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Novel is a gripping read

27/9/2021

Cold Wallet
by Rosy Fenwicke

This book is a gripping read, the plot twists and story bends were sufficient to capture me, making it hard to put down.
Jess is a New Zealand doctor working in Auckland Hospital and just finishing her specialist qualification, when she marries her crypto-currency expert fiancé, Andrew, and goes on honeymoon with him to one of the world’s most exclusive resorts in the Yasawa group of Fiji.
Andrew is taken ill while there and after some quite graphic illness scenes, he dies, is cremated and Jess brings the ashes back to New Zealand. She learns that Andrew has left his company, Vaultange to her, cutting out his partner and closest friend, Henry.
Jess attempts to open Andrew’s laptop, but succeeds only to introduce malware onto the computer, rendering it useless. This is the real thrust of the story, as the password required to unlock the Vaultange cold wallet is now useless.
Vaultange is not a storage for currency, but an exchange so that people wanting to buy or sell Bitcoin or other currency, can do so for a small commission. There is no check on who the users are, no banks or police are involved and the transactions are heavily encrypted. Inevitably, criminal elements become involved, as well as the public who know that they have bitcoin held in the transactions stored on Vaultange and now want to access their funds. After complaints, the police are involved, and everyone suspects that Jess knows the key, but is planning to keep it all for herself. So now she has police, criminals, and users pressuring her to unlock the Cold Wallet.
There are revelations about Jess’s past, and her relationship with the hospital where she works.
The book shows how these issues are resolved, but there are many sub plots and unexpected turns to the story, that you will need to read for yourself. Just read carefully as clues are there cleverly planted by the author.
This book is a sophisticated and engaging story, that I can recommend fully. The book is set in Auckland, but could be any modern city. The final chapters move very fast and have an unexpected ending.
There are some issues I had with the book. Jess has a hangover and grabs several aspirin tablets for her headache. I find it difficult that a New Zealand trained doctor would ever take aspirin in such circumstances, all would take paracetamol.
Another issue is that the story is told from multiple characters’ points of view, and often it was not obvious who was speaking, so I had to go back to try to find clues to the narrator’s identity. This could easily be overcome by simply starting a section with the name of the narrator.
Overall a really good read.

Review by Harold Bernard

Title: Cold Wallet
Author: Rosy Fenwicke
Publisher: Wonderful World
ISBN: 978-0-473-55940-3
RRP: $36.50
Available: bookshops

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Three poets, three distinctive voices

16/9/2021

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AUP New Poets 8
by Lily Holloway, Tru Paraha, Modi Deng.
Anna Jackson (Ed)

This is the latest compilation in a series, which provide a good foundation for Aotearoa New Zealand poets to – all going well – have their own collections published later.
From my experiencing this compilation, the only thing the three poets have in common is that all are young, articulate, and intelligent women, as witnessed in their toikupu here. Which, however, is divergent even in their individual pieces, as well as among the three poets. Holloway and Paraha in particular, can be classified as experimental poets in the way that much of the former and all the latter’s work is a faaaaaaaaaaaar cry from ‘traditional’ verse/stanza layout, while Deng also displays a measure of innovation with her prose poems and in tabulated work like lessons.
What I noticed about the ambience of Holloway’s mahi – titled a child in that alcove – is that there is a consistent mood of dark thoughts, depression, self-effacement, which is more manifest than latent. Take for example these lines from as the tide (p. 9), where ‘I’ has become ‘i’,
i look out to that expanse,
      bare now to the beaks of grey herons,
      which i realise is me
      in this metaphor
Elsewhere, as her/their poems develop across the pages of the anthology towards found poetry and  w i d e  o p e n  spaces, Holloway casts herself with lines such as,
The quietest panic attack happens when my heart is a small dog (from stocktaking during venlaxafine discontinuation p. 13)
      And,
      I am a dog so it doesn’t matter much    (from Is any of this relevant? p. 17)
There is a consistent inner turmoil and torment here, as the poet eerily unravels herself in poems with revealing titles such as you are my night terror i hope i am yours (p. 12) and moirai (pp. 23-26).
Images return again (the title of a poem on page 11) here and there too, in a sort of Plathean frenzy, among them a Four Square carpark and supermarkets, as the poems as presented in this book deconstruct and yet reconstruct in a whole new way/Holloway.
In her introduction, editor, Anna Jackson writes about the work of Paraha, ‘These poems are not easily read for narrative or scene-setting and it would be possible to feel a little lost, as a reader’. Āe, tika tēnei kōrero. There are no titles. There are few if any verses. Words and letters throw themselves across and around a page, spill in a
s  p  r  e  a  d  e a  g  l  e  d  manner in two interspersed tongues, te reo Māori rāua ko te reo Ingarihi.
Paraha is deliberate in this depiction of our cosmos. It is a massive never-ending, perhaps never-able-to-end and ongoing process, paradoxically full of lacunae. Her work is a set of paintings to be perceived and experienced on a screen, on a wall, as a video behind a melee of dancers. Paraha is sui generis, hers a whole new poetry planetarium. She is enmeshed in Te Kore, va, ki tua (beyond) as splayed over pages 49-51, in a complete dismantling of language, of the inherent straight-line concept(s) we generally associate with any given word. My pātai becomes, when watching this star trek, ‘where does the end begin?’  in my darkling universe, the artist cannot reply, as no one can. Rather, she flirts here and there with possible cogent universe ‘meaning’ as with the words made up from highlighted letters torrented down a page – ‘hone’ and ‘alistair’ – while having fun inhabiting te hinengaro me te tinana of a cannibal in wheniwasacannibal with compressed lines like,
iwaswaitedonhandandfootsotospeak. (p. 71).
This cosmic stuff does not/cannot suit a book. I look forward to witnessing Paraha at work/play across other media.
Modi Deng returns the reader (nearly) to planet earth with her structured verse, her less abrasive, comforting words – an wei. Witness this poem with the same title, here in its entirety,
When light pooled in,
  the camber of your palm
   and your quiet laugh dipped a reprieve, a catching net,
   fullness to cheek hollow –
   I couldn’t help it. Your candour was
   embodied/your words fading/
   our rhythm softly a morning moon.    (p. 81).
In the 17 poems included here, Deng writes about (mis)communication with her mother, love affair(s). music, the UK, where she is a postgraduate student at the Royal Academy of Music. Hers is a gentler cadence, rather an innocence surrounding,
      …my
      soft (read weak) heart      (from lightning courses (p. 92).
The standout piece for me is Euston Road, where the poet systematically relates her medical event, and the aftermath,
      leaving behind the paranoid clinical
  attendants, all the pear-nurses and
      the requisite burnt soya coffee     (p. 95).
Three poets, three distinctive voices sampling on a wide – perhaps endless - continuum of topoi and technique. After all, ‘There is no end to possible meanings’ (from Holloway’s Is any of this relevant? pp. 17-19).
     Tēnā koe mō tēnei raupapatanga.

Review by Vaughan Rapatahana

Title: AUP New Poets 8
Author: Lily Holloway, Tru Paraha, Modi Deng. Anna Jackson (Ed)
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 9781869409456
RRP: $29.99
Available: bookshops

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A different view of our country

3/9/2021

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Crimechurch
by Michael Botur

I was not aware of this author before agreeing to review Crimechurch. Apparently he has achieved quite a bit in his 37 years – the preparatory pages of the book work hard, too hard, to convince the reader of his literary credentials. I don’t read them. I don’t want to be told what to think – a book should stand on its own.
So, straight into the story this novel tells.
The language and the references are contemporary and set the scene for a section of society that few want to believe exists, in Christchurch or anywhere in this country.
Crimechurch, as the title suggests, is about the underside, criminal element of Christchurch society. Not limited to one culture, the characters involved are South African, Chinese/Samoan/Tongan, Maori – varied ethnic groups and mixtures.
Each of the main characters tells his or her story separately, in first person narration, though all are connected.
Marty, 15, intelligent, more privileged than some, is aware he has not made a dent in the world and  wants to make the world more aware of him. He’s hungry for something real gritty, something spicy and dangerous. He’s not alone in this.
Jade has been broken by a harsh and judgemental upbringing that leads him to see himself as an agent of retribution.
Mona, tells the female counterpart of such young lives. “Court honestly sux – and I’m going to change it. God, if you’re listening: that’s a promise.”
Chong, a very hard-liner, is on probation in the care of a Mormon agency. “if I have to pretend to be some kinda Jesus freak to get probation off my back, shit, sign me up.” But not before he tests it to the extreme – “I’ll have to let them know: I’m a new breed.”
Winston, acts the good son to gain credit while rebelling against his parents’ upper-middle class way of life. He want to do something big – bigger than his brother, bigger than his parents, “bigger than this whole tight-arse city.”
Mama Ta’a, the “absolute gold” corrections worker for young offenders, is praised for reducing crime in the city, though she is unable to reform her own son.
Selling weed fudge is at the very bottom of the scale of offences these young dissidents commit. Drug-dealing, alcohol abuse and the details of personal and gang-violence are not only hard to read about, but enough to shake the stability of the very city. “We’ve made God mad. We’ve bumped the pillars. The temple is toppling.”
     When the intensity of Christchurch is too much, there are places of escape – Nelson, Thailand, Australia “where Kiwis go to unfuck their lives” – but they are temporary, the city always calls them back. “This city, man. This island. This country. Like an Alcatraz planted out in the middle of the god damn Southern Ocean. There’s nowhere to go.”
Reading Crimechurch is challenging because of the subject matter, especially so for women, and the sense of hopelessness it invokes. The vocabulary also confronts, but it is always vibrant. It is fittingly colloquial, though more variation between characters would improve the whole.
     After the challenges, the last section, Aftermath, is unexpected, though there is an earlier clue that supports the change, and it comes as welcome relief.
This reader’s judgement then – the self-promotion at the beginning of the book is not necessary, Michael Botur proves he can certainly write.
Where there could be much improvement is in the quality of the publication itself. The publishing standard is a step or two below professional. It could be improved by layout with wider margins and better formatting, stronger proofreading and developmental editing. And putting that promotional content, if it must be included, at the back.
However, hats off to this author for showing us a different view of our country. I am sure we will see more writing from him.

Review by Kauri Wood

Title: Crimechurch
Author: Michael Botur
Publisher: Rangitawa Publishing
ISBN: 978-0995116665
RRP: $30
Available: Amazon.com, RangitawaPublishing.com, NZshortstories.com
Contact: [email protected]

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Novel is a gripping read

Three poets, three distinctive voices

A different view of our country

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