Something New

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

“STAKES – Dracula and the secret to happiness” by Noelle McCarthy   (Penguin $NZ40)

Before I get to the reviewing part I have to say that Stakes is an excellent and very readable book. Noelle McCarthy writes with gusto and she has a unique way of expressing herself – dare I say it’s a very Irish way with some of the country’s patois. She’s no damned fool either. When it comes to writing about 19^th century books she has done her research and she is right about the way women were treated – often badly. But there was one thing that confused me. In her first book Grand – Becoming My Mother’s Daughter [reviewed on this blog] she told us about her alcoholism and coming out of it and settling in New Zealand, Auckland. She also told us about her time working on New Zealand Radio. But when we come to Stakes, we are not sure where and when these events were. This is a very little gripe.

So to the tale itself.

When she was a young teenager, living in Cork, she read Gothic stories and she became obsessed with Dracula. Indeed she saw Dracula as romantic. She left her window open and dreamed that Dracula might one night ravish her. She has very romantic ideas as when she says: [Pg 24]. “I stared at the path from the top of the rock to the sun hanging over the edge of the horizon, and I felt a longing so strong, it filled my mouth with saliva. I wanted to walk that golden track, out over the smooth water right up into the sunshine and be transformed by it, turned by something magical. I didn’t care what, a mermaid, a see beast,  a flying angel. I wanted to be taken from this body, this version of myself, into the free thing I always should have been.”  This was of course hormones buzzing and youthful desire. A little further on, she got on with boys and more or less looked for sex. She read more Gothic stories. Much snogging, much petting, many details about almost loosing knickers and she heard about girl friends who had had sex [or could it be bravado?].  Somewhere around 15-years-of-age she lost her virginity apparently with a fellow called Daniel. [N.B. An author’s note tells us that, apart from her husband, all the men in Noelle’s book are ”composites”.] She is not overwhelmed by this first swive. [Pg.53] “I have a moment to think, why am I not as moved as moved him? Why am I not on the edge of crying? I lie in the dark with my eyes closed, taking in the new sensations of being next to someone I’ve just had sex with. This is going to happen with other people, the thought comes to me. Boys from college I haven’t even met yet. I will have sex and lie in the dark, and I’ll hear them breathing next to me. And then I push the thought from my mind, appalled by my own disloyalty.” When she goes to university she parties a lot and she has sex with a number of young men. She breaks up with Daniel. But she is serious in her study. She is interested in a lecture about how women were treated in 19^th century novels – almost seen as angels, though often seen as waiting to be ravished. She takes some time off to visit her friend Bernadette who is working in London [as a barmaid]. She picks up another boyfriend called Michael and they cohabit… and then she goes back to see her mother, who drinks a lot just as Noelle does. She learns about how her mother was a nurse and how she used to work in a psychiatric ward. And she is more aware that there is much about her mother’s life that she does not know.

She finishes her university time, having done very well. She writes about 19^th century Ireland. She is still interested in Gothic literature… and Dracula. When she goes to London she links up with friends and enjoys walking around with them around the streets where Jack the Ripper did his work. She works at a counter for a while… and she decides that she wants to leave Ireland.

Noelle first goes to Australia then moves to New Zealand, settling in Auckland. She has an affair with a guy, “Eric”, who is married. She finds a number of jobs in Auckland, but she loses many jobs because she is often drunk and hungover. The alcohol has caught up with her. So at last, with the help of others, she slowly gives up the booze. But there is loneliness now that she has dropped “Eric”. (Pg. 140]. She thinks “My life is small, manageable, contained. It is not so much that I like sobriety as that it is working. Nobody cares that I’ve stopped drinking. It doesn’t make one bit of difference to anyone else.” There is still the temptation to go back to drinking But she also says (Pg. 143] “ I have no problem coming back to the idea of the sinfulness I was born with. I am an alcoholic, inherently flawed, inherently weak. I am powerless over drinking, over the cavernous screaming want inside me.”… But she does still manage to be dry. She decides to go back to Ireland for a while; and there she is able to get work as a free-lance journalist. Still in awe of Dracula, she begins to write her own Gothic novel about vampires. She is very earnest about it and speaks to friends about it… but gradually she understands that it is not working and she lets it go. Even so she goes with some of her family – mother and father etc. – to places where Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, had lived and been interested in ancient castles and ruins. When she goes to Dublin, looking at all the places where Stoker lived and worked, she is more aware that Stoker was not really Irish but rather “Anglo-Irish”, meaning those English who had taken over parts of Ireland.

She is still interested in the ancient times of Ireland. With an archaeologist examining barbaric medieval things, she learns about the way children were mistreated and buried. At the same time she becomes more disenchanted by the Anglo-Irish writers who wrote about the Irish as if they were an inferior species … and she goes back to New Zealand. So she is now back doing work on New Zealand Radio… and she writes articles, including one about how young women want to be models: but they are often exploited and misused by photographers who want sex. She thinks about her life now that she has John and they have a baby and there is responsibility. She is now in her forties. And on the whole she no longer sees vampires as glamorous. They were really versions of men who exploited young women. She thinks about Ireland as it now is. It has changed considerably. There was a referendum in favour of making abortion legal which was once unthinkable in Ireland. There was the scandal when, under the supervision by nuns, many girls and young women were kept in the “homes” until they died. Even worse were “homes” that were run by nuns who took in “illegitimate” new-born children… and research recently showed that many hundreds of new-borns died early and were buried without names. The status of the church plummeted.

And Noelle looks once again at her mother. She now knows that her mother was deprived of her real training as a nurse. She now also knows that – before Noelle was born – her mother had a child out of wedlock, and the baby was adopted out. Noelle feels that she has missed having a sister; and she diligently went though the records to find out where this sister now was. She finally finds her. Her name is Janet. Janet dies . She writes [Pg. 260] “I do not know that I really believed in Dracula, a long pale man with no refection and gleaming teeth. I don’t know that I believed if I left the bedroom window open, he’d actually come in. I believe in death though, the photos on my dresser: Mammy with her dahlia, and Janet grinning in the café the last time I met her.”

Footnote: My wife, who is of distant Irish descent, has already told me off for just giving you a synopsis rather than passing judgment in detail. Sorry for that. Must admit though that Noelle’s teenage and young adult life almost seems like Molly Bloom or Edna O’Brien. Are all Irish girls like that? And once again, Noelle has written a great book.

 

 

 

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 year or two ago. 

JOURNAL D’UN CURE DE CAMPAGNE by Georges Bernanos [First published in 1936] First published in English in 1937 as The Diary of a Country Priest.

 

There is no doubt that Journal D’un Cure de Campagne is the most widely read of all Bernanos’s novels. As soon as it was published, it was seen as Bernanos’s masterpiece. He was awarded the Grand Prix de l’Academie Francaise and the novel is still being published, not only in French but in many languages. Years after Bernanos died, Journal D’un Cure de Campagne was made into a film by Robert Bresson, very true to the novel but of course missing much of the priest’s thoughts. As the title tells us, this novel is written in the first person. What we read is what the priest thinks and writes. He has decided to write his diary during one year. This means a degree of artificial language presented by the priest when he gives us verbatim accounts of conversations he has had, but this is a common way of presenting conversations in novels. An alert reader will also be aware that the novel was written after the First World War, when many French people had memories of great loss.

 

The priest [who is not given a name] is a young man, about thirty-years-old. He has been directed to Ambricourt to be in charge of a parish. His church is a small church that was built in the 15^th century. We are aware from the beginning of the novel that the young priest is in poor health. Is he perhaps suffering from tuberculosis or some other complaint? He has been in a sanatorium. His opening words are “My parish is just like all the rest. They are all alike. Those of today I mean… good and evil are probably evenly distributed…”  He is aware that priests are not frivolous, but he is sometimes annoyed when priests are being too interested in pointless anecdotes. Some older priests see him as naïve.  He soon knows that the land he has been sent to is flat and the surrounding fields are usually wet. He makes it clear that he himself came from peasant stock and he was not used to the upper classes. In fact his father owned a rather shabby pub and he often heard fights going on. When he was quite young he had read and admired Maxim Gorky’s account of his impoverished childhood. He has little money to feed himself but sometimes his Aunt Philomene sends him some money. His superior, who often speaks to him, is the Cure de Torcy who seems very worldly and at first the young priest thinks the Cure de Torcy is too interested in keeping order rather than looking after his flock. But he soon understands that his superior knows more than he thought. The Cure de Torcy talks about the decay of the church, how fewer people go to mass and some people go to confession only as a formality. But he also makes it clear that his mission is to look after people, even if they are rough, even if they are uncouth. Referring to the Nativity, the Cure de Torcy says “Bring down fresh straw for the ox, give the ass a rub down”. The message is that nobody is to be looked down upon, even the poorest … and at the same time, the wealthy have to be looked after in a different way. Later the Cure de Torcy gives to the young priest the most compelling lecture about poverty and their duty to always look after the poor. The young priest seems at first not to know how most people get their food. So the young priest writes in his diary “I have undertaken to visit each family once every three months at least. My colleagues consider this excessive, and indeed such a promise will be hard to keep, since first and foremost I must not neglect a single duty. People who set themselves up to judge us from some remote distance, sitting in a comfortable office where they do the same routine tasks every day, cannot begin to realize how ‘untidy’, how scattered our daily work can be. We can barely manage our ordinary parochial round, the kind of thing which – when it is strictly carried out – makes a superior to exclaim ‘That’s a nice well-kept parish!’ There remains the unforeseen. And the unforeseen is never negligible. Am I where Our Lord would have me be? Twenty times a day I ask this question..”

 

The young priest naturally has to deal with mundane things which are part of his work. He has to teach children the catechism… but they are often disrupted by an annoying little girl called Seraphita who learns her lessons very well but who often makes fun of him for the amusement of other children…. Yet much later in the novel it is annoying Seraphita who helps him when he is nearly lost. Of course he says mass regularly even if few are there; and he hears confession. There are other things that he does not fully understand. The Dean of Blangermont tells him off for not keeping accounts properly. He also tells him that he should not ridicule the rich and the middle-classes as they are also the backbone of the country.

Which brings us to that matter of the wealthy. The young priest has to deal with the people who live in the Chateau and he visits them.  Mlle. Louse is the governess at the Chateau. M. le Comte owns many farms… and he is apparently promiscuous… yet he gets on well enough with most priests … though the young priest sees him as shallow. Mlle. Chantal  - a young girl – hates her mother because she thinks her mother is the cause of the death of her brother. And Mlle. la Comtesse worries about both her husband and her daughter. The young priest has a hard time trying to speak with them.

The young priest becomes very sick and it is a Dr. Delbende who examines him. Dr. Delbende is a man who likes shooting in the fields. He explains why he is not a Christian – he is an atheist. He talks about unnecessary pain and gives the priest some pain-killing drugs. This does ease the priest for some time, and he is told that he should eat more as he has almost been starving himself… And then Dr. Delbende is found dead in the fields where he is said to have had his gun caught in a bush and it killed him. Surprisingly Dr. Delbende was a good friend of the  Cure de Torcy. The young priest suggests that the doctor might have committed suicide. The Cure de Torcy says “God is the sole judge” and says Dr. Delbende was “a just man”. At the very least, it is a warning about underrating people instead of being charitable. It leads the young priest to reflect on his own flaws. “No, I have not lost my faith. The cruelty of this test, its devastation, like a thunderbolt, and so inexplicable, may have shattered  my reason and my nerves, may have withered suddenly within me the joy of prayer – perhaps for ever, who can tell? – may have filled me to the very brim with a dark, more terrible resignation with the worst convulsions of despair… but my faith is still whole for I can feel it….” This is a stage when the young priest has doubts about his calling… and he is sent an  anonymous letter telling him to leave the parish. It could be anyone. Maybe  it could be a very angry woman called Mm. Ferrand who thinks something has been stolen from her… but it could be anyone. He is aware of evil in human beings.

At the Chateau, Mlle. Chantal continues to hate her mother. She believes that Mlle. la Comtesse was the source of her brother’s death and she therefore always sides with her father. Whenever the young priest visits the Chateau to talk with her mother, Chantal tries to eavesdrop on their conversation.  The young priest takes it upon himself to have a long conversation with the Comtesse. She has lost her faith in God. Although he is essentially a peasant and she is an aristocrat, he is able to get her to accept her daughter and understand her daughter’s anguish, right or wrong. She also again understands the workings of God. This is the longest conversation in the novel and it is very persuading. The young priest has spoken carefully and the old Comtesse also speaks carefully and intelligently. At first he thinks he has done something brilliant… and then he understands that pride is eating him up. His duty is to help and guide people, not to admire himself. More prayer is needed.

There is more trouble ahead. The old Comtesse dies. The Canon [the superior of the priests] says that M. le Comte wants the young priest to write an account of his conversation with the Comtesse. After all, it was only a conversation; not the hearing of confession. But the young priest cannot do it. He regards the conversation as personal and almost the same as  confession. The Comte is angry because he had hoped the priest would have heard about how much money the Comtesse had; and he was also annoyed because the priest has spoken to his angry daughter. Chantal has tried to compromise the priest, but it did not work.…There are always problems with the rich.

Later, showing how difficult a priest’s life can be, the young priest has a conversation with a peasant who says that many people think he is too precise and fancy in his work; and warns him that he does not eat enough and he is fading away. Once again the Cure de Torcy  tells him about what is needed to be a priest. On his own, the young priest thinks “We’re all called to the priesthood, I agree, but not always in the same way. So to get things straight I start off my taking each one of us back where he belonged in Holy Writ. It makes us a couple o’ thousand years younger, but what of it? Time does not worry our Lord, He sees right the way through. I tell myself that long before we were born – from a human point of view – Jesus met us somewhere, in Bethlehem, or perhaps Nazareth, or along the road to Galilee – anywhere. And one day among all the other days, His eyes happened to rest upon you and me, and so we were called, each in his own particular way… This isn’t theology I’m preaching… It’s simply my own imagination … it amounts to this: if the unforgetting soul in us, which remembers us eternally…” and here the young priest falls into thinks of his own situation.

He is more and more aware of his sickness. His nose is often bleeding  As he walks though the forest he thirsts for a drink of water. It is Seraphita who gives it to him. She has matured… or is he realising that there is good even in people who are flawed. He thinks about the way he prays. “Of course I am ‘praying better’ . But I no longer recognize my prayers.”

He now has to go to Lille to be seen by a Dr. Lavigne. On his way there, a young soldier gives him a ride and he has very different attitudes from those of the priest. The young soldier is annoyed with the Church as it is not as strong as it used to be and it is not as nationalistic as it used to be. He pines for the likes of Joan of Arc. He is not aggressive when he talks with the priest, but he believes that the Church has collapsed… and when the drive ends, the young soldier is courteous. [ Here I think Georges Bernanos is giving a warning about those who confuse Christianity with nationality. As a priest should know, nationalism is not his calling.]

Dr. Lavigne examines him.  Dr. Lavigne was once a morphine addict. He is an atheist as many doctors are; but nevertheless he is a very good doctor. He is able to show that the priest is not suffering from tuberculosis. What is slowly killing him is cancer of the gut… And now the priest has to consider what he can do in what will be his last days. One of the last people he speaks to is a poor working woman who says she is getting on even if she has little. He considers what he has done in his one year. Most of his parishioners have scorned him or have ignored him. His growing pain is slowly killing him. Yet something inside him says that he has seen good people, those who have helped him even if they weren’t really Christians; those who were growing; and he knows that he has done some good. Before he dies, his last words are “Grace is everywhere”. Nobody is to be scorned

Something Thougthful

  Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.   

          WHERE CAN I FIND A SECOND-HAND BOOK SHOP? [or shouldn’t I bother?]

In days of old (by which I mean about twenty years ago) I was addicted to buying second-hand books. Very well, I am a bibliophile and about a quarter of the books I have on my shelves are books that I have bought from second-hand-book shops. But I was very choosy and bought only books that meant something. I made it a law to avoid the latest “best-sellers” which are usually trite. So, back then, when the week’s work was over and it was Saturday, I would catch a bus from the North Shore and go to central Auckland. In those days there were about five second-hand-book shops in central Auckland, so I would wander around those shops. They were just off  Queen’s Street. Then there was Ponsonby where there was an excellent second-hand-book shop run by a thoughtful man called Bryan Harold. I bought quite a number books from him. And very, very occasionally I would hop into my car and go to Onehunga, where there was another very good second-hand-book shop. And once or twice I went to Devonport where there were two competing second-hand-book shops. There where an abundant number of second-hand-book shops in Auckland .

And then one day I went into Bryan Harold’s shop and he was very gloomy. The rates had been raised so high that he could not pay them, and he had to close shop. He went down south, very far away from Auckland. And then the people who ran the Onehunga second-hand-book shop also had to close-up… but the priests who ran St. Benedict’s church allowed them to set up a second-hand-book shop in rooms where nuns had once taught children. For a number of years it worked. But bit by bit, second-hand-book shops disappeared in central Auckland. Yes, you can find small second-hand-book shops in some suburbs but they are mainly short of stock. In central Auckland there are some traders who offer very expensive first editions, which really can be bought only by the rich. So what is left if you are a bibliophile in Auckland looking for old but thoughtful books? You have to go the Book Mark in Devonport. I hasten to note that it is a very good second-hand-book shop and I usually have a good chat with the owner.  … At which point I have to admit that, as well as buying old books sometimes, I also sell new books to owners of second-hand-book shops. If you read this blog at all, you will be aware that I review new books – some of which are just off the print – but I do so very rarely.

But here is another problem.  Devonport is a charming place, but there is one difficulty. There is only one main road that leads to Devonport; and sometimes, every so often, when one drives back home, there maybe a long traffic jam. some visitors curse that they had gone there at all.

Meanwhile, second-hand-books shops thrive in other parts of New Zealand – especially in Wellington and Dunedin but also in smaller cities. My wife’s cousin Michael O’Leary runs a second-hand-books shop near to Wellington and I am glad to hear that Bryan Harold now runs a second-hand-books shop in the South Island.

Footnote: Many people have told me that Aucklanders prefer to buy their second-hand-books by getting them on line… you send the money and the book is sent to you. But this takes away the delight of being able to walk around a real second-hand-books shop and discover books that you had never heard of. And it’s a good place to chat with other bibliophiles.

Something New

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

PEPEHA PORTAL by Ariana Tikao (Otago University Press, $NZ30) ; AFTER WAR by Dzenana Vucic (published by University of Queensland…) ; BEYOND THE BORDER and other poems, by Owen Marshall (published by Quentin Wilson, $NZ37.50) ; HERE & HEREAFTER by Alice Miller (published by Liverpool University Press.)

 Pepeha Portal is Ariana Tikao’s first collection of poetry, but she has written poetry for years and has often appeared in various presses. She sojourned at the University of Canterbury after the devastating earthquake and that was where she wrote all the 50 poems that make up this collection. They are divided into two parts. She says “Pepeha” is related more closely to tipuna places and stories; and “Portal” reflects more about her childhood and other memories. In her poem From, she tells us about her childhood, beginning with the stanza “I’m from Redgrave  Street, Hoon Hay. Potiki of seven ‘half-caste’ kids raised in a house built by the state, with purple polyanthus and sweet peas blooming along the driveway…” She gives us two pages explaining her name. She was the youngest of a family of seven. Their parents gave them all European names.  Her parents named her Leanne. But in her adulthood, she legally changed her name to Ariana Tikao, honouring her Maori ancestors and forbears.  And her sees the world from a clear and compelling Maori perspective.

Mihi begins with how the land was formed and reformed by its movements; but this shifting, when it came to Christchurch, meant that many people had to move elsewhere, thus breaking up many communities.  There are poems based in Maori ancient tales such as the making of a Te Taniwha. Again there is an ancient tale Te Tarere a Hikaiti which is about a woman who was mistreated and “juiced and crushed / fermented heart / I leapt to my death / I sang my lament… I fell for you.” It is based on the traditional story of a woman who threw herself to her death after her husband had betrayed her. There are also poems about pre-European Maori customs such as Poua’s Oriori about the right season to plant “You must follow the order of things… /do not come in the time of Maku / when wet cold world / congealer of lung. / No air will enter / No song / No chant… / … We sleep when we’re tired / We eat when we’re hungry / We are born when / whakapapa / & moontide / shine.” But Ariana Tikao is not concerned only with ancient things. There are poems of protest such as “Settling” against Israeli settlers in the West Bank; and “Reclamation” which protests at the way land has been expanded, taking over where there was sea and water.

Moving on to Portal there is Transforming about growing up and seeing the world gradually and taking up radical ideas as in “We will summon those willing to fight for Papatuanuku, those who won’t keep extracting from her – unlike us, who believed the claim of the capitalists. These new fighters will speak our reo and dance with the fluid movement of bull kelp surging around the rocks.”  Intonation celebrates the late Moana Jackson who always advocated for Maori rights. Yet just as often she deals with her family. Cold Feet (Mum) is a sort of elegy for her mother, seeing her when she has died and then “with my sisters and our daughters / I am dressing you / in your swirly bronze and black / coat-dress, and we marvel / at your legs, how / beautiful that are / smooth and straight / like emergency candles / in a box.” There is a sense of close community. There can also be room for the amusing as in  Infight Lovers of Bristol Street where two birds are so involved in mating that they fall off the roof. And there is also the intimate in Surfacing / Diving which is about having her moko “I feel the cut and burn / of my moko’s creation / as when the baby’s / head stretches the puapua / slowly ripping perineal tissue / sweet hot pain / fire breathing her / into tea o marama…” It may be a moment torture, but it takes her to her full Maoritanga.

As is always the case, I have quoted only some of her many poems; but I am certain that this is the best and most polished collection of Maori poetry that I have seen for years.

  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *

 

            Dzenana Vucic is a Bosnian-Australian and in her After War she writes of the horrors of war. The war she deals with is the disintegration of what used to be Yugoslavia, where Serbs, Croats and other ethnicities ripped each other apart, meaning massacres, “ethnic cleansing”, and often rape, which was used as a weapon. Bosnia was caught up in it. She does not take sides in her poetry. Indeed she dedicates her collection to a retired Croatian army officer, Tomo Buzov, who protected a Bosnian boy. The title of her book reads in full “After War – a memoir in poetry and pieces” for she is concerned with how she remembered things. She was six when her family brought her to Australia and she recalls pieces of trauma that shaped her life, as well as the tails of horror that her family told her. In her poem First Year After War she writes “How do you fall from a building unshaken by bombs / How do you fall unrunning from gunfire”. Or later in the poem Fainting Goat she writes “The first time I hear a car backfire / I throw myself / to the ground, / arms over head as though arms / might make a difference/ (not that they will, they have not)”. Bosnians are [mainly] Muslim, and sometimes she refers to the massacre of Muslims by an Australian in Christchurch. She is also concerned about the matter of language where [in some parts of  what was Yugoslavia] the Bosnian language was banned. But of the whole catastrophe she writes “I want to write a poem that explains a hundred thousand deaths, one point five million unhomed, up to sixty thousand raped and 9 million youtube viewers …”, the latter part showing how un-caring the rest of the world is. There follows a long sequence – covering 20 pages written in fractured words – which makes it clear that the whole country was fractured by war. And in the poem To Learn a M/other Tongue, she tells us how, as she grew up in Australia, she began to speak English.  So she taught herself how to speak the Bosnian language. There is much, much more to this collection, including poems that show she now has a wider perspective. But it all speaks of what should be humane.

  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *  

 

Novelist, short-story writer and poet, Owen Marshall’s Beyond the Border is his fifth collection of poetry and it is a very generous one, giving us fully 196 poems. This collection  begins with Beyond the Border, an elegy for the late Vincent O’Sullivan, saying that O’Sullivan “wielded the language of academia with the best, but also struck home with the intense simplicity of the butcher and the candlestick maker. You couldn’t drive a car, but had complete licence in the use of words”. Very true. [And I remember driving Vincent home once or twice as he had no car.] As you might expect, a collection beginning with an elegy often deals with memories and losses, such as the dead who are “beyond the border”. But Marshall is not sentimental. Far from it. This is a very balanced collection, and it is abundant. As always Marshall does not perplex readers but works in straightforward literal statements, though sometimes with irony. Nothing is written to baffle us. Marshall uses, in these many poems, prose poetry [sometimes], free verse, standard stanzas, and others, but never confusing. And so to the many poems.

Marshall certainly has travelled and there are poems about visiting Saint Agnes, what is left of Troy, going to the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, visiting Menton, and the Antarctic. He also has memories of childhood; and as an old man he sometime writes about his grandchildren. He also writes poems that come close to philosophy. But it is the loss of friends who have died that most hurt him. There are so many poems in this collection that the best I can do is to point out the poems that most interested me.

First the poem Retrospection, which reminds us that we often remember trivial things which we thought were important, and yet they stay with us. My Father Laughing is a happy moment he recalls from his young years. Disunity gives us a moment of old age saying “My toes are farther from me now and snag / my blue socks when I attempt to dress them. / Other body parts are also distancing themselves / or disputing suzerainty….” Oh so true if you are old. And right next to it there is the poem Bipedal Advantage, which wonders how we homo sapiens came to be the leading creatures on Earth when other creatures are in many ways more majestic than we are. Mr. Catarrh is about a man he knew when he was young – a man who would “hock” and spit a lot - but with whom he was able to converse. Among memories of school days there is Ignominy about negative things he did – really small things but he felt bad about it. And as you might expect for children in the 1950s, he has memories about The Bughouse, kids watching movies before television in New Zealand basically took over.

And what of some even more thoughtful poems? Yet It Will Come asks us to think how the world will end – not in terms of warfare or famine, but the long natural disintegration of the Earth as the Sun expands and the Solar System changes. Who will be the last human beings on Earth before they are wiped out? There is a charming poem called Whatever telling us that anything, seen the right way, is poetry. As for True Mentors, it tells us that “Those writers of the past whom you admire become the family in your head, best friends too. It doesn’t matter that they are dead, for you have met them in the confessional of their works…” And there is much more about poetry this poem says. When he turns to Watching Children Play he sees “Everywhere are exhortations concerning remedies for infirmity and the improvement of our well-being, but nothing lifts my spirits more than to watch small children playing. No guise of cynicism, or cloak of subterfuge as they reach for life, just the vulnerability accompanying openness, innocence and trust.” Oh yes there are also other very good poems of the past, as in The Nostalgia Club and The Car Museum and Student Days.

But the poem which I thought the most brilliant was Orca, which he saw when he was in Antarctic where orca were near, described as “Streamlined royalty in black and white rising in gleaming crescent then curving back in such graceful choreography, yet bearing too the insolent demeanour of apex predators. One could aptly be named the name of some lightning-striking Viking god but comes instead from Latin – Kingdom of the Dead.” The best description I have ever seen of orca.

I have, of cause, noted only a sample of these many poems. I do not think every one of Owen Marshall’s poems is great. Some of his poems are downright mundane. But this is a great collection and, is always with Marshall, it is very readable. 

*.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.   * 

 Over the years I have read all of the collections of Alice Miller, including The Limits in which she said that life is such that we have to simply develop intellectual resilience to deal with the world and its people. In her next collection What Fire she was very concerned about the fearful, hesitant and uncertain-ness of the future of human beings, perhaps mitigated by love. All of which might sound as if I were saying that she is a prophet of doom – which of course is not true. She has a streak of wit and she is very open to considering many ways people live. I would go so far as to say she is almost a philosopher with a heart. Alice Miller was born and bred  in New Zealand, but she now lives in Berlin and obviously she can speak the German language. Her grandmother was Jewish and managed to get out of Germany before Hitler took over. Now her new collection Here & Thereafter takes a broad view not only of the country where she now lives. One of her opening poems Old Romantic says “When we’re young we know poems matter, later we / still know but have to admit there’s only one way they can. / After all, much more than sandcastles are vanishing. / What with those odds, one part must keep singing / and it’s that proof we keep.” Think about this poem carefully. It means so many things. Coming to Germany she writes Future Proof wherein “To apply for a special German passport, I needed / proof my ancestors were persecuted, to show / their vanished business off Unter den Linden; / to listen to the current State’s persecution; and to never / call it that. I smile wide, a man says / I’m allowed here”. One of the most heart-breaking poem is Apology where an old German man awkwardly apologises for the Holocaust. But this is far from all of Miller’s poems. Read deeply of poems about having a child as in the poems Babies and Birth, with all the pains of giving birth. She does not deal only with older wars but with some that are still going. And in the poem The Golden Baugh Hotel there is the possibility of a war to come. And sometimes there is loneliness, as in the poem Real Bird where “Some days I’m like the gannet / on that island where people left / concrete birds to try to attract a colony. / The poor gannet was the only real bird / left, courting the concrete birds…”  I have given you only a very small sample of the many poems in Here & Thereafter but it is clear that Alice Miller is one of the most thoughtful poets we have.

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 year or two ago. 

“UN CRIME” by Georges Bernanos (first published in 1935). Published in English in 1936 under the name A Crime.

Un Crime was the first novel by Bernanos to be published in the English language. Why should this be so? Because Un Crime is basically a detective story – a whodunnit – and detective stories were very popular in the 1930’s. An American imprint took it up. But why should  Bernanos write in such a genre in the first place? Simple. Bernanos had a large family to feed [three sons, three daughters] and his publisher suggested that he could make more money if he wrote a detective novel. So he did. But do not be fooled for, detective tale or not, Bernanos wove in philosophical and religious ideas as well.

Set in the mountain country of France, near Grenoble, there is a small town called Megere. The town’s priest has gone and a new priest is on his way to replace him. Oddly the new priest arrives at night and he has walked through a forest when he could have come through an easier road. The new priest is young and pale. When he comes to his presbytery he wants to sleep. He is directed by his house-keeper to his bedroom and he sleeps. Later he wakes in the night and he wakes the house-keeper. He says he had heard gun-shots. The house-keeper says she did not hear anything. But the two of them walk in the darkness to find what had happened. Firmin the constable has looked over the ground. A man has been killed in the nearby forest; and another man has almost been killed on the grounds of Madame Beauchamp – an old and wealthy woman who has recently died; and Madame Louise now looks after the deceased woman’s house. The man lying on the grounds is still alive but his blood is draining out and he cannot speak, partly because somebody has forced a stone down his throat. In due course he dies. As well as the gendarmes, there are now Frescheville – who is often called “the little judge” – and later a district attorney and a magistrate who are examining all the details and trying to work out who could have committed murder. Among the conversations, he understands that there is in Madame Beauchamp’s house an ex-nun, a secularized religion sister and a house-keeper. It is suggested that something shady has happened in the house.

People want to know what the new priest is like and they ask Firmin. He says “Well, Monsieur le maire, a mere boy with a maidenly expression, but according to my mind, more thoughtful than you’d suppose. You ought not to have left him up yonder, we should have taken our time.”

The priest tells Gaspard Andre, a young altar-boy, that he will not give mass on his first day in the town because, he says, he is sick and out of sorts and he stays in the presbytery. Even so, the altar-boy is impressed by the priest. And the police ask the priest to give his account of what he said he had heard shots in the night… but this takes things no further. There is much investigation into Madame Beauchamp’s house and the fact that there was a piston in the house that is now gone missing. A doctor is brought in and he looks at the corpses. Of the priest he says “… this priest has nothing womanish about him, on the contrary. Anyway I have not examined him; his pulse worries me, his expression is that of a highly strung patient, that’s all… like a great many of his fellows – I mean born priests – the feminine side of his nature is very pronounced…” Later Frescheville [“the little judge”] quizzes the priest about what he knew of the two men who died, but the priest has nothing to say. [Suggestion – there is at this point the possibility that the priest is holding back from given information because he has heard something in the confessional…]. However the priest does say that he could get relevant information from a woman in another town nearby. So off goes the priest… and he is never seen again…

 Frescheville and other inspectors look carefully over the information again. Why did the priest disappear so quickly? Why could he not be available even if he was in a different town? Frescheville interrogates Gaspard Andre, the altar-boy, about the disappearance of the priest and he does learn that the boy had helped the priest to find a route that could take him far from Megere. He sends the boy on his way, telling him to tell people where the priest might be… and he more and more comes to believe that the murders had much to do with the goings-on in the family of the late Madame Beauchamp. Now the officers, the judge and the police look over the area again and walk through the bush and see where events could have taken place. By now they are speculating about how or why the priest had gone. The  disappearance  seems to have something to do with a legacy which was going to be given to the church. It was another priest who, having heard of the disappearance of the younger priest, tells the judge about the legacy… and of certain scandals about the family that were common knowledge.

The boy and the priest are in the Basque country. The boy no longer believes in the priest. And….

 

            Wait a moment. I’m about to tell you about how the novel ends, and given that it is a whodunnit, that would be a grave thing to do [pun intended]. Surely a whodunnit is a game of wits for the reader, working out who the killer was. But to help you out, look at what Firmin and the doctor said about the priest, then think about it. Un Crime ends in a very awkward way, with Bernanos giving us a character who writes a long letter explaining who the priest was and what this character had done.

            I said at the beginning of this review that “Bernanos wove in philosophical and religious ideas as well”.  This is true in one sense. Bernanos does give us, in this small town, a collection of people who represent what France was like in the early ^20th century – that is, Catholics and sceptic rationalists. There is no anger between the priests and the doctors and the law. Their status is simply accepted. And Bernanos does show that both can sometimes be wrong. 

 

Something Thoughtful

   Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.   

              BACK AT THE MOVIES I’M AFRAID

Yes I’m sorry to tell you that my wife and I go to the movies only when there is something worth seeing. This means that we rarely see what Hollywood makes; besides, after a few months you can see recent Hollywood films on television. But foreign-language films are likely to be seen only in the cinema. Which brings us to our recent experience with foreign-language films.

A couple of months ago a “festival” of Italian films did the rounds of New Zealand – all being new films. Of course we are not made of money, and so we saw only four of the Italian films. The first was quite a jolly film about an impaired boy who wanted to sing on television and with the help of his loving sister, he got his wish. In other words a “feel-good” film. The next was quite grim – the detailed tale of a woman police-officer in Sicily who tries hard  to prosecute a leader of the Mafia… but there is so much corruption in Sicily that she gets nowhere. This film was the very best of the Italian film festival that we saw; and I am sure that most Italians are appalled by the corruption that keeps Sicily down. Next came a promising movie about children who came from Naples  to New York just after the end of the Second World War. It was both was amusing and sad in places and at first it worked well. But alas, once it got to the New York section it was smothered in bad, inappropriate, loud music as it collapsed into fantasy. But redeeming the Italian film festival there was a very good documentary about Ennio Morricone, the musician who made most of the music of  scores for many Italian films… and sometimes he made scores for films other than Italian. We happily watched this one in the company of our daughter and our Italian daughter-in-law. But of course we had only seen only a sample of this festival so perhaps we had missed some better films.

That was then and this is now. Currently there is now a “festival” of French films going through New Zealand. We booked for six films. Here they are.

L’Etranger [The Stranger] is the second filming of Albert Camus’ novel. The first version was made in 1967. It was directed by Visconti. It was also made in bright colour and the leading character [Meursault] was played by the suave Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni. Amazingly I saw this film when I was a teenager because our teacher took us to see it as we were studying French. Compared with the new film, it was too glamourous and Mastroianni was bad casting. And so to the new version that I have just seen. It is very different and less glamorous. This time it is filmed in black-and-white which is right for a tale set in the 1940’s. It is also more aware of the Arab people in Algeria and their recentness for being colonised. The leading character is played by Benjamin Voisin, a Frenchman, who is an ordinary young man. I will not go into giving you a synopsis. The story is well known. All I can say is that it is well shot, it follows Camus’ story closely… and I still think that Camus’ philosophy was inane.

La Bataille de Gaulle: L’Age de Fer [English translation De Gaulle Tilting Iron ] is mainly about De Gaulle’s activity in the Second Would War, and it is clearly a film that was made on a large budget, as in the episode when the R.A.F. bombs the French Fleet [Churchill was afraid that the Nazi’s would take over the French fleet]; or in the long episode in which the Free French slog it out against the Panzers in the sands of North Africa. Much of it is about de Gaulle’s relationship with Churchill, de Gaulle often being stubborn and Churchill often losing his temper, but ultimately both of them having to agree on major points. On the whole it is true to history but some viewers night be confused by the ending with the assassination of a French Admiral. French viewers would understand what it was about…and so would those who understand that the admiral had worked for the Vichy. The ending makes it clear that ultimately de Gaulle would be in charge.

When I looked at the brochure that came with the French Film Festival, my eye spotted a film called The Money Maker. I was in a hurry and I did not read the blurb, but the name suggested that it was going to be a happy tale about a millionaire. I was so wrong. The Money Maker [French name L’Affaire Bojarski] is a quite serious film – with some humorous moments -  based on the true story of an excelled forger who, just after the Second World War and up to the middle of the 1950’s, was able to forge French banknotes so well that even experts could not see the difference from his notes and the real currency. The film had a good pace and I do not want to give away how it ends.

Then there is Maigret and the Dead Lover, a straight-forward, no-nonsense Simenon story with a very good Maigret played by Denis Bonitzer, pipe always in hand. No frills, realistic situations, much talk and exactly what you hope for if you like Maigret. I do.

And then comes  Jean Valjean, a very good account of the first third of Les Miserables wherein Jean Valjean learns that there is some good in the world after having been endlessly mistreated.            As for the sixth film we booked for… we are going to see it as soon as I leave my desk. We booked for only six films. This year’s French Film Festival has 24. I’m sure we have missed some great ones; but the films we did see were better than anything Hollywood can churn out.