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Novel tells really good story

30/5/2025

Swimming with Crocodiles
by Julie Ryan

Swimming with Crocodiles is the second book of a trilogy that follows the big OE of Dennis Bogdanovitch.
The middle book in a trilogy is always challenging, but Julie Ryan makes it interesting as Dennis travels the world (sometimes in the custody of various law enforcement organizations) and works his way back towards his beloved boat. His character is well developed now. He is learning, and his decisions are improving, but he still makes some bad ones, and somehow survives them, mostly by being himself. He makes some new friends, muddles through the middle of the Syrian civil war, but never gives up on his boat. The risk of spoiling the book increases with every word I add, so I will not provide more details.
It is a good book, again starting somewhat slowly but picking up steam along the way and going quite well by the end. Well enough that I looked forward to book three. This book is not really a standalone, as it is a much better reading experience in the context of the first book, and both of them are needed for the third (and the trilogy as a whole) to work. Swimming with Crocodiles sets you up to fully experience the concluding volume; the three together are one large story. The difficulty is that the story is too large to be printed in a single book, but it really is just one story being told in instalments. Trilogies get written because a really good story takes time in the telling, and Julie Ryan is telling us a really good story.
It is well worth the time we spend reading these in order. I did, and I am quite glad of the experience. I strongly recommend her work in total. If you’ve read Swimming with Big Fish, the previous book, get this one as well and prepare yourself to properly enjoy Fatima Downunder (the third book of the larger story).

Review by BJ Chippindale

Title: Swimming with Crocodiles
Author: Julie Ryan
Publisher: Orakei Press,
ISBN: 9780473725518
RRP: $50
Available: Fishpond.co.nz

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For would-be or vicarious walkers

21/5/2025

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A Will and a Way –
on foot across France
by Jennifer Andrewes

There are several reasons why one might choose to read a book like this. You simply like travel books, you’re considering taking such a trip yourself and looking for tips. Perhaps you can’t, so trek along with the author experiencing it vicariously.
Similarly, there’s a variety of reasons one may set out to walk one of the Camino trails in Europe – one’s mental or physical health, religious motivation, sense of adventure, and more. As the author says – “there are many different reasons, both secular and spiritual." "There is no single answer, no right answer.”
Jennifer Andrewes’ reasons were a mixture, and the result – her written record – will speak to a variety of readers.
A Will and a Way covers two Camino trails. The first, a 43 day trek from La Voie du Puy, France, to Roncesvalles, Spain; the second, 45 days from Vézelay to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in the southwest of France.
Each of the days’ walks, covering about 20 kms, is given 1 to 2 pages of description – the path, other pilgrims met, accommodation, with great detail given to meals consumed – breakfast, lunch, dinner with frequent additional snack and drink stops. Over the two journeys the book documents, along with the thousands of kilometres walked, there’s mention of local sites, churches, accommodation of varying quality, countless meals and what must amount to vats of coffee and hundreds of croissants consumed. If you’re looking for specific tips about the route, day to day, these may help.
The book keeps pace with its subject – not the excitement of the sprint, more the determination of the marathon competition as it makes slower, steadier progress to its end.
Two sections of coloured photos are an excellent addition to the descriptions.

Review by Meg M

Title: A Will and a Way – on foot across France
Author: Jennifer Andrewes
Publisher: Parallel Lives
ISBN: 9780473739065
RRP: $34.95
Available: bookstores

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Impressive book about a complex artist

9/5/2025

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Tony Fomison Life of the Artist
by Mark Forman

It is argued that Tony Fomison (1939–1990) is one of New Zealand’s most influential twentieth-century artists.
Tony Fomison, Life of the Artist by Mark Forman is a biography focusing on his career spanning three decades. It was a huge undertaking for author and researcher Mark Forman; a book thirteen years in the making and drawing from interviews from more than 120 people.
  But the big shock when you start reading it is that none of Fomison’s paintings or drawings are in the book. The Fomison family’s decision to withdraw consent for paintings to be included has been respected by the author and publisher. But it is very disappointing that they are not included. I really wanted to see his art as a way of understanding him as an artist. Especially his very well-known painting What shall we tell them? (1976) or The Fugitive (1982-1983) that sold for $1.8 million dollars in 2022. Concerned about possible factual inaccuracies, the late artist's three sisters who represent his estate withheld consent for his artworks to be reproduced in its pages.
  It is well known that by the 1970s morbidity and the grotesque begins to surface in his work. But I would have been fascinated to see drawings and paintings from when he was younger and to see if his style of paintings changed before his early death in 1990.
  His long-time friend Richard McWhannell describes Fomison in the book. Tony was supportive, praising, loving, he was vile, fiendish and cruel, he was funny and entertaining, he had great humour, he had great lows and he suffered doubts; he was incisive, he was prickly, he would take the piss, he would challenge and offend. He loved to poke shit at apocracy. I couldn’t help but love him and hate him.
  Fomison was born in Christchurch in 1939 and as a schoolboy he was interested in archaeology and in particular Māori rock drawings.
  For a short time he worked at Canterbury Museum as an ethnologist.
  He lived in Auckland in the late 1970s and early 1980s and developed a strong connection with the Samoan community, even receiving a traditional Samoan pe’a tattoo at the age of 40. This was a great honour and extremely unusual for a Pākehā to receive this tattoo.
  Fomison died in 1990 when he was fifty years old. He was taken to Auckland University marae and was given the honour of being the first ever Pākehā to have a tangi held at the marae. Toss Woollaston, Hone Tuwhare, Llew Summers and many other New Zealand artists and writers attended the tangi.
  The 472 page book is divided into 9 chapters, an introduction, author’s note, notes, biography, acknowledgments and a very thorough index. The chapters are chronological from 1939 to 1990. The book is extremely well researched, focusing on his childhood, beginning as an artist, his career and many connections with other New Zealand artists, such as Colin McCahon, Allen Maddox, Philip Clairmont, Richard McWhannell. It covers his identity as an ‘outsider’, his addictions, struggle with his sexuality, loneliness, sadness and essentially embracing the label of a ‘working class painter’.
  Forman finishes the book by describing Fomison one last time; an intelligent gifted and generous man, flawed, emotionally tangled and wounded man, the darkness and the light – all of it, together at once.
  Author Mark Forman, was awarded a Whiria Te Mahara New Zealand History Grant, and the 2024 Gerrard and Marti Friedlander Charitable Trust publishing grant. He lives in Onehunga.
Tony Fomison, Life of the Artist is a deep dive into the man behind the art. Mark Forman has done an excellent job curating 13 years of research into an impressive book about a complex artist.

Review by Renee Hollis

Title: Tony Fomison, Life of the Artist
Author: Mark Forman
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 9781776711277
RRP: $59.99
Available: bookshops

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Follow-up title from outstanding writer

4/5/2025

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After the War
by Patricia Fenton

Not quite two years ago this reviewer saluted the emergence of Patricia Fenton as a ‘new and rare talent’ with the publication of her debut ‘War Bride’, before rabbiting on about how history is so often the story of ordinary people doing occasionally extraordinary things in frequently extraordinary situations. I’m delighted that her second novel, ‘After the War’, both confounds the myth of a second novel inevitably being inferior to the first, and strengthens my view of history’s nature.
To explain: one of her characters in ‘After the War’ hits the nail firmly on the head in saying: “All these years later the war casts a dark shadow. Books, movies, TV series—they’re all about the heroics but they don’t tell the real stories, do they?” Generally correct, Stephanie, but not this book, and there are two reasons for that.
The first is that Fenton does ‘ordinary’ with style, and while this story is bereft of the biggest and most savage war in history as a backdrop, it has the very human (and perhaps even ‘ordinary’?) quality and strength of Evie and Frank’s love to provide one as they delight in the small things of life and the good times that come from them as they ‘soldier on’ post-war.
Giving rise to that, the second reason is Fenton’s near-psychic understanding of people and their motivations which ensures that her story is, like Jimmy Stewart’s preferred bourbon, ‘always neat, but never gaudy’.
As a migrant myself, I can affirm that Fenton’s research into what might be termed ‘the migrant experience’ has been searching, extensive and above all, valid. She captures precisely what the Scots know as ‘the longing for my ain folk’; the benefits of improved living-standards as a result of ‘just getting on with it’; the earning of respect through the work ethic possessed by those determined to validate a choice made for the best of reasons. All these things are very familiar to Evie as she wrestles with ‘hiraeth’, her own longing for her home, for her people and for her Welsh Valleys.
Not all war bride stories are happy ones, and Fenton acknowledges that. Some couldn’t settle, despite the best of reasons, and in fact one knows of some who packed it in, went ‘home’ and found that what they had ‘endured’ until they could do so no longer, was infinitely better than the ‘home’ they remembered. Evie was spared that for she returned only in spirit, and spirit has a way of being unsusceptible to empirical evidence. Especially is this so where that evidence features economic austerity, the presence of bomb shelters in backyards and ten-year-old bomb-sites flourishing weeds.
Moving on, though, the pictures Fenton draws from her childhood memories live and breathe accuracy. Anyone who grew up in post-war NZ will recall the road presence of large and inevitably somewhat battered American V-sixes and V-eights; the thrill of the transistor radio; the amazement of television and the inability of the generation who fought depression and war to understand some of the actions and attitudes of the ‘boomers’ they produced. In that last, the author’s depiction of the Weston children, David and Christine, and their friends have the unmistakable stamp of parental experience producing the “uh-huh” of recognition.
Enough of the book for, as with ‘War Bride’, one really has to read it in order to appreciate both the flavour of Frank and Evie’s journey and the sense of loss that accompanies its ending. Of more moment might be the question: what makes Patricia Fenton such an outstanding writer?
The answer to that might incorporate the amount, the range and the quality of her research, for she was neither war bride nor immigrant. It might also involve the acknowledgement of her skill in weaving together the stories, both conflicting and harmonising, of diverse and separate people. It might even acknowledge her kinship to the main subjects of this work.
But it will definitely include her knowledge of people and her ease in representing them in daily situations, an ease that indicates the nature and amount of her empathy with ordinary–there’s that word again—people, their lives, and their stories. This, more than anything else, is why my last review of Fenton’s work opened with the assertion that hers is a new and rare talent.
‘After the War’ simply makes me rest my case while it poses, for Ms Fenton, the head-scratcher of how she will follow an act like this, for not to do so would constitute a crime against nature and literature both. Brava, Patricia Fenton.

Review by M J Burr

Title: After the War
Author: Patricia Fenton
Publisher: Heritage Press
ISBN: 9781991097125
RRP: $30.00
Available: Available as a paperback in book shops throughout NZ and as an ebook from Heritage Press heritagepress.nz

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Novel tells really good story

For would-be or vicarious walkers

Impressive book about a complex artist

Follow-up title from outstanding writer

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