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Book merits popular acclaim

29/8/2024

Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud
by Lee Murray

The only drawback I find with this book is that too few people will probably get to read it. And that’s a shame because it is beautiful and deserves wide appreciation. It has been honoured as Winner of the NZSA Laura Solomon Cuba Press Prize in 2023 and now merits popular acclaim.
Lee Murray takes the Chinese tradition of the húli jīng, the nine-tailed fox spirit, as the linking trope to tell nine tales of women brought half a world away from the Middle Kingdom to this antipodean land in years past. Just as the fox is not endemic, so the women find themselves alien to New Zealand, condemned to lives of cultural isolation.
The tales are inspired - provoked may be a more fitting word - by the lives of people and happenings that occurred in this country.
The first, a very moving story told in exquisite prose, reveals the sadness of one who longs for a career in music, but she’s a girl, just a girl, so years sorting fruit and vegetables in the family’s Auckland shop is her lifelong gender-prescribed lot.
Even in New Gold Mountain, your father’s empire belongs to your brother, of course. It is the way things are, the way things are destined to be.
From this one, the fox spirit inhabits further women whose stories are increasingly unhappy. But while this is so, the quality of the writing makes them beautiful.
So you grow up in China, speaking the silk-slipper tongue of your father’s ancestors, your strangeness pinched and nipped and contained so you might become a golden filial daughter.
Beautiful, yes, in relation to the prose. The women’s experiences are in sharp contrast – loneliness, violence, hopelessness, all too often leading to extreme action. Reading of them, one weeps for the reality of their lives, which makes Lee Murray’s remembrance more poignant – the prose which is of high poetic precision partially making up for the brutality.
…at last you [the fox] understand your purpose. You will bear witness. You will give these women voice and nourish them with hope. You will sing their spirits to the mountains and shout their stories from the tips of the red turrets. You will give them flesh and make them real.
The short chapter pieces alternate fox-girl-fox-daughter-fox-woman-fox-wife and so on. My advice is to read this 130-page book pairing a fox view followed by the human persona, with gaps between the pairings rather than in one sitting. That way the humanity of the stories will be accentuated and time allowed for later thought. And the whole experience will last longer.

Review by Bronwyn Elsmore

Title: Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud
Author: Lee Murray
Publisher: The Cuba Press, New Zealand
ISBN: 978-1-98-859577-1
RRP: $28
Available: print book. From the publisher, or via Bateman distributors.
Also as an e-book (ePub) https://thecubapress.nz/shop/fox-spirit-on-a-distant-cloud/
Information on the author's website: https://www.leemurray.info/foxspiritonadistantcloud

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Less is more

23/8/2024

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Below Ground
by Sandra Arnold

Below Ground is a collection of flash fiction pieces uncovering the lives, feelings, actions and interactions of a variety of New Zealanders. While every story is entire unto itself, some stories link to others, which you discover as you read through the series. Flash fiction makes for a very easy and entertaining bedtime read – one or more, depending on the heaviness of your eyelids, with no requirement to read in any particular order.
My favourite story could be titled, ‘Revenge of the Worm’, but is actually called ‘Ka mua, ka muri – walking backwards into the future’. In it, a bullied schoolgirl (bullying is a repeated theme through the stories) becomes brave in multiple ways to overcome her tormentors.
Don’t be put off by the cover of Below Ground. The truth is, if I saw this book in a store I would be unlikely to pick it up as the cover conveys magical realism. The stories are, however, all too real as they cover the many ways people relate to one another in fictional settings.
Sandra Arnold has a great eye for detail of people and their behaviours which she combines, apparently effortlessly, with a smooth and humorous approach to language. Once you start reading, as another reviewer said, “…you will want to read one more story, and then another, and then another…” all the way through.

Review by Jane Shearer

Title: Below Ground
Author: Sandra Arnold
Publisher: Impspired
ISBN: 9781915819932
RRP: $25
Available: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/1915819938; Scorpio Books, Christchurch

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Memoir, biography and novel mixed

16/8/2024

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Nell
by Penelope Todd

“This above all: to thine own self be true / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
     Time-serving windbag though Polonius is generally accounted, it must be conceded that this advice to his son offers a guide to living a life of integrity, and Penelope Todd has been quick to adopt the advice in her memorial to her grandmother. Memoir, biography and novel mixed, the life of the woman born Eleanor Preston but known all her life as ‘Nell’ is a study in that very quality.
     A product of the times in her upbringing, Nell was born in 1897 at the high tide of Empire, the year of the Queen-Emperor’s Diamond Jubilee. As a child of empire, she imbibed the attitudes and mores of her times as readily as she absorbed the primal tastes, feels and scents of plants, the farm and the sprawling land under the vast skies of the South Island, and these attitudes sustained her as she watched the progressive crumbling of the world of her birthright under the impetus of outside events.
     She was a maid of 20 when Passchendaele tore her generation of young men apart; a young mother of 30 at the onset of the Great Depression; 40 at the onset of another war that occurred because the ‘War to end War’ had signally failed to do so; 50 as a New Elizabethan and 60 at the advent of the Swinging Sixties. However the world around her of which she was so much a part altered or convulsed, Nell remained staunchly high-principled, self-aware, self-possessed and happy in her own skin, buoyed and sustained by the behaviours and principles she learned as a daughter of the Empire at its apotheosis.
     This went beyond the public into the private life also. Today, when the term ‘colonist’ is more often an epithet than a description, it is instructive to consider the type of life such people led. Todd spares no effort in showing the reader just how much strength, self-sufficiency and stiff upper lip were called for not only to live in a wattle-and-daub cottage through several Maniototo winters but to adapt to marriage, miscarriage, childbirth and supplying indispensable farm labour along the way. Such self-sufficiency was essential in a land that was even more empty than the North Island and Todd shows us, all the way through the work, that Nell’s cares were often worsened or at the least added to, by pressure from the needs, deeds or wishes of others.
     From a husband, for example who, although not consciously cruel nor misogynistic, was nevertheless a man of his times and upbringing with expectations to suit. This is best shown in the early awareness of a nine-year-old Nell that ‘Each time visitors come, she notices afresh that men and boys are lords, and that women and girls look after them.’ In her early twenties, Nell was the victim of her own mother’s need for companionship and assistance to the extent of giving up a promising career as a nurse. Again, thirty years later her husband’s decision in the face of the post-war economic slump to sell the farm that had been purchased with her ‘dowry’ and into which they had poured blood, sweat and tears is presented as a fait accompli which Nell had little choice but to accept.
     Through such major blows, though, as well as the multitude of setbacks present in an age of muscle rather than machine, ever and anon Nell’s ability to roll with the punches was founded upon an inner strength that came from knowing whom and what she was as a sentient, thinking being; a product of her times and situation no less than was her husband. Todd demonstrates this by recounting how a new and young doctor rather sniffily dismissed the “old wives remedies of . . . all you intractably opinionated women . . .until you need actual medical care, actual scientific advice” in a manner that showed how little he knew of the life situations and realities facing frontier women often far from “actual medical care” in an empty land.
     Only one event in a long life came close to breaking this amazing woman, and for the sake of Penelope Todd’s well-told story, this reviewer has no intention of revealing it, as to do so would deprive the reader of the impact which the event and its aftermath had on me.
     ‘Nell’ is a deceptively simple story of hard work and simple pleasures; of a generation who ‘got on with it’ through thick and thin; of the people who, in a variety of ways, made New Zealand the place that it is and who were responsible for my abiding conviction that History is the story of ordinary people frequently doing extraordinary things. Anyone interested in New Zealand’s story needs to read Penelope Todd’s tribute to her grandmother.

Review by MJ Burr

Title: Nell
Author: Penelope Todd
Publisher: Cloud Ink Press
ISBN: Paperback 9781738594337, epub 9781738594344
RRP: $34.99
Available: Most bookshops; online from
Bateman Books, The Women's Bookshop, cloudink; e-book Amazon

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Valuable addition to war history literature

8/8/2024

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Our Gun
by Geoff Lawson

Our Gun is the story of how a field gun built by the German company Krupp for the South African Orange Free State ended up in Wanganui.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Southern Africa included the Cape Colony, Orange Free State and Transvaal. Cape Colony was part of the British Empire while the other two regions were settled by Dutch farmers, referred to as Boers. There was already confrontation between Dutch farmers and the British, which escalated after a huge seam of gold was discovered in the Transvaal, which was subsequently invaded by British nationals. This eventually led to the South African war.
The Krupp gun belonged to the Orange Free State Artillery Corps. It suited the local conditions, being relatively simple to maintain, and munitions were readily available. The Boer republic was surrounded by territory under British control and Cecil Rhodes, an English mining magnate, had ambitions to extend their control into Boer territory. He organized a raid, intending to annex all land in South Africa. The raid was unsuccessful. The Dutch farmers’ familiarity with the country gave them the advantage but given time, the British were able to call in reinforcements from their Empire. These included troops from Australia, Canada and New Zealand, with the New Zealanders being first to land in South Africa. Although the British Empire won the war, it came at a terrible price with over 22,000 dead and 23,000 injured. The Dutch Africans lost 12,000 men.
The author became aware of Krupp Number Four at the Wanganui Regional Museum, one of eight similar guns used during the South African War. Number Four was captured by New Zealand soldiers and became a war trophy to commemorate the country’s contribution. In later years it had been neglected and was in poor condition. With the museum’s permission, Geoff Lawson formed a restoration team. The gun was restored to its original state with great care and detailed records of the work were kept. His acquired knowledge of the gun’s past motivated him to research and write about the Boer war.
Our Gun provides a very readable overview of the South African war and the people involved on both sides. The book’s A4 format is ideal for clear maps, diagrams, sketches and photographs which include individuals involved on both sides of the war. The story of the Krupp gun restoration follows, providing much detail about the gun itself.
Our Gun is an interesting and valuable addition to the field of war history literature, especially for New Zealand genealogists.

Review by Ian Clarke

Title: Our Gun
Author: Geoff Lawson
Publisher: Geoff Lawson
ISBN: 9780473207472
RRP: $40
Available: Geoff Lawson: [email protected]

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Short stories impress

1/8/2024

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Partly Sunny
by James O'Sullivan

This further collection of O’Sullivan’s short stories impresses no less than did his first, “Mostly Cloudy”, of 2018 and for the same reasons. The laser-like perception of human nature and motivation is still there, as is the classic dialogue in his depictions of the Kiwi vernacular. In fact, and as this reviewer was prompted to write six years ago, the quality of his perception is well-attested by the number of times the thought “Hey, I know someone just like that” pops into the reader’s head, for O’Sullivan is a keenly accurate observer and scribe of the human condition and this offers a rock-solid platform for his stories.
In his present offering, O’Sullivan mainly returns to the dark side of human nature inasmuch as most of his characters are either flawed or dependent in one way or another. ‘The Hitch-Hiker’ and ‘We Are All Australians’, for example, each concern central characters whose need to be needed drive their lives and actions. While it would be nice to think that Melody, in the former, turns away from her intended suicide because the hitch-hiker provoked feelings of altruism, the feeling persists that she has concluded that even her largely pointless life of rejection is better than his. Similarly, Catherine, the closet racist in the latter work, represses her true nature in expounding the need to be inclusive, even if her attitude towards her nearest and dearest shows quite the reverse.
Closer to O’Sullivan’s Taranaki home, even his depiction of rural life pack something of a wallop, for his stories dealing with small-town manners and morals range from a demented woman keeping the mummified corpse of her mother in a back bedroom to two stories involving murder and the clandestine disposal of the bodies. Similarly, despite the assumption of the city-slicker bystander in ‘Incident at the Dairy’ that racism is alive and well in the town, the dairy-owner’s reaction to the main character persuades us that something much deeper, more sinister and definitely locally-based is at work in his refusal to serve the main character.
There is social commentary in ‘Visiting the Doctor’ and ‘Fish and Chips Tonight’ when poverty leads to actions that shock, and outright revulsion at the psychopathic attitude of Polly in ‘Hens’; but the anthology contains some leavening of humour in “Raising Capital’ and ‘The Chief’s Daughter’, the last being something of a spoof on stories that include the presence of a princess whose peerless beauty is the motivating factor in fairy stories of derring-do.
Two outstanding stories of inter-generational conflict are ‘Give Me a Kiss’ and ‘Arriving Home’. The former contrasts a traditional Pacific Island attitude to life, work and charity with the reality of the heroine’s working life, and the contrast is nowhere more marked than in the title, for the same words are spoken by her gentle, traditionally-focused mother and a drug pusher who has just exacted oral sex as the price of his product. Throughout, and in a tribute to the author’s ear, the dialogue is accurate, contemporary and realistic. The latter, ‘Arriving Home’, also addresses the generational divide in the recounting of how a self-made-and-proud-of-it salesman alienates his talented daughter by refusing to acknowledge that her world contains aspirations and possibilities that his does not, and never will.
However, and true to the man’s talent, in ‘Leaving For England’ O’Sullivan shows that perhaps the generations are sometimes more alike than different. He does this by having a grandmother pick up Nietzsche’s theme of ‘The Eternal Recurrence’ in telling her own story of the traditional Kiwi OE in London when her grandchild is about to do the same; an OE in which she ‘had seen Pink Floyd play in a poky, godawful nightclub in the acidic bowels of Swinging London’.
All told, then, “Partly Sunny’’ bears the stamp of authenticity in its characters, its settings, its interactions and its themes. James O’Sullivan shows us ourselves in full measure, and if sometimes the ‘warts and all’ predominate, the thoughtful reader may conclude that this says more about us than he.

Review by MJ Burr

Title: Partly Sunny
Author: James O'Sullivan
Publisher: Independent As Books
ISBN: 9780473710118
RRP: $20 + postage
Available: Paperback: fishpond.co.nz, or from author at [email protected]

Comments

Book merits popular acclaim

Less is more

Memoir, biography and novel mixed

Valuable addition to war history literature

Short stories impress

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