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Golden age for arts

30/7/2016

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Bloomsbury South: The Arts in Christchurch 1933–1953
by Peter Simpson


     There was a golden age in New Zealand in the two decades between 1933 and 1953, and Christchurch was at the centre of it. Culture bloomed and flourished. Exceptional people – Denis Glover, Ursula Bethell, Toss Woollaston, Evelyn Page, Allen Curnow, Ngaio Marsh, Douglas Lilburn and many others – were busy painting, writing, reading and making music. It was a fizzing, vibrant time – while it lasted.
     Peter Simpson, who lived in Christchurch and knew several of the people he writes about, has delved into the lives and achievements of these individuals and the environment in which they worked. This handsome book, full of pictures in colour and black and white, and the whole printed on glossy paper, is a celebration of those people. They were young and bold. They flatted together, socialised, argued, supported each other. They challenged the conservative establishment which resisted change and innovation, as it always does. They deplored the prevailing but phony nostalgia for everything English, and worked to create literature, music and art not inherited from older, northern hemisphere traditions.
     The comparison with the Bloomsbury Group that became famous in London between the two world wars is nevertheless apt. There were the same attachments, passions and commitment to culture that was innovative and eclectic, the individuals within the group were exceptionally talented, and they found the support and inspiration they needed from each other. So, the writers and painters, poets and musicians, printers, actors and dramatists in Christchurch gathered together and set their part of the world to buzzing.
     There are towering personalities throughout this book – people whose influence extends down the years to this day. At the centre was the poet Ursula Bethell, older than most but with an elegant knack for mentoring those who gravitated towards her, especially, it seems, young men. Ngaio Marsh, who was both a painter and a passionate director of Shakespeare’s plays and, in the words of one of her student actors, “boomed like the proverbial bittern” strides theatrically across the pages. Her detective novels, quite rightly, don’t get a mention here.
     Landfall was launched in 1947 and Charles Brasch and many of those involved with the periodical are household names now. And the painters: they were scoffed at but they had new ways to show what they saw, and they found support from the discerning few. However, as Simpson reminds us, the Colin McCahon painting International Air Race was accidentally broken up and used for packaging – surely someone is still having nightmares about that? The long-running controversy about Frances Hodgkins’s painting Pleasure Garden most clearly reflected the clash between the old and the new: “No episode better illustrates the cultural forces … that prevailed in Christchurch in these decades, especially in the visual arts.”
     So, why did that golden age end? By 1953 Ursula Bethell had died and many others had moved, mostly north. Christchurch was “left only with the old colonial standbys of choirs and brass bands” – Bloomsbury South had shrunk, dispersed, evaporated.

Review by Joan Curry
Title: Bloomsbury South: The Arts in Christchurch 1933–1953
Author: Peter Simpson
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 978 1 86940 848 0
Available: bookshops

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Wide-ranging essays 

25/7/2016

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Shelf Life: Reviews, Replies and Reminiscences
C. K. Stead


    C. K. Stead regards himself as a writer first and an academic second. When in 1986 he gave up teaching at university to write full-time as a freelance, he experienced a scary feeling, as though he were “stepping off a secure academic perch into nowhere”.
    Now, his mornings are devoted to the serious business of poetry and fiction. In this, his fourth book of literary journalism, Stead has selected another assortment of essays, interviews and opinion pieces which constitute part of what he calls his “afternoon work”. He has clearly found engaging ways of spending his time, and occasionally finds himself in hot water without the “aura of respectability and authority a university chair had seemed to provide.”
   Stead is splendidly opinionated. In spite of being the recipient of several of them, he believes that the culture of literary awards is too commercialised, distorts literary values and creates false reputations. He deplores current book reviewing standards as dumbed down, too pictorial and less verbal. He declares that there is no excuse for critics who can’t make themselves understood, and that writing survives if it’s intelligible and contains real intelligence, in both senses of that word.
    There are several wide-ranging essays here, including nine which cover aspects of his work on and about Katherine Mansfield. Stead talks about the art, craft and business of writing, and describes himself as an Arthur Lydiard kind of writer – “the more you run/write the better you are at it.” He discusses the David Bain affair, and reasons that the factual innocence of David Bain can’t be established without the blame for the murders being placed on the father Robin without any real evidence against him.
    Other pieces describe how he sets about writing novels about real people, or using real people, lightly disguised, as models for his fiction, and how he justifies the small inventions he must inevitably make to accommodate the story. He doesn’t seem to mind if the individuals are recognised, or take offence, and considers it to be “practising the art of fiction, which is always partly an art of voyeurism, spying and theft.”
    One of the most intriguing pieces in this book concerns the genesis and structure of the novel My Name Was Judas. Unconvinced by the gospel story of Judas as betrayer of Jesus, and the transformation of the young and gentle Jesus to the threatening, wrathful man he became, Stead set about constructing a more plausible portrayal of the two men. He has done so, not by distorting the gospels but by creating circumstances and a background that gives credence to them.       
  Stead is crisp, entertaining, sometimes challenging, and clearly not afraid of controversy: “One never knows where the next idea will come from, or where the next thought may lead. One must simply stay alert, and wear a hard hat” – for protection, he later explained in a Listener interview, against the brickbats he might receive for following his instincts and going wherever the story might lead.

Review by Joan Curry
Title: Shelf Life: 
Reviews, Replies and Reminiscences

Author: C. K. Stead
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 978 1 86940 849 7
Available: bookshops

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Heart-warming story 

19/7/2016

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The Paris of the West
by Karen McMillan


   The Paris of the West is written in the post-war period when Europe is war weary after the long and bitter Second World War. In Poland there is a take over by the Communist Party and with the country reeling from mass murders in the concentration camps there are those who elect to leave their homeland for a fresh start in other countries.
    This story follows the emigration of a family looking for a better life in America and their reactions to leaving war torn Poland. It is a heart-warming love story that revolves around two brothers, the wife of one of them and an aging father.
    Throughout the book you are given little snippets of San Francisco history that are interwoven into the story in a very subtle and imaginative way but not enough to ruin the flow of the story line. It is well written and has an ending that I personally felt was satisfying and complete.
    On the way through I came across a couple of points that caused me to pause and ponder about conditions in the period. My first-hand memory doesn’t stretch back to that year, but the author seems to have informed herself of the history of that time. In view of that, I found this story both warm and informative.
    Written earlier was The Paris of the East, which starts in 1939 and is a pre-runner to this title. I will hunt this book out and read it also, as I am sure it will be just as delightful as
The Paris of the West.

Review by Merilyn Mary
Title: The Paris of the West
Author: Karen McMillan
Publisher:  McKenzie Publishing
ISBN: 9780473343910
Available: Now
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Other-worldly people

13/7/2016

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​Murder on Muritai 
The Ryxin Trilogy - book one
by Genesis Cotterell

   If you have ever met someone so ‘other-worldly’ that you thought they could almost be ‘from another planet’, then Murder on Muritai may be all the confirmation you need that aliens – Ryxins from the planet Ryxin in this case – have indeed settled on Earth, in human guise, naturally.
   The book opens like any other murder mystery, with Curtis McCoy, a private investigator, listening to his client’s report of her partner’s death, which she assumes was murder. We soon learn however that this is no ordinary crime scenario since the deceased is Ryxin, and Human police are forbidden by law to investigate crimes involving Ryxins.
   ​Muritai Island should be an idyllic setting in the southern Pacific Ocean but instead its population is deeply divided: lawless Ryxins are striving to outnumber the Human population. McCoy is a new comer to the island and a new comer to detective work – this murder is his first case and as he tries to solve it he becomes entangled with the worst features of Ryxin society. At the same time, his involvement with a couple of Ryxin women distract him from his investigation to the point where he seems to have forgotten that he has a murder mystery to solve. And yet, cunningly, as the book draws to an end, McCoy pulls himself and all his clues together and identifies the killer.
   And on the surface, this is Murder on Muritai: a not overly gripping crime novel where the investigator spends much of the book either racing around the island (or catching the ferry to the mainland) in pursuit of various women, or mourning the end of his marriage to a Human.
   In spite of weaknesses in the crime-solving aspects of this book, I found Murder on Muritai both fascinating and disturbing. Cotterell cleverly brought the Ryxin aliens to Earth – to Ireland in a flash of blue light, in 1905 – not so very long after the arrival of Europeans in New Zealand must have seemed like an alien invasion. From Ireland, many Ryxins have made their way to Muritai Island ‘in search of a better life’. Some of them have obeyed government regulations and only mated with Humans, thereby diluting Ryxin blood. Others are intent on illegally preserving their full-bloodedness, and all the superior powers that that entails.
    Putting the science-fiction - suspended reality - aspect of Murder on Muritai aside, it is impossible not to reflect on its parallels with some of the volatile racial and migrant dramas currently unfolding around the world, with their associated issues of socio-cultural diversity, integration and identity preservation, or to muse on colonisation, ethnic cleansing and master races. And then there’s the question of those ‘other-worldly’ people that we’ve all met from time to time: could they have come ‘from another planet’?
   Murder on Muritai is book one in the Ryxin trilogy. If Curtis McCoy is going to stay in business he will have to spend less time chasing beautiful women, but like all good first books in a trilogy, Murder on Muritai ends with some questions still unanswered – a reason for catching up with McCoy, as he strives for a better Muritai Island, in book two. 

Review by Carolyn McKenzie
Title: Murder on Muritai  The Ryxin Trilogy – Book One
Author: Genesis Cotterell
Publisher: P Hayes
ISBN: 978-0-473-35480-0 (Kindle)
Available only as an ebook via Amazon Kindle.

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Enjoyment guaranteed

8/7/2016

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The Hoppleplop
by Kyle Mewburn and Deborah Hinde


What’s not to like about The Hoppleplop! And I’m not even in the age range of its intended audience – pre-schoolers and a little beyond.
    It’s important, of course, that the adult reader enjoys such a book too – they’re the one who has to do the reading. In the case of The Hoppleplop this is almost guaranteed, which is just as well, as they’ll have to repeat it over and over.
  The story is simple enough. You’re invited to move from room to room of a house in a search for a creature called hoppleplop. The fascination comes with relating the pictures to the text. The two are very well integrated.
    There are a couple of mysteries in the story, and the solutions are revealed by study of the illustrations.
    It’s an attractive, well-produced book, with silky cover and pages children will love to touch as they examine the full colour pictures.
   This is a re-issue of a book first published in 2004, with three extra pages giving details of the production process.

Review by Emily R
Title: The Hoppleplop
Author: Kyle Mewburn; Illustrator: Deborah Hinde
Publisher: Lizard Lane Books
ISBN: 978-0-473-35529-6
Available: bookshops
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