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Reading as mudlarking
The Chimes
Anna Smaill
Sceptre
ISBN 9781444794533
The Chimes, debut novel of poet and violinist Anna Smaill, portrays a post-apocalyptic but disorientingly medieval dystopia dominated by music. The novel opens with Simon, a boy on his own, as he embarks on a mysterious errand to London. But this is London as we’ve never seen – or more accurately – heard it before:
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Tagged with: Anna Smaill, Issue 111, Sceptre, Spring 2015, Thom Conroy
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review
Obituary — Campbell Smith
The world a stage
Gregory O’Brien recalls the life and work of artist and writer Campbell Smith (1925-2015)
The last time I saw Campbell Smith was in June a year ago. Friends from around the country had gathered at Hamilton’s Meteor Theatre to celebrate his life’s work and watch a performance of his play, Ida and I (aka Quite a Woman), a doco-drama – if such a thing can exist onstage – about the Waikato painter and arts-advocate, Ida Carey. It was both a glorious and a traumatic occasion.
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History, myth and jollity, Linda Burgess
Roly the Anzac Donkey
Glyn Harper (Jenny Cooper illus)
Puffin, $20.00,
ISBN 9780143506638
The Song of Kauri
Melinda Szymanik (Dominique Ford illus)
Scholastic, $27.00,
ISBN 9781775432289
I Am Not a Worm
Scott Tulloch
Scholastic, $19.00,
ISBN 9781775432517
Zoo Train
Sally Sutton (Daron Parton illus)
Walker Books, $28.00,
ISBN 9781922179876
There’s an immutable force that stands between a child and a book: the adult who buys it. There’s already been the adult who wrote it, published it, reviewed it, stocked it, displayed it – all that has to have taken place before the child can say that magical – sometimes chilling – word: “Again.”
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Tagged with: Daron Parton, Dominique Ford, Issue 111, Linda Burgess, Melinda Szymanik, Sally Sutton, Scholastic, Scott Tulloch, Spring 2015, Walker Books
Posted in Children, Literature, Review
Posted in Children, Literature, Review
Raymond Chandler meets Alfred Bester, Michael Morrissey
Hold My Teeth While I Teach You to Dance
Mike Johnson
99% Press, $30.00,
ISBN 9780994101518
Mike Johnson is one of our most gifted novelists, yet he has been curiously neglected. I suspect the problem is his bold originality. Each of his novels seems to break new ground, creating a new one-off genre. No wonder critics, not to mention readers, have been baffled. Lear: The Shakespeare Company Plays Lear at Babylon was an extraordinary tour de force set in a post-apocalyptic world which, like Joyce’s Ulysses, draws on a parallel literary universe. Thus, the reader is invited to read the world through a double focus. The effect is enriching. In Dumb Show, his fourth novel, he successfully relocated the gothic of the American Deep South to New Zealand in all its cruelty and bleakness. Father, one of the central characters, is granted the grace of redemption.
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Tagged with: 99% Press, Issue 111, Michael Morrissey, Mike Johnson, Spring 2015
Posted in Fiction, Literature
Posted in Fiction, Literature
Byzantine complexity, Geoffrey Palmer
Democracy in New Zealand
Raymond Miller
Auckland University Press, $45.00,
ISBN 9781869408350
Democracy in New Zealand is a competent work by an experienced and well-published Professor of Politics at the University of Auckland. Clearly designed as a student text for an introductory course in politics in New Zealand universities, it reflects its author’s research interests in electoral systems, government formation and execution, political parties, interest groups, political representation and leadership. Miller’s more specialised comparative work with Ian Marsh, Democratic Decline and Democratic Renewal, was published in 2012.
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Tagged with: Auckland University Press, Geoffrey Palmer, Issue 111, Raymond Miller, Spring 2015
Posted in Non-fiction, Politics & Law, Review
Posted in Non-fiction, Politics & Law, Review
Looking for home, David Cohen
Barefoot Years
Martin Edmond
Bridget Williams Books, $15.00,
ISBN 9781927277676
On Coming Home
Paula Morris
Bridget Williams Books, $15.00,
ISBN 9780908321117
Somewhere in the course of his perceptive career, in what one assumes was a more or less idle moment, George Orwell turned his attention to the question of whether purchasing cigarettes or literature leaves a larger hole in the average reader’s pocket. To this cobweb-hung dilemma, the English essayist devoted all the remorseless attention with which Marx went about weighing the merits of capitalism and socialism; although there the comparison must end, for Orwell surely never strung a gilded sentence together that would cause a reader mental pain on account of its construction. His tentative conclusion: reading is indeed better for one’s financial health. Workers of the world, unlight!
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Tagged with: Bridget Williams Books, David Cohen, Issue 111, Martin Edmond, Paula Morris, Spring 2015
Posted in Essays, Non-fiction, Review
Posted in Essays, Non-fiction, Review
Rejecting meat, Alison McKee
The Compassionate Contrarians: A History of Vegetarians in Aotearoa New Zealand
Catherine Amey
Rebel Press, $20.00,
IBSN 9780473274405
New Zealanders are prolific buyers of cookery books; however, an interest in the social history of eating and cooking has emerged in the last 10 years, with several academic studies now being published not only for research but also for general reading.
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Tagged with: Alison McKee, Catherine Amey, Issue 111, Rebel Press, Spring 2015
Posted in History, Non-fiction, Review
Posted in History, Non-fiction, Review
Grasping for something to say, Tom McLean
Charles Brasch: Selected Poems
Alan Roddick (ed)
Otago University Press, $35.00,
ISBN 9781877578052
Let us begin with the face. It isn’t what you expect. On the back cover of this trim little book, a woolly-haired young man looks sideways, away from the camera’s gaze, against a backdrop of grass and sky.
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Tagged with: Alan Roddick, Issue 111, Otago University Press, Spring 2015, Tom McLean
Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review
Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review