Blog Archives

The colony’s resident expert of choice, Simon Upton

Posted on December 5, 2015 by NZ Books

James Hector: Explorer, Scientist, Leader
Simon Nathan
Geoscience Society of New Zealand, $45.00
ISBN 9781877480461

Simon Nathan’s biography of Sir James Hector fills a major gap in the nation’s historical bibliography. The reasons why the gap remained unfilled for over a century following Hector’s death are worth pondering. A cursory glance through Nathan’s bibliography reveals full length biographies of several of Hector’s scientific contemporaries, McKay, Haast, Buller, Davis and Murchison among them. But Hector’s life, despite his towering public stature in the development of 19th-century New Zealand, remained confined to an MA thesis in 1936 and a more recent doctoral thesis devoted to his early life.

Tagged with: Geoscience Society of New Zealand, Issue 112, James Hector, Simon Nathan, Summer 2015
Posted in Biography, History, Natural History, Non-fiction, Review, Science

Lives shaped by the novelist, Elspeth Sandys

Posted on December 5, 2015 by NZ Books

Death and Forgiveness
Jindra Tichá
Mary Egan Publishing, $30.00,
ISBN 9780473306717

Rich Man Road
Ann Glamuzina
Eunoia Publishing, $30.00,
ISBN 9780994104748

In a recent review in New Zealand Books, Jane Westaway commented on the rise, both in New Zealand and the United Kingdom, of the small press, a phenomenon directly attributable to the devouring appetite of the multinational conglomerates. Having charted the rise and rise of such monster publishing companies as Penguin Random House, and the corresponding disappearance, at least from the fiction market, of hitherto commercially successful local presses, Westaway went on to observe that, whereas in the past book editors (she herself is a past co-editor of New Zealand Books) were inclined to turn their noses up at the so-called “vanity press”, in today’s changed world of publishing, that response is no longer valid. Small presses are here to stay!

Tagged with: Ann Glamuzina, Elspeth Sandys, Eunoia Publishing, Issue 112, Jindra Tichá, Mary Egan Publishing, Summer 2015
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Crime wave, Bernard Carpinter

Posted on December 5, 2015 by NZ Books

Running Towards Danger
Tina Clough
Vanguard Press, $30.00,
ISBN 97811784650100

Blood, Wine and Chocolate
Julie Thomas
HarperCollins, $35.00
ISBN 9781775540533

Something Is Rotten
Adam Sarafis
Echo, $35.00
ISBN 9781760067762

New Zealand crime fiction is booming. The long list for the Ngaio Marsh Award this year comprised nine books and the five on the short list are all very good. Those books are, in no particular order, Five Minutes Alone by Paul Cleave, The Petticoat Men by Barbara Ewing, Swimming in the Dark by Paddy Richardson, The Children’s Pond by Tina Shaw and Fallout by Paul Thomas.

Thomas and Cleave, in particular, have given New Zealand crime fiction credibility, their lively prose delivering crackling plots, larger-than-life characters and even humour. And they are distinctively Kiwi books; Thomas’s protagonist of five novels, Tito Ihaka, is Māori and well versed in the blunter forms of the Kiwi vernacular.

Tagged with: Adam Sarafis, Bernard Carpinter, Echo, HarperCollins, Issue 112, Julie Thomas, Summer 2015, Tina Clough, Vanguard Press
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Moss, C K Stead

Posted on December 5, 2015 by NZ Books

Maurice Gee: Life and Work
Rachel Barrowman
Victoria University Press, $60.00
ISBN 9780864739926

When I was young, New Zealand fiction had three Maurices. Duggan (“Maurice”) was the maestro, Gee (“Moss”) the dependable tradesman, and Shadbolt (“Morrie”) the showman. The maestro wrote mostly very slowly and with difficulty; the tradesman was more fluent and produced new work with what appeared to be near regularity; the showman was always ahead of the pack, prolific and catching the public eye, but was felt by some to be a bit of a sham. All three were in varying degrees neurotic – to be a writer in the 1950s, you had to be.

Tagged with: C K Stead, Issue 112, Maurice Gee, Rachel Barrowman, Summer 2015, Victoria University Press
Posted in Biography, Literature, Non-fiction, Review

So wide, can’t get around it, John Newton

Posted on December 5, 2015 by NZ Books

James K Baxter: Complete Prose
John Weir (ed)
Victoria University Press, $200.00,
ISBN 9781776560370

James K Baxter’s Collected Poems which appeared in 1979 remains the most monumental object in New Zealand verse. But it contains a mere 700 poems; the total corpus is said to approach 3000. There’s a fat hardback edition containing some but not all of Baxter’s plays (he wrote about 30). It’s anyone’s guess how much shelf-space the letters will eventually occupy – but a single correspondence, the letters to Noel Ginn, already runs to 570 pages in Paul Millar’s edition of 2001. All this from a writer who died at 46. Laurence Baigent describes locking himself in the bathroom to try to get away from Baxter’s barrage of talk: “But even then, like the baying of the hound of heaven, Baxter’s voice pursued him through the door panels,” writes John Weir in his introduction. Others have recounted the same manic deluge. And Baxter seems to have written as compulsively as he talked.

Tagged with: Issue 112, James K Baxter, John Newton, John Weir, Summer 2015, Victoria University Press
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Non-fiction, Review, Short stories

Tireless affectionate scrutiny, Michael Hulse

Posted on December 5, 2015 by NZ Books

Being Here: Selected Poems
Vincent O’Sullivan
Victoria University Press, $40.00
ISBN 9780864739315

Let the Writer Stand
Judith Dell Panny
Steele Roberts, $30.00
ISBN 9781927242803

Vincent O’Sullivan is a writer of such prodigious gifts that the Collected Poems I can’t be alone in longing for simply isn’t feasible. In the time such an edition would take to assemble, O’Sullivan would have written another collection or two. Just as the ironic, intellectual and psychological positions of his writing routinely pre-empt and outdistance critical responses, so too his extraordinary rate of production, not only in poetry, is ceaselessly speeding away from us. So this wonderful selection, Being Here, the first attempt to showcase his whole work in poetry since the 1992 Selected Poems, will have to do for now.

Tagged with: Issue 112, Judith Dell Panny, Michael Hulse, Steele Roberts, Summer 2015, Victoria University Press, Vincent O’Sullivan
Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review

The thinking man’s cartoonist, Dylan Horrocks

Posted on December 5, 2015 by NZ Books

Brockie: A Memoir in Words, Cartoons and Sketches
Bob Brockie
New Zealand Cartoon Archive/Fraser Books, $39.50
ISBN 9780958232074

David Lange called Brockie “the thinking man’s cartoonist”. Which is pretty nice of Lange, considering that Brockie had drawn him on various occasions being pissed on by a giant bulldog, with his head cut off, naked and (very frequently) in drag. Mind you, Lange was far from alone. Robert Muldoon, Jim Bolger, Colin Meads, Kim Dotcom and even Keith Holyoake have all, at various times, been stripped and humiliated by Brockie’s pen, which has been scratching away at public reputations for more than 50 years.

Tagged with: Dylan Horrocks, Fraser Books, Issue 112, New Zealand Cartoon Archive, Summer 2015
Posted in Art, History, Memoir, Non-fiction, Politics & Law, Review

The gap between fiction and history, Hamish Clayton

Posted on December 5, 2015 by NZ Books

R.H.I.: Two Novellas
Tim Corballis
Victoria University Press, $30.00,
ISBN 9780864739827

Trifecta
Ian Wedde
Victoria University Press, $30.00,
ISBN 9780864739834

In 1987, the South African novelist J M Coetzee spoke at the Weekly Mail Book Week in Cape Town, offering a few observations on the relation of novels and novel-writing to the times which produce them. Coetzee’s subject was, effectively, the nature of fiction’s relationship to history, a subject peculiarly charged by the time and locale into which his talk – later transcribed as the essay, “The Novel Today” – was delivered. The problem for the novelist, as Coetzee sees it, is that in times of intense ideological pressure (like the apartheid era in South Africa) the gap between fiction and history is squeezed to almost nothing, forcing the novelist to either supplement or rival the power of history itself. Coetzee is mainly concerned with the ethical dimensions of fiction’s resistance to history and, over a lifetime, has produced one of the most remarkable bodies of work of any era, pondering this question among others through fiction and essays.

Tagged with: Ian Wedde, Issue 112, Summer 2015, Tim Corballis, Victoria University Press
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Maybe, maybe not, Craig Cliff

Posted on December 5, 2015 by NZ Books

The Writers’ Festival
Stephanie Johnson
Vintage, $38.00
ISBN 9781775537984

Taken together, Stephanie Johnson’s The Writing Class (2013) and her latest novel, The Writers’ Festival, are a study in ambivalence. Can creative writing be taught? the first asks. Maybe, maybe not. At least, Johnson’s two writing tutors in The Writing Class are in disagreement. Merle Carbury, a 50-something midlist-and-slipping novelist, believes teaching “a student with no instinct for writing is as impossible as teaching a tone-deaf child the violin”. Gareth Heap, on the other hand, has parlayed a prize-winning first novel into a teaching gig and reckons writing, like chemistry or a foreign language, can be taught.

Tagged with: Craig Cliff, Issue 112, Stephanie Johnson, Summer 2015, Vintage
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Life invisible, Louise Wareham Leonard

Posted on December 5, 2015 by NZ Books

The Pale North
Hamish Clayton
Penguin, $30.00
ISBN 9780143569268

The Pale North, written by 1977 Hawke’s Bay-born Hamish Clayton, is an experiment, a metafiction, a deconstruction, a love letter and an investigation heir to certain writers – the late German writer W G Sebald being the most obvious one as well as, perhaps, the likes of Paul Auster. Its strengths are in its sure prose, its rich depiction of the atmosphere and landscape of Wellington, its experimentation and range of ideas. Clayton, in this, his second novel, plays with form and theme in a way that puts him at the forefront of certain metafictional and innovative contemporary writers.

Tagged with: Hamish Clayton, Issue 112, Louise Wareham Leonard, Penguin Books, Summer 2015
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review