Something New

  We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“THE DECK” by Fiona Farrell Penguin-Random House, $NZ37); “FROM THERE TO HERE – A Memoir” by Joe Bennett (Harper-Collins, $NZ23:52) ; (“PINEAPPLE STREET” by Jenny Jackson  ( Penguin-Random House, $NZ37)

Some years ago I set out to read all of the Florentine Boccaccio’s Decameron, using both the (bowdlerised) old two-volume Everyman’s edition, and the (unbowdlerised) more recent, fat Penguin edition. I never made it all the way through the 800 odd pages, because (sorry) I soon discovered the sameness of so many stories – all those tales about monks bonking nuns and priests bonking penitents and extraordinary fortune coming to the deserving. I know this is very rude of me because the Decameron is rightly regarded as one of the great works of the early Renaissance and it inspired many imitations, with the likes of Jeff Chaucer and Bill Shakespeare using Boccaccio’s stories as source material (on my shelf I also have a copy of the Venetian Giambattista Basile’s Pentameron, written about 200 years after the Decameron and clearly inspired by it). In fact, the only tale I really latched onto was (Decameron, Fourth Day, 5^th Story) the story of Lisabetta and her pot of basil, renamed by John Keats Isabella and the Pot of Basil (analysed elsewhere on this blog).

Fiona Farrell is very interested in Boccaccio’s Decameron, and in her opening chapter “The Frame”, writing as “the author”, she gives us an engaging 24-page account of the Decameron, its influence, how it inspired her and how it has become a widely read classic. But she is not a slave to Boccaccio. The Decameron has ten young adults (7 women, 3 men) fleeing from the bubonic plague that is raging in 14^th century Florence and retiring to an opulent home as their safe quarantine. There they tell each other stories to pass the time – ten stories each day for ten days = one hundred stories. Fiona Farrell’s The Deck (presumably an abbreviation of The Decameron) has her New Zealanders going to a remote bay on Banks Peninsula where they are less likely to contract a new plague that is stalking the country. Farrell has clearly been inspired to write by the Covid pest, but this novel is set in the near future. Those seeking quarantine on Banks Peninsula are not young adults. Most of them are advanced in age, like the author herself, and with a lot of experience behind them. They are also mainly middle-class. They do tell one another a few stories, sometimes on the deck of two characters’ bach overlooking the bay. But they are mainly presented to us by the back-stories of their lives, which are related to us readers and not spoken out loud to the other characters. And they are in their refuge for only six days and nights, eventually leaving in conditions that seem like the ravages of Cyclone Gabrielle.

So here they are. Ani the artist; Philippa, an erstwhile judge, and her partner, Tom who sometimes have a tense relationship because one has long kept an important secret from the other; Philippa’s sister Maria who is protecting her grand-daughter Zoe from being caught up in a cult; the gay couple Pete and Didi – who for some reason is sometimes called “E’ or “e”; Baz the surfer, always trying to shuck off his father’s taunts that he was a “nancy boy”; and a few others.

Inasmuch as it is a collection of stories, The Deck is various in its interests and varied in its quality. Ani thinks of the animals on Earth that are being rendered extinct and how it affects the way she illustrates children’s books. To the group she narrates a story of being lost in the wilderness when a car was stolen. Without attaching names to each tale, there is a story of inept deerstalking ending in pure sexual fantasy; a tale of an unexpected birth; a character recalling childhood life in a rough run-down rural home, and yet remembering it fondly; a story of a father’s drunken abuse and how the family reconciled only after he was dead; and a tale (one of the best in the book) in which a character chooses self-interest and career over decency and morality, in a way that has repercussions for another person. Most bizarre tale, and with the most unexpected outcome, concerns one of the quarantined group recalling his days as a singer on a cruise ship and an odd request that two passengers made to him. Most improbable story involves the outcome of confronting Somali pirates.

But in this varied book, Fiona Farrell is as much essayist and polemicist as she is novelist – as was shown in her earlier books The Broken Book and The Villa at the End of the Empire. Speaking in her own voice as the author, not only in her opening “The Frame” but also in the closing essay “The Author’s Conclusion”, she speaks loudly about climate change and the too-widespread indifference to its problems. If plagues, which have been relatively common in human history, are capable of wiping out many thousands of human beings, could it be that climate change will wipe out all of us? And in this context, can stories and literature be of any help? Farrell raises awkward questions about the validity of story-telling. Are we deceived by stories? Do they enlighten us? Are they a refuge from reality? Is it actually worthwhile for her to write fiction especially when, as she sees it, climate change could mean that we might all soon be exterminated? And then there comes a condemnation of false stories in our age of both misinformation and disinformation and conspiracy theories and nonsense shared on line. The age of “post-truth” is upon us. Hence her condemnation of the destructive protests staged in Wellington by “antivaxxers”. Collectively, her address to us is one of admonition.

Personally, I enjoyed this book, especially when Fiona Farrell indulges her wilder imagination or lets rip with angry polemic. But I’d be hard pressed to call it all of a piece.

Footnote: Elsewhere on this blog, you can find accounts of other works by Fiona Farrell, her 2009 novel Limestone ; her first account to the Christchurch earthquakes The Broken Book  and her scathing critique of how Christchurch was being rebuilt The Villa at the Edge of the Empire ; as well as her own selection of her poems up to 2020 Nouns, Verbs etc.

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There’s a strong possibility that I owe Joe Bennett an apology. Although I’ve read many of the light and often jocular columns he’s written, I’ve read only two of his books. Way back in 2012, I reviewed for the NZ Listener his Double Happiness, purportedly an expose of “how bullshit works”. It struck me as the same sort of easy-ironical and sometimes glib journalism found in his columns. In 2015 I read and reviewed for Landfall Bennett's novel King Rich, centred on the Christchurch earthquakes and a lonely old man hiding from the family who had abandoned him. While a credible tale, some of it read as interpolated journalism.That, I thought, was the only level Joe Bennett’s writing could reach. I now hastily pull my head in and admit that I judged wrongly. Written in his 66^th year, Joe Bennett’s memoir From There to Here is a beauty, genuinely witty in places, thoughtful in others, and always buoyed by clear, unambiguous prose.

 From There to Here covers the first thirty years of Bennett’s life, from early English childhood to when he settled in New Zealand in 1987 and stayed here. He was born Julian Bennett. He disliked the poncy name Julian and shucked it off early. His family came from the north of England but relocated to Brighton in England’s south-east. Brighton – town of decaying interest to holiday-makers, with its decrepit pier already being largely ignored by people who could now afford to take their breaks further afield, such as in continental Europe. Very vivid is (in Chapter 5) Bennett’s account of men and boys, like young Bennett himself, who found their amusement in fishing off the pier in fair or freezing weather.

Bennett’s father was a hard man, following the accepted mores of his time, but not excessively abusive. Even so, his disciplinarian ways turned one of young Joe’s older brothers into a bit of a rebel who scarpered from home as soon as he could. Bennett admits that, years later, there was a sense of relief in his family when his father died. Young Joe himself was more of a conformist than his elder brother. He weathered infant school and primary school noting, as all perceptive little boys do, how sadistic and violent little boys’ playground games could be. The game of “piling on” smaller kids sounds to me very like the awful “stacks on the mill” game I remember in New Zealand primary-school playgrounds. Bennett admits honestly that he joined in such games, noting “In The Lord of the Flies, I’d have laughed at the smashing of Piggy’s glasses and I’d have helped to kill Simon.” (p.50) He also witnessed – but did not take part in - the sheer sadism of even rougher games played by older boys near creeks or in neighbouring woods. Young Bennett loved cricket (it features quite a lot in the earlier stages of this memoir) and was happy with football (soccer) but was not interested in rugby.

The growing boy was of the generation where, in England, your fate was moulded by the Eleven-Plus examination. If you passed, you went to a grammar school. If you failed you were consigned to a secondary modern school. Bennett passed, went to a grammar school, and though he mildly rags and ridicules some of the teachers (it’s compulsory in a memoir of this sort, isn’t it?) he clearly liked the school and did reasonably well in learning. I share the horror he felt when he was confronted with calculus, being able to make neither head nor tail of it (me too) and shifted his studies over to literature, language and history (me too). There he did very well, revelling in the poetry of Philip Larkin and enjoying reading Camus’ L’Etranger.

But there was a major crisis when he hit puberty. He began to realise that he was homosexual. He often had crushes on handsome boys and young men of his own age. Always what ensued was friendship, with the young man in question being quite heterosexual, totally unaware of Joe’s real feelings and treating him simply as a pal. Joe played the part of being a regular, rough guy, taking part in larrikin-ish stunts, getting copped for drunk-driving etc. The odd thing about this memoir is that Bennett chronicles only two times he had sexual intercourse, in both cases with women and (in his case) with little enthusiasm. He does not make a big issue of it. Apparently he lost his virginity to a woman who seduced him in a graveyard, which at least adds an element of humour.

Bennett’s reward for his diligence at grammar school was a place at the University of Cambridge. As he tells it, he lounged his way through his time there, read what he wanted to, lazed, partied, and just scraped through a degree with the lowest of marks. Is he being modest? Maybe. But it seems clear that he was unsure of what he wanted to do with his life, apart from a vague sense that he wanted to write something. So he did what so many graduates do when they are at a loose end. He went school-teaching, first in a prep-school. Then he latched on to teaching the English language in foreign [European] countries – another favourite of those who aren’t quite sure what to do with their lives. After hitchhiking his way around France, he took an English-teaching job in Spain, thoroughly enjoying the welcome alien-ness of the country.  And (in part supported by a modest legacy) this was how he spent the next few years – going from school to school teaching English.

It's in these sections of From There to Here that he piles on the tales of eccentric or strange language-teachers, grotty digs in which he often had to live, and comical mishaps – which were probably less funny at the time than they were in written memory. But, all the while hoping he could write something worthwhile (short stories? a novel?) he came to realise that jobbing his way through language schools was a dead end. He notes: “So I was left in the usual quandary. I could teach, and there were always jobs to be had. But there were also [fellow English-language teachers in the school where he was then teaching] who’d taught a year or so in each of seven of eight countries and who planned to carry on being peripatetic into middle age. I saw in them a warning of how easily I could delude myself that by moving on I was getting somewhere. Geography was not the answer, but I didn’t know what was.” (p.204)

He went back to England and took a diploma in physical education – not that it really enthused him, but it did give him a teaching certificate. And, partly helped by the prestige of having studied at Cambridge, he was offered a post teaching full-time in a senior school in Vancouver. In his holidays he took a hitchhiker trip across Canada in the freezing depths of winter. Later he took three weeks hitchhiking in the USA. I’m amused that while he clearly liked most of the Americans he met en route, his English perspective led him to throw in a barb, thus: “My one surprise from three weeks on the road in the states was the overwhelming generosity of ordinary Americans, their open-hearted friendliness. That aside, I had my prejudices pleasantly confirmed. It was a place dedicated to making a buck. It wasn’t strong on irony. Religion was more undisguisedly a business than it was elsewhere. And the whole country felt founded on the triumph of appearance over reality, of hope over truth.” (p.251)

Then a return to England. And a trip to Australia. And (by this stage realising he would never be a novelist) landing in New Zealand when he was 30. And securing a teaching position at one of New Zealand’s most expensive private schools, King’s College in Christchurch, at which point From There to Here ends. I wonder if Joe Bennett plans another memoir of his 36 years (so far) in New Zealand

What keeps the wheels turning of this memoir that I have thoughtfully synopsised for you? It is Bennett’s humour, his gallery of odd or slightly eccentric people, his confessions about himself, and above all his tersely-told anecdotes. The book keeps moving, is entertaining and is well-written. What more do you want?

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I’ll begin with an obvious confession – American author Jenny Jackson’s Pineapple Street is not what I would call my preferred genre of reading. I would suggest that it is aimed mainly at a young female audience; and the wrong sort of reviewer might dismiss it rudely as “chick-lit”. But that would be very demeaning. Though Pineapple Street is not my type of novel, Jenny Jackson writes with much skill and is astute at presenting in detail a certain type of social class.

Pineapple Street concerns the Stockton family of Brooklyn Heights - wealthy New York WASPS, living on huge trust-funds, property speculation and much inherited wealth. They are always concerned with the accumulation of even more wealth and the preservation of what they already have. The family is ruled by patriarch Chip and performative matriarch Tilda, but the novel focuses on three younger Stockton women  - Darley, Georgiana and Sacha, who was not born into the family but who married the senior Stockton offspring, Cord. So two sisters and a sister-in-law.

The in-law Sacha is far and away the most sympathetic character in the novel. She came from an ordinary middle-class family, not exactly poverty; but she is frequently sneered at by Darley and Georgiana as a “gold digger” who has only married into the family for their money. This is clearly not the case, and she is capable of standing up for herself when she is attacked by snide innuendo. Darley is almost a sympathetic character. Her marriage is solid and she has set aside a career to raise her children, even though she knows this nowadays invites criticism. I think we are meant to see Georgiana, the youngest Stockton, in a positive light, but I can’t help seeing her as a bit of a twit, easily led on and foolishly having an affair with a man before she’s checked whether or not he is married. Later she matches up with a guy, another WASP inheritor of great wealth, who says that all wealth should be given away to the poor. The novel traces these three women through a year or so.

Before I get to the good stuff, proving the author’s skill, I note some major flaws. There’s some melodrama to push the plot along – somebody suddenly loses his prestigious job; somebody suddenly dies in a plane crash – but I’m not the sort of swine who would ruin your reading pleasure by saying to whom, when and how these things happen. I also think the finale is contrived, suddenly giving us a “happy ending” when sweetness-and-light prevails in an otherwise quarrelsome family. Or am I misreading it? Perhaps Jenny Jackson is being ironical and is showing us that the rich will simply go on being the rich.

Now for the really good stuff. Jenny Jackson gives us precisely-observed behaviours and fads of the American very rich. The superfluous “gender reveal” parties, lavishly catered, when somebody is pregnant. The “auctions” for the private schools they send their kids to, where people can show off their idea of philanthropy by donating exorbitant money for relatively inexpensive things. What is and is not regarded as acceptable food and behaviour at the dinner table. The special codes in which many of the rich speak. The fetishization of such things as playing tennis. The awareness that they are a people set apart from the general population. The ease with which the wealthy flitter around the world, usually on holiday, sometimes of business. And – most often emphasised by the author – the women’s way of dressing – dressing to make an impact on beholders, knowing how to pick out what is currently chic, what is passe, what jewellery they should wear and what they would be shamed by wearing.

In the end, Pineapple Street is a lively revelation of a certain social class, a sort of urban lesson in modern anthropology. This what I found most interesting about the novel and what kept me reading.

                       

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago. 

“LIMESTONE” by Fiona Farrell (first published in 2009)

            I have been told that I put New Zealand books in this “Something Old” spot too rarely, and it’s true. Only very occasionally have I made something like James Courage’s The Young Have Secrets, Judith Binney’s Encircled Lands or Paula Morris’s Rangatira the subject of this section. But the reason should be obvious. The majority of weeks I devote the “Something New” slot to New Zealand works and get through a formidable amount of New Zealand literature in the process. “Something Old” allows me to go further afield. But I don’t want to snub older New Zealand books that are still worth reading. So here, unaltered from its appearance in the NZ Listener (on16 May 2009, to be precise) is the review of an eight-year-old novel that I really enjoyed, Fiona Farrell’s Limestone. For other books by Fiona Farrell that have been reviewed on this blog, look up The Villa at the Edge of the Empire and The Broken Book.

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The matter of narrative voice can be a bit of a bother to some of us readers. If a novel is written solely in the first person, we know nowadays that the narrator is unreliable and has to be regarded with a degree of scepticism. But if there are various narrative voices, then the author is seeking to create a different sort of effect.

Limestone is written in two separate narrative voices, and Fiona Farrell is up to something special, because each voice centres on the same character.

Clare Lacey is an art historian from the University of Canterbury, aged about 50, en route to an academic conference in Ireland. As she heads for Cork, and ruminates on the paper she means to give, she has another agenda. She wants to find out what became of her Irish father. He walked out on her family and their modest Oamaru home when she was a little girl.

When Clare thinks about the more distant past and re-creates her childhood, Limestone is in the first person. But “present” events are in the third person, as is the more recent past. Chapters alternate between these two voices, with separate typefaces in the chapter headings to point up their duality.

There is an implied split in Clare’s consciousness, a radical distinction between her past and her present. But there’s also a depth of perspective that couldn’t be created by one narrative voice alone.

The first-person narrator may sometimes be a little unreliable. At one point Clare rages against “coupledom”, yet to the very end she is clearly in need in need of somebody to share her life. So there's some self-deception in the mix. But the alternate third-person voice gives her solidity and endorses much that she says. She isn't all that unreliable after all, and reality is presented in its layered complexity.

Farrell's narrative strategies are wily ones. Limestone is not an arbitrary series of events. Nor is it an unreflective "quest", even as Clare gets nearer to her Irish goal. Early in the novel, a wickedly funny (and accurate) response to The Lord of the Rings shows what the author (or the narrator?) thinks of conventional "quest" stories. This tale has a tight controlling intelligence behind it, and what seems random reflection or digression falls into its place as the pattern is revealed.

Yet Farrell's powers of description are so strong and her details so precise that it's easy to linger over the novel's individual episodes. To savour them. The opinionated loudmouth whom Clare has to endure in the seat next to her on a long-haul flight. The bitcheries and pecking order at academic conferences, with show-off younger lecturers trying to make their mark. The real Irish pub night, which stands in contrast to the version of Ireland sold to tourists. And, most vividly, those childhood scenes in New Zealand in the late 1950s and early 60s, with the child observing clearly but not always understanding; experiencing and rejecting a child's version of Catholicism; and once inadvertently causing great unhappiness.

Then, of course, there is Dad building a limestone wall.

It could be that rather too many narrative revelations come in the last few chapters. It could be that the central image of limestone, building itself up from millions of microscopic creatures, doesn't quite work as the intended idea of human solidarity or philosophical recompense for botched human relationships. But these are quibbles.

This is a cunningly contrived, beautifully written and wonderfully readable novel. Not only does it say much about that peculiar New Zealand unease over ancestral roots, those nagging questions of identity, but page for page it has the type of prose that can only be written by somebody who knows exactly what effects she means to create and exactly how to create them. A novelist at the top of her form, in other words.

Something New

  We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“THE VILLA AT THE EDGE OF THE EMPIRE – One Hundred Ways to Read a City” by Fiona Farrell ($40, Vintage)

Why Fiona Farrell’s non-fiction work The Villa at the Edge of the Empire is subtitled “One Hundred Ways to Read a City” is obvious enough. Its four long sections are divided into one hundred chapters – some of them very short chapters  - which look at the whole concept of cities from a great variety of viewpoints. Historical, geological, cultural, economic, personal, nostalgic, poetic.

But why it is called The Villa at the Edge of the Empire takes some time to find out.

In fact you are at Page 272 of its 350-odd pages before Farrell uses the term. She is referring to the remains of a Roman villa in Britain, which she once saw an archaeologist friend digging up. She reflects on how it was at the furthest edge of the Roman Empire, and yet its unearthed decorations included things that spoke more of the Mediterranean than of the chilly British clime, which it inhabited. Appropriately or otherwise, the imperial centre (Rome) had given its style to its furthest colony.

 Fiona Farrell links this image with New Zealand in general and Christchurch in particular. We have always been at the edge of somebody else’s empire, from the time we were the furthest reach of medieval Polynesian migration to the time we were proudly part of the British Empire to our current dominance by American pop-culture and neo-liberal economic theories. Maybe tomorrow we will be more dominated by China’s growing economic empire. Like that Romano-British villa, we are so often dominated by ideas and designs more appropriate to other places.

But the concept of the villa has a further resonance. After all, so many of the most comfortable homes destroyed, demolished or rendered uninhabitable by the big Christchurch earthquake of February 2011 were early twentieth-century villas. In this case, though, Fiona Farrell suggests that what replaces them may be something much worse than the community they used to represent. In part this is because of the actions of central government, and of conniving insurance companies.

“The houses along the riverbank, the houses in the suburbs that stretch across the plains and out to the coast and up the slopes of the Port Hills exist on the edges of the empire of international insurance and reinsurance.” (p.297)

The starting point of The Villa at the Edge of the Empire is the earthquake. This is not the first time that Farrell, a Canterbury resident for over 20 years, has been fired by this subject. Her The Broken Book, reflections on walks around Christchurch and other places, came out 2011 and was in part a response to the earthquakes. (I covered it on this blog some months before I covered Jane Bowron’s book of newspaper despatches from the stricken city Old Bucky and Me.) Nor will this volume be Farrell’s last word on the earthquakes. An endnote tells us that The Villa at the Edge of the Empire is the non-fiction first part of a two-part work. The second part will be a work of fiction.

Farrell begins in deceptively whimsical style. The first part is called “The Map”. Farrell discourses wittily (and with much research to back her) on ideal cities that have been dreamt up in the past by planners and cartographers far from the actual land upon which those cities were intended to be built. This leads her to Christchurch, planned by Englishmen as “a serviceable, rational, rectangular grid, set four square on a swamp on the eastern coast of the southern island.” (p.27) Farrell knows such an ideal plan was incongruous in the real geography of the plains and the Port Hills. To emphasise this point, she gives an account of the region’s geological history and flora and fauna, sometimes rising to heights of lyricism. Check, for example, her wonderful account  (p.29) of eels over millennia swimming north from Banks Peninsula to reproduce and die.

As she muses on Christchurch, she muses on her own relationship with the city, starting when she arrived in the early 1990s and was baffled by the flatness of it. Being an Aucklander who has enjoyed long sojourns in Wellington and Dunedin, I sympathise wholeheartedly with this. On my own brief  (all of them pre-earthquake) visits to Christchurch, the flatness not only baffled me but came near to depressing me. Farrell writes:

“Christchurch is flat and tricky. I rode out that morning into puzzlement. Up one flat street, turned into another, across a bridge, through suburbs that changed abruptly from Arts and Crafts two-storey to concrete-block units to post-war state houses to 90s plaster Provencal. …. I rode back into town, losing my way on streets of tall fences and leafy gardens, so that I was forced to cast about from a glimpse of the Port Hills, like a calf that had lost its mother’s smooth brown flank in a wide field. The city took time to assemble.” (pp.54-55)

Nevertheless, she came to love the city and delineates its delights as she tells the stories of the successive homes she bought and the consolations they provided.

Then came the earthquake, killing 164 people, injuring thousands of others, damaging over 100,000 homes, requiring 25,000 of them to be demolished and completely rebuilt, and also requiring 40 of the inner city’s 51 high rise buildings to come down.

In Farrell’s account, this disaster has been made all the worse by the time in New Zealand’s history in which it occurred. We have been living with money- and profit-focused free-market neo-liberalism since the 1980s, that dreaded age in which a new, coded vocabulary was invented and:

“the business study buildings began to swell and a new language began to be spoken. The words took hold like a virus. Sick people used to be called ‘patients’, an old word of great dignity meaning ‘to bear and endure evil with composure’. Now in public documents they were referred to as ‘health consumers’, as if they had a choice like shopping for shoes.  They could choose to purchase good health, or they could decline to become well. It was an act of individual will. They would ‘consume’ health services, and in the word alone there is the spark of burning, destroying by fire or decomposition. There is the taint of wastefulness and reckless squandering….” (p.84)

Central government and CERA (Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority) took over from local government attempts to refashion the city, with government minister Gerry Brownlee declaring “My absolutely strong position is that the old dungers, no matter what their connection, are going under the hammer… Old stuff, if it’s got any damage at all, needs to be got down and got out, because it’s dangerous and we don’t need it.” [quoted p.93]

In other words, the pre-earthquake character of the city was to be transformed into something more conforming to the government’s monetarist, free-enterprise model. “Down at street level,” says Farrell “the citizens heard the ricochet, the distant rattle of sniper fire as national government undermined local authority, overturned a modest proposal for reconstruction and forced another direction.” (p.98)

Instead of focusing on residents’ needs, wasteful glamour projects were and are designed to attract tourism. Wryly, Farrell compares these with the woeful story of Dunedin’s new rugby stadium (cost $224.4 million), which has recorded a loss every year since its construction ($4.31 million in 2012) “starving other civic projects of funding and saddling ratepayers with forty years of debt. And for what? A handful of rugby matches and an Elton John concert for which the city actually footed the bill.” (p.119).

Part Two, “The Loop”, moves into a close study of the Christchurch area known as the Avon Loop, to illustrate these ideas more minutely. The area was apparently, pre-earthquake, a homely, comfortable, neighbourly and not particularly expensive residential area not very far from the city centre. As she tells its post-earthquake history, Farrell suggests that, when the Zoning system was introduced, there were shonky post-earthquake assessments of the structural stability of many damaged homes in the Loop. She comes close to saying that in this case, the Zoning was really an exercise in real-estate land-grabbing by developers, supported by the government, who wished to destroy the existing community anyway. CERA basically gave “move-or-else” directives to the inhabitants of the Loop once it was Red Zoned, forbidding them to purchase new residences that were being built in the footprint of their old ones. No wonder “BROWNLEE SUCKS” graffiti began to appear in the area. Speaking of another government minister, Farrell notes:

“Evidently…. Red Zone clearances have not been easy to achieve. Demolition has been piecemeal, according to Roger Sutton, because too many people were hanging on, but now ‘all areas targeted are free of residents’ and work can proceed apace. ‘Free’. The word betrays the man. It’s the word used of vermin and pests and noxious weeds. An island rid of rats is ‘pest-free’…”(p.190)

At which point, in Part Three, The Villa at the Edge of the Empire skips to the other side of the world as Farrell considers how a small city she has visited in Italy, l’Aquila, has dealt with its repeated earthquakes, the most recent being in 2009. Much smaller than Christchurch, l’Aquila nevertheless suffered a similar death toll. It was also, like Christchurch, plagued by businessmen who saw its earthquake as an opportunity to make money, by opportunist construction and demolition firms, and by insurance companies which were reluctant to pay out on their policies supposedly covering earthquake damage.

In this Italian section of The Villa at the Edge of the Empire, Farrell does take the opportunity to refer to Italy’s long earthquake-plagued history, does provide very enjoyable pages on Seneca’s speculations about what causes earthquakes, but still focuses on the fact that, after indignant and lively protests by l’Aquila’s inhabitants, an approach to reconstruction was adopted which was radically different from the one adopted in Christchurch:

“In l’Aquila officialdom would take greater care to preserve continuity. That’s why this city will be restored. They are planning for the future with reference to the past. Restoration makes sense to people in a country where hundreds of thousands of children are educated each year to see themselves as part of a tradition, rather than as individualists and entrepreneurs.” (p.236)

The Italian authorities were also more robust that the New Zealand ones have been in prosecuting the designers and builders of structures that proved lethal when earthquakes struck. (Farrell references here the drawn-out court cases involving the unqualified designer of Christchurch’s CTV building, the collapse of which caused most of Christchurch's earthquake fatalities.)

And so the last section returns to Christchurch, and gives the sordid details of insurance companies, interested only in the bottom line, deliberately drawing out assessment visits and delaying payouts, so that desperate home-owners would be forced settle for less. Again, the virus of neo-liberalism is dissected. Farrell sees the behaviour of insurance companies as being at one with the plans to “consolidate” local Christchurch schools, and to replace real family residences with rows of small flats for young urban professionals. All these things assume that profit is more important than community. But the real community is well-represented in the individual stories which Farrell presents of desperate or disillusioned people still living in damaged homes over four years after the ‘quake struck.

Summarised thus, I have probably made The Villa at the Edge of the Empire sound even more like a polemic than it is. Certainly the polemic is there – the indictment of neo-liberalism, the scorn directed at soothing government slogans and slick PR, the anger at the way real communities are being destroyed in the guise of rebuilding the city, the contempt for expensive, and ultimately pointless, big-scale projects designed to attract tourists. But this book is much more than a polemic. Fiona Farrell pours much of herself into it, so it is also memoir and autobiography. She places Christchurch in the larger context of history, knowing full well that all attempts to design or redesign cities are provisional and flawed – so she is not starry-eyed about the motives of the men who constructed the old Christchurch that is now being destroyed. She is philosophical enough to end on a serene note, hoping (against all her observations) that the flawed rebuilding of the city, and the philosophy that underlies it, might just do some good.

Even so, this book of various knowledge, of lyrical passages, and of real wisdom, is also a book of anger. And it was often the bracing effects of anger that kept me reading.

Something New,

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“THE BROKEN BOOK” Fiona Farrell (Auckland University Press, $34:99)

           

A couple of years back, a publisher suggested to Fiona Farrell that she write a meditative, reflective book about walks she had taken. This seemed a good idea to the Canterbury-based writer. But she was only part of the way through the task when her home province was struck by two earthquakes – first the jolt of September 2010, which caused a scare but killed nobody; then the horror of February 2011, which killed many people, smashed up Christchurch’s CBD and some of its suburbs, and continues to be followed by thousands of after-shocks.

Fiona Farrell’s The Broken Book is broken in two senses. It is broken because it is not the book she began to write. And it is broken because it has to reflect on broken people and things. After a “Preamble” (the amble that comes before the walks themselves, I guess) this is indeed a reflective account of four walks, but they are interspersed with 21 post-quake poems on a shattered home, on crockery shifting and smashing, on people panicking on the seventh floor, on sleeping under temporary tarpaulin, on more subtle unease. Indeed on all the things that remind us tectonic plates grind together and the earth beneath our feet shifts and is unstable. It is not the solid earth in which walkers often think they are delighting.

Whenever one of Farrell’s serene and reflective accounts begins to seduce us with a vision of sweet bucolic nature, in comes a terse poem to knock us off our feet a little.

In each of Fiona Farrell’s four walks, I note she finds objects of sympathy, empathy or solidarity - but not of pity, which implies a sort of condescension.

           

First there is a walk she took in 2009 in the Cevennes, in France. Spurning the religious pilgrimage track to Compostella (she doesn’t believe in concepts of sin, redemption or afterlife, and is no pilgrim),  Farrell briefly follows the trail of Robert Louis Stevenson, who, as a young writer, made a best-seller out of his travels there with the hired donkey Modestine. As she moves, Farrell deplores the way Stevenson beat his little female donkey mercilessly to keep her going. This walk turns into a reflection on the imperious nature of human beings as they exploit animals.

Then there’s the walk she took near Menton when she was Mansfield Fellow there. At first she has thoughts on limestone and on the ancientness of crustaceans, similar to what provided the imagery underpinning her novel Limestone (published in 2009). But as she thinks of Katherine Mansfield, the subject of  “consumption” (tuberculosis) leads to a whole train of thoughts on old sanatoria, the health tourism of the rich one hundred years ago, and the death of her tubercular uncle. She puzzles over whether or not it is true (as was once believed) that those afflicted with TB had heightened periods of perception and creativity.

As you can see from these first two walks, this is unashamedly a book of reflections, not of topographical or landscape descriptions like a guide-book. Farrell can certainly do description when she wants to, but any walk is as much a pretext as a subject.

This is most true of the third walk, the longest in the book. It begins with Farrell and her little grand-daughter in the Dunedin botanic gardens, but it segues into a long reflection on motherhood, grandmotherhood, wife-hood, woman-writer-hood and womanhood itself, sometimes throwing darts at male and misogynistic writers, sometimes reflecting ironically on the more strident feminist fashions of Farrell’s own youth, and definitely giving much autobiography. The tone is forgiving and tolerant. Parents and upbringing are forgiven. So is the young self.

And then to the last one, followed by an epilogue. The impact of Canterbury’s two earthquakes. The odd buoyancy of the first one. Disorientation, a fallen chimney, and emerging from a darkened house to see with curiosity how others were getting on. The horror of the second one, which struck when Farrell was driving south and far from Christchurch’s CBD. In both, there is a sense of reality shaken and reactions being other than expected. Farrell tells us of her fleeing up a nearby hill when her home was threatened by a tsunami – and then being oddly disappointed when the tsunami didn’t come.

The Broken Book is a book of lovely limpid prose. It is a pleasure to read and evidence of a fine mind which is self-aware without being self-absorbed. In fact it is so good that there are parts I want to argue with, as I always do with a good book.

Farrell is well-read but does occasionally come close to literary smart-arsery, especially when she has her woman-writer hat on and wants to take illustrious male writers down a peg. Thus with wisecracks about the probable smell of T.S.Eliot’s farts. She admires Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Reveries d’un Promeneur Solitaire (Reflections of a Solitary Walker) as a sort of template for her own habit of writing about the things that occur to her as she rambles. Partly for this reason, she forgives Rousseau for his self-evident male chauvinism and hypocrisy in abandoning his own children while presuming to tell others how to raise their children.

Given that she acknowledges these notorious aspects of Rousseau, it’s odd that she is so indulgent to him and so merciless about poor Robert Louis Stevenson. While admitting that she hasn’t read much of RLS’s work, she takes big swipes at his presumption and colonialism and lustily sets about demolishing the image of Tusitala, the benign story-teller in Samoa. I note her main source is the biography of Stevenson by Claire Harman, which I reviewed for the NZ Listener on 1 July 2006 (you can find the review on the Listener’s website) and which, on balance, is a lot more positive about RLS than Farrell is. Whatever you think of his works, RLS was a relatively harmless chap while Rousseau’s ideas did infinite harm in the public arena, so I’m genuinely puzzled about Farrell’s preference.

On the other hand, when Farrell first philosophizes about earthquakes, after Christchurch’s first jolt, I am pleased to see that she dives at once for Voltaire’s long poem on the Lisbon earthquake. That is exactly what I would do, ever since I first read it as an appendix to the edition of Candide we used in undergraduate French.

So I quibble about some of the fine details, but I still enjoy taking these strolls with Farrell. Yes, this is the best literary response to the Christchurch earthquakes that we have so far had.