Abstract
Introduction
Jolisa Gracewood provided one of the most controversial and contested views of New Zealand literature in 2010 in comparing what she regards as the proliferation of “pyrotechnical plots” to the late Victorian sensation novel. She reacts to what she describes as the “new sensationalism” with “boredom” and a lack of engagement and urges New Zealand authors to ditch the “special effects” and write about characters “who do something, rather than relentlessly suffer things done to them” (Metro Jan-Feb 2011 p93). Sensational incidents are certainly to be found in some of this year’s offerings, but other works are characterised by understated realism. Likewise, while some authors adopt a pessimistic tone and outlook, others write with a sense of joy and an awareness of the possibly of transcendence. It is this variety of tone, style and genre which, in my view, makes the current year rewarding.
Craig Cliff’s dazzling debut collection of short stories, A Man Melting, is a case in point. Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book, this collection also garnered considerable praise from Siobhan Harvey, who compares Cliff’s “deconstruction[s] of the New Zealand psyche” favourably with New Zealand short-story king Frank Sargeson. She writes that Cliff “examines all the big questions of life – birth, infancy, adolescence, violence, parenthood, death […] in fresh and intriguing ways” (Listener 17 July, 2010). Master storyteller Owen Marshall’s new volume of stories, Living as a Moon, is praised by Elspeth Sandys as a “superb collection”, but she echoes some of Gracewood’s concerns, troubled by the “tone” of some of the stories, which she sees as embodying Thoreau’s comment that “most men lead lives of quiet desperation”, and by the way in which the characters “make do” rather than thrive or triumph (New Zealand Books 20 [3] p15).
Several established poets published volumes in 2010. Bill Manhire’s The Victims of Lightning, nominated for the national award for best poetry collection, is typically lyrical, conversational and experimental, with meditations on children, mortality, politics, philosophy, and the enduring power of words. “The Lid Slides Back”, with its celebration of the “artist-poet” as a Prospero-like “magician” is a particular favourite: “I could draw a sunset./I could draw the stars./I could draw this quiet tree beside the water” (New Zealand Books 20[1] p19). Kate Camp’s The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls is another contender for the award for best work of poetry. Siobhan Harvey compares Camp to Carol Ann Duffy and Billy Collins, viewing her work as both “profound and playful” (New Zealand Books 20.3 p24). These qualities are evident in the last lines of the collection: “The ordinary can be miraculous/if it happens often enough. Each moment/a calm object she placed in my hand/like a freshly unwrapped cake of soap.” Mauri Ola, a splendid collection of contemporary Polynesian poems written in English, edited by Albert Wendt, Reina Whaitiri and Robert Sullivan, rounds out this year’s poetry prize nominations. Sullivan’s Cassino, City of Martyrs movingly combines memory and travel as the poet travels to Italy to retrace his grandfather’s World War II journey.
Vivienne Plumb’s Crumple reflects on travels, both local and international, that the poet has made while writing. Mark Houlahan notes that the first poem of the collection, “Instructions”, sets the tone of “mild surrealism the collection deploys” with its imperative “Do not give the parrot avocado” (NZ Books 21[4] 2011). David Eggleton’s Time of the Icebergs also ranges widely through the Pacific, but is particularly focused on his beloved Dunedin. Houlahan notes the oscillation between Eggleton’s “full-throated rhetoric” and notes of “quiet delicacy” (NZ Books 21[4] 2011). The latter is particularly evident in an ode to the late Hone Tuwhare, “Aotearoa Considered as a Scale Model”, in which the poet becomes one with the land and the reader is invited to “follow a jiggle-string of beach pulled taut/By the soaraway kite of blue sky”. Poet laureate Cilla McQueen’s Radio Room likewise concludes with a poem, “to Hone 1995”, which celebrates Tuwhare’s connection with the land, but also relishes the “wicked eyes/that needle me and piss me off, my friend”. The collection employs a variety of poetic forms, interspersing free verse poems with prose poems, a stirring ballad, concrete poems and delicate illustrations.
The three contenders for the New Zealand Post Book Awards prize for best fiction are particularly diverse this year. Tim Wilson’s debut novel, Their Faces Were Shining, is set in the American Midwest and focuses on the plight of the middle-aged Presbyterian female narrator, who, much to her dismay, is left behind after the Rapture. Wilson is particularly accomplished at subtle shifts of tone, from the wry, to the darkly comedic, to the satiric, to the tragic, to the moral, with an insistence on the importance of being invested in the human life on earth. Charlotte Grimshaw’s wry and satiric depiction of National Party politics and Auckland socialites in The Night Book focuses on obstetrician Dr Simon Lampton’s relationships with his insomniac daughter and the flawed wife of a prominent politician. Laurence Fernley’s The Hut Builder is a bildungsroman which charts the growth of protagonist Bowden Black in 1940s Fairlie. Paula Green was mesmerised at the way in which Fearnley “brings together a mix of the ordinary and the sublime – the routines of everyday life and the uplifting South Island landscape are the backdrop, the key and the catalyst to character development. But this enticing narrative fabric is pierced by thunderbolts and epiphanies.” (New Zealand Herald 17 November).
Lloyd Jones’ intertextual bravura, so evident in his acclaimed Mister Pip, is also a feature of his latest novel, Hand Me down World. Jones recounts the desperate journey of his African protagonist Ines to find her child in a chorus of contradictory voices. James Purdon writes that there
remains something Dickensian, in the best sense, about Jones’s imagination: lost children, a diverse cast, unscrupulousness on the part of rich and poor alike. But the greater debt here, given the novel’s sheaf of conflicting testimonies, may be to Dickens’s friend Wilkie Collins. […] Events, as we see them through the eyes of different witnesses, seem believable; yet their statements don’t jibe with the story Ines tells about herself. “How did a creature so soft and flexible,” she asks, “leave behind, almost in passing, something so set and hard?” (The Observer 21 November)
The flourishing genre of crime writing received particular recognition in 2010 with the establishment of the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel. The inaugural award went to debut novelist Alix Bosco for Cut and Run, which centres on Auckland-based heroine Anna Markunas, a middle-aged legal researcher who has been easing herself back into work after several family tragedies and who finds herself investigating a celebrity murder. Bernard Carpinter revels at the way in which the “voice of the monster” is to be heard in the work of crime novelists such as Bosco (New Zealand Books 20 [1] p19). He also praises Paul Cleave’s Blood Men which is set in a dark and violent Christchurch in which the protagonist Edward Hunter undergoes a Jekyll-and-Hyde struggle to contain the inner demons he has inherited from his serial killer father.
The literary relationship between Frank Sargeson and Janet Frame has received considerable attention, in both authors’ autobiographies, Michael King’s biographies, and in C.K. Stead’s novel All Visitors Ashore. This year, what served as the inspiration for Patrick Evans’ Gifted were the sixteen months when Frame lived in a hut in Sargeson’s Takapuna garden. Through the first person narrative Sargeson emerges as both manipulative and vulnerable, but it is Frame’s chameleon personality that captivates. Jenny Lawn comments perceptively that “while there is plenty of biographical evidence that Frame both intrigued and irritated Sargeson, the sense of obsession […] is heavily inflected by Evans’s own lifelong pursuit of Frame”. Gifted is thus a “critical as well as literary achievement” and there is a pleasing symmetry in reading Evans’ latest scholarly article on the power of names and allusion in Frames’s work in the latest issue of The Journal of New Zealand Literature (JNZL 28 p140).
Indeed, the fiction and life of Janet Frame has attracted particular attention over the past year. Pamela Gordon and Denis Harold have edited a beautiful and moving collection of the correspondence between Janet Frame and Charles Brasch, Dear Charles Dear Janet, which details the sustaining power of a reciprocal friendship. Frameworks, edited by Janet Cronin and Simone Drichel, offers readings of Frame’s fiction and poetry, including the posthumous Towards Another Summer, while Cindy Gabrielle turns her attention to representations of Maori culture in Frame’s fiction. French interest in Frame was particularly strong in 2010, with a conference in Lyon in October and two monographs (one by Ivane Mortelette and the other by Claire Bazin and Alice Braun) focusing on her first collection of stories, The Lagoon.
This international interest in New Zealand authors is reflected in Gerardo Rodriguez’s discussion of Katherine Mansfield as a modernist (El Posmodernismo Incipiente de una Modernidad Renegada, Editorial Verbum, Madrid). Like Frame, Mansfield received particular attention in 2010, with her modernist sensibilities also the focus of a collection of essays published by Edinburgh University Press. Jenny McDonnell’s meticulously researched Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace is welcomed by Angela Smith as a “new approach to Mansfield’s writing” which examines the way in which Mansfield “negotiated a route for herself between the elitism of high modernism and the stereotypes of popular culture” (JNZL 28 p152). In contrast, Kathleen Jones’ new biography of Mansfield received mixed praise from Hermione Lee, who commended Jones’ “steady, thorough, professional and unsensational” scholarship, but expressed frustration at the splicing of the present tense narrative of Mansfield’s life with past tense vignettes of her husband’s later life and the creation of the Mansfield myth (Guardian 12 February 2011).
Paul Millar’s biography of Bill Pearson, No Fretful Sleeper, was nominated as one of the best non-fiction books of 2010 in the New Zealand Post Book Awards. C.K. Stead writes that in Millar, “Pearson found a biographer he felt he could trust” (New Zealand Books 90, p. 5) and Wystan Curnow praises the “great faithfulness” with which Millar delineates Pearson’s life as a “closeted” gay man and weaves Pearson’s words through his own, so that the book becomes a hybrid genre, part biography and part autobiography (JNZL 28 p130).
C.K. Stead’s memoir, South-West of Eden, covers the formative years (1932-56) of one of New Zealand’s most acclaimed and controversial creative writers and man of letters and is a hymn both to the influences that shaped him and the place in which he grew up: Auckland. Murray Bramwell praises the memoir’s “persistent inclination to question and wonder at what has been – and how it has played out” (NZ Books 20.3 p11).
Several contemporary New Zealand writers received critical attention this year, in particular Patricia Grace, Witi Ihimaera, Kapka Kassabova, Yang Liang, Cilla McQueen and Carl Shuker. New Zealand travel writing, a genre as popular in the nineteenth century as it is today, inspired a special issue of Studies in Travel Writing. Literature of the colonial period is the focus of Sean Sturm well researched meditation on George Chamier, Jane Stafford’s acute analysis of the first New Zealand novel, and Lydia Wever’s charming Reading on the Farm, which uses the library on Brancepeth Station in the Wairarapa as the inspiration for an extended reflection on the meaning of books, reading and intellectual life in colonial New Zealand.