the baron’s daughter (the novel’s third protagonist) Livia (pretty, and thus a romantic goal for both Thomas and Charlie; intelligent; self-disciplined to the point of aggravating piousness). Lady Naylor, a scientist and revolutionary, reveals that All Is Not As It Seems, that the aristocrats appear smokeless not because they’re morally superior but because they’ve found a way to game the system, and that the conspiracy to maintain the oppressive status quo goes All The Way To The Top. But can she be trusted? Our heroes must set off on a Quest to Discover the Truth! Etc. 

Despite its occasional clunkiness, Smoke is an enjoyable read, with enough mystery and adventure to keep the reader turning pages. Although Vyleta seems to be more concerned with investigating the mechanics and meaning of human smoke than in the readability of his novel, this didn’t bother me, because I too found the whole concept intriguing. 

Various adult characters serve as mouthpieces for different ideologies of smoke. The religious interpretation states that smoke is the manifestation of sin, and must be punished. The Enlightenment-inspired philosophers attempt to study smoke in a rational manner: “Every transgression leaves behind its own type of Soot and those versed in such matters can determine the severity of your crime just by studying the stain’s density and grit.” Maybe smoke is the symptom of a disease that science can cure? The Marxist interpretation says that smoke is a tool of class oppression: “Smoking ain’t a sin. It’s a weapon. Toffs use it to keep us down.” The humanist-socialist interpretation says that smoke is a natural expression of passion: “It’s the animal part of us that will not serve.”

At its best, Smoke is a fascinating alternative history that fully explores the central question, what if human bodies smoked? At its worst, it’s a trope-ridden YA novel that doesn’t quite manage to lift itself up from under the layers of plot strands and furious philosophising. An enjoyable light read.