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Suspenseful well developed thriller

31/10/2016

A Moment’s Silence
by Christopher Abbey

A poignant premise underlies the title, A Moment’s Silence. What legacy do we leave behind – a life fulfilled or one that goes almost unnoticed by others?
New Zealander Martyn embarks on his middle-aged OE after his corporate career and thirty-year marriage implode. Picking up the pieces he’s re-established himself with an accountancy consultancy, a new home, and custody of the cat. With business going well, Martyn decides to reward himself with a belated OE in England, but he encounters far more adventure than he’s anticipated when he reports a suspicious sighting to the police. Now he’s the target of a mentally unbalanced IRA hitman who’s gone rogue.
A lonely man, Martyn’s drawn romantically to Sergeant Elizabeth Candy (off-camera style romance), but there’s the complication of the hitman’s relentless pursuit hanging over things.
The storyline is based on real events, and the author has skilfully woven fact and fiction, and backstory together, creating a compelling tale with his vivid writing style. Martyn’s travel itinerary and his tourist meanderings are shown in sharp contrast to the movements of the vindictive killer stalking him.
A well thought out thriller, brimming with suspense, and lifelike characters. I would read more by this author.

Review by Wendy Scott

Title: A Moment’s Silence
Author: Christopher Abbey
Publisher: Mary Egan Publishing
ISBN: 978-0-473-36189-1
RRP: $34.99
Available: print: bookshops; ebook: via Amazon

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Down-home tales

26/10/2016

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Great Tales from Rural New Zealand
by Gordon McLauchlan

Amongst an impressive list of previous publications Gordon McLauchlan has already written a book of New Zealand historical stories, and another about the ports and shipping activities of the country’s past. Now he has collected an assortment of his pieces about rural life in New Zealand from the time when the Polynesians first arrived in canoes with their dogs and their rats and found a “Garden of Eden with no god, no humans, no apples for bait and certainly no serpents.” What they did find was luxurious forests, water and good, arable land which they, and those who followed them, began turning into farms. This book tells the stories about how it happened and those who made it so.
Most of the pieces are short – a couple of pages perhaps – and they are based on archives of various kinds, including McLauchlan’s own extensive private collection. They are comfortably down-home and occasionally blokeish in style – the sort of easy-going narratives that might once have been shared around a campfire. They are not “tales” in the fiction sense but rather stories about real people and events, from Polynesian mythology to the second world war, about prime ministers and swaggers, bush poets and cow-cockies, and cheese, wine and Chinese gooseberries.
It is probably true to say that it was not so long ago that New Zealand was regarded by the rest of the world as a quaint but sometimes endearing, slightly backward country. Among other faults, our poetry was sometimes unsophisticated, we suffered “a great national weakness: the she’ll-be-right syndrome, or good nature to the level of inertness” and we cooked our meat and vegies to death.
Well, that’s how it was – once upon a time. But Gordon McLauchlan also shows us how, as time went on, we learned a thing or two. We shrugged off the hick images, found new ways to show the world who we are and what we can do, and even had a few laughs along the way.

Review by Joan Curry

Title: Great Tales from Rural New Zealand
Author: Gordon McLauchlan
Publisher: Bateman
ISBN: 978-1-86953-928-3
RRP: $29.99
Available: bookshops

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Silver net of words

19/10/2016

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Mister Hamilton
by John Dickson

This is the first collection of poems from John Dickson in eighteen years, and it is worth the wait. Personally, I’m all for slow growth, and if there was ever a profession that required long and deep contemplation, it is probably that of poet.
The twin virtues of what constitutes good writing, in my opinion, are clarity and flow. They allow for readability, and that is something I look for rather than the more difficult to define ‘literary merit’. John Dickson’s poems have both.
I still relate well to clarity and flow in poetry, along with that added and indefinable ‘something’ that declares it to be poetry and not prose.
Too many amateur poets believe that a poem is delivered by an ethereal muse, fully formed; that they are merely the scribe who puts the words down on the page – “That’s exactly how it came to me!” they cry, and pause expectantly, awaiting praise.
The analogy in my mind to this approach to the making of poetry is as if I were to declare my intention to make a chair, throw a pile of sticks upon the floor, and invite you to sit down. What a blessing then to explore poems by a man who understands his craft.
No one can accuse him of being hasty, or anything but thorough in the creating of best words in best order. Throughout, his pace seems unhurried, though always varied to match the intent of the poem. The rhythms are mostly conversational, and he acknowledges this in his notes: “In producing Mister Hamilton I attempted to compose verses that would not only use the speech rhythms of other people as well as myself, but also match the rhythms with various metrical patterns. (Yes, indeed, tick tock, tick tock, or the challenge of timing.”
Slow writing, and slow reading for this reviewer; and there is plenty of meat to savour on these finely-sculpted bones.
‘Plainsong,’ a favourite, clearly acknowledges the differing patterns and tonalities of region:
“… I am from Southland.
Some people say my speech is slow
I say it’s deliberate, just.
And my soul runs dark
like Southland’s slow intestinal rivers…”
There is story in his poems, too, even in something as contained as ‘The light above his head’ and the man writing a poem on the beauty of granite, or ‘Dee Street, Invercargill, 1960’ with its focused observation.
The longer poems are challenging. I needed the notes at the end, and did some Googling to fully understand them – if one ever can fully understand another person’s sharing of thought and emotion in poetry or prose. After careful study of the first, ‘The persistence of football results on Beasley Ave,’ I was rewarded for being a slow reader with a run of poems by Dickson that were shorter and yet still acute.
‘Piano time with Monk’ resonated with this lover of jazz, and its defence of response without explanation – to listen, to react, instead of standing apart from the music to construct a critique. To allow the music to take us where it will is always better than wallowing in theory, though the theorists also have their role to play, I’m sure.
‘Question’ tells us that “In middle age, the laws of living become slowly clear,” and that word slowly is how I continued to approach these poems by Dickson.
(I have sent a copy of ‘This is Zepf’s poem almost word for word’ to a writer-friend who, like me, favours clarity and flow, but who is also a dedicated football coach. He’ll get it, I know.)
I resisted ‘Something else’ at first. What was a chunk of prose doing in a book claiming to be poetry? Somewhere at the back of my mind lurks the word ‘proem’ to describe this kind of writing. In the end I accepted it as it was offered – a deeply felt weaving of various strands of narrative centred around the grief of losing a child. Subtly the point is made that TV brings too many reports of dark events worldwide that we cannot fully comprehend or fight against. There is reference to Brueghel’s equally complex world, the surface busyness, the dolorous undertones – “the mute song of unnameable blackness” – and a father mourning his dead daughter.
As in a ‘Road near meremere’ others have mourned such losses, marked by:
   “No roses
no thorns
   four crosses nailed to a pole.”
The careless, reckless deaths upon our roads.
If life is transient, as we know it is, let us all slow down, so as to mark it more clearly, Study it more nearly, beginning to grasp that we’re trying to understand what may never be fully understandable, like the secrets the dead take with them to their graves.
Mister Hamilton is a collection of poems of a thoughtful man, compassionate and also dispassionate, which sits well with me. I dislike the unkempt outpourings some writers pass of as ‘inspired by the muse.’ (Someone should shoot that dratted muse.)
In writing, intellect must control emotion, not be overtaken by it. How else are we to allow readers the courtesy of bringing into that space we’ve left for them their own knowing of loss and pain and grief and occasional miscomprehensions? Done that. Been there. Thank you for sharing with me, poet.
Dickson says:
   “… now I’m sixty-five
   and approaching silence,
   when I listen to someone
   telling their thoughts
   of that and this,
   I nod and smile
   all the time thinking,
   The minutes,
   the minutes do go on.”
  When a poet of the calibre of John Dickson speaks, it’s good to listen, and ignore the minutes ticking by, caught, for now, in his silver net of words.
I’m presently commissioned to write an article on love poems, so let me end with some of those words from ‘Fourteen lines for Jen.’ I equate them with Yeats’ “one man loved the pilgrim soul in you” .
Dickson says:
  “… when I think of
   how much I love you, the flow of my blood
sings the nomadic song of a summer sleep.”
Let all our poets write so slow and deep.

Review by Jenny Argante

Title: Mister Hamilton
Author: John Dickson
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 978 1 86940 855 8
RRP: $24.99
Available: bookshops

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Deft skill in historical novel

11/10/2016

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The Youngest Son
by Tony Chapelle

Welshman Tomas Gerold is the youngest of three brothers. Although he reluctantly accepts that he is never going to inherit any part of the family estate, his strong sense of belonging to that land has drawn him back to his brother’s home after losing his commission during the Crimean war. No matter how much he loves the farmland that is shared between his two older brothers, Tom’s bitterness at having no future there and his misadventures both in business and with women see him on the run from Wales in 1860. He is heading for New Zealand with his recently acquired bride: the book ends in Wanganui, while further north, the Land Wars are brewing.
The Youngest Son is a companion book to Merely a Girl. Neither prequel nor sequel, Tom Gerold’s story unfolds parallel to that of Adelaide Gilbard. Whereas Merely a Girl is a genteel, feminine tale, The Youngest Son is earthy, cruel and brutal. Tom’s striking sense of entitlement, his frustrated anger and his recurring drunkenness make him not always likable. He is perhaps most appealing when he expresses his self-doubt and lack of self-confidence.
Just as Tom’s beloved Welsh countryside is imposing, rugged and stone-grey, Chapelle’s evocative word-painting is pervaded by hardship, violence and sorrow. It is easy to understand why Tom isn’t the only man in this story to seek a fresh start with life in New Zealand. New Zealand readers with a Welshman, or a remittance man, in their ancestry will gain moving insight into life in rural Wales in the mid 1800s.
With deft skill, Chapelle has built a network of characters whose lives collide, shy away from each other and intersect again. At the same time, he has created a number of teasing leads into the future: the end of the book is by no means the end of the story. A good part of the story’s future will play out in New Zealand’s pioneering days. From 1858 to 1863, Merely a Girl and The Youngest Son have brought Adelaide and Tom to New Zealand with several other key characters.
I’m looking forward to how Chapelle will carry this story forward in his next book.

Review by Carolyn McKenzie

ED NOTE: Merely a Girl was reviewed on this page on 29 February this year. Access the review via Archives February 2016 on the right sidebar.

Title: The Youngest Son
Author: Tony Chapelle
Publisher: Rangitawa Publishing
ISBN: 978-0-9941268-9-4
Available: Amazon, Bruce McKenzie Booksellers, Rangitawa Publishing
Format: print only

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Highly-informed view of art

4/10/2016

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This Model World: Travels to the Edge of Contemporary Art
by Anthony Byrt

I undertook this review with some misgiving. With no formal training in art or art history, and being an occasional rather than regular visitor to art galleries, surely I was under-qualified? But at least my reading should reveal how accessible the book will be to a wider readership.
Brief scenario: Anthony Byrt, Kiwi, returns to New Zealand after years involved in the art world overseas, and rediscovers the art scene and artists here. His own stated purpose for the book is to show what it’s like to spend your life chasing contemporary art and the people who make it, show readers why they should care about art, and show us why we should be interested in the way artists test boundaries where our bodies meet the world.
Relating to the first of those aims, he talks of visiting and speaking with New Zealand-born artists in many parts of the world. Places mentioned include Detroit, Houston, Sydney, Marfa Texas, Copenhagen, Berlin, Venice, as well as various spots around our own islands. It doesn’t seem like a bad sort of life.
His main subjects, each of whom he spends time with, are Yvonne Todd, Luke Willis Thompson, Kalisolaite Uhila, Shane Cotton, Fiona Pardington, Billy Apple, Steve Carr, Peter Robinson, Shannon Te Ao, Judy Millar, Ruth Buchanan, Simon Denny.
Byrt’s coverage of these visits concentrates on the artists’ works and purpose. The few biographical details are included to help reveal and elaborate. The illustrations, coloured photographs, are mostly of the artworks rather than their makers.
References to major recent events in relation to many pieces speak to the value of contemporary art as contributing commentary on the world and politics.
Byrt’s writing is confident and artistic in its expression, as would be expected from such an experienced art critic and journalist.
This Model World is a highly informed appreciation of the place and value of many of this country’s current artists’ contribution to the wider world of art. Time taken over reading and rereading each chapter will be repaid by a greater understanding of what the author set out to do – show why we should be interested in the contemporary artists New Zealand has produced.

Review by Paua Blue

Title: This Model World: Travels to the Edge of Contemporary Art
Author: Anthony Byrt
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 978 1 86940 858 9
Available: bookshops

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Suspenseful well developed thriller

Down-home tales

Silver net of words

Deft skill in historical novel

Highly-informed view of art

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