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.

Orville: Ghost of Honour

As is only right and fitting, Orville has been invited to be the Ghost of Honour at LexiCon, NZ’s 38th national science fiction and fantasy convention. Here is the text of the short bio I have supplied for the con book:

“Orville: rat, film star, legend. In many ways, Orville’s is the classic rags-to-riches story. He survived a difficult kittenhood in the foster care system, eventually being adopted from the New Zealand Rat Rescue by a Wellington couple. He quickly adapted to a life of leisure and treats, but there was something missing.

And then, in early 2012, the call came: the call to greatness. Peter Jackson needed rats for The Hobbit films, and Orville was just the rat for the job. He never looked back. Orville took to the glamorous film-star lifestyle as though born to it, hobnobbing with agents, makeup artists and actors with grace and poise. He was pleased to receive fan mail from John Rhys-Davies, and condescended to appear in a short film documenting his fabulous career. He died in late 2013, the bright flame of his talent extinguished by old age.”

— Elizabeth Heritage, mortal representative of Orville the Movie-Star Rat

Fan mail for Orville the Movie-Star Rat from John Rhys-Davies. CC BY

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.