We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“THE FORGOTTEN FOREST” by Robert Vennell (Harper-Collins, $NZ40); “THE TRACKERS” by Charles Frazier (Harper-Collins, $NZ35); “DOWN SOUTH” by Bruce Ansley (Harper-Collins, $NZ35)
Let’s consider the presentation first. The Forgotten Forest opens with 32 plates of coloured drawings, produced in the 18th and 19th centuries by European botanists and explorers, depicting fungi, native or introduced, mushrooms, parasites, poisonous mushrooms (like the introduced “death cap” mushroom), puffballs and many other specimens. The book closes with another 32 pages of yet more specimens. This artwork is somehow more precise and more explanatory than photographs of the same specimens would be. They are also very elegant. The text of The Forgotten Forest is presented in blocks of words leaving very wide margins and with lines widely-spaced. This is very much in the style in which books were once published, helped by the fact that this is a hardback book. There are wonderfully precise end-notes, allowing readers to find more details about specimens, and a very comprehensive bibliography. Before his poetic prologue, Vennell warns that it is foolish to forage for mushrooms when you do not know the correct identifications of specific types of mushrooms.
And so to the text.
Vennell imagines he (and we) are walking through the New Zealand bush and forest, and he describes step-by-step what we would see of the fungi and small plants. As often as is relevant he makes reference to Maori lore and beliefs about many plants, citing legends and using both Maori and Linnaean versions of a plant’s name… as well as the more casual Pakeha names.
To give only one chapter in detail – the opening chapter “The mystery of mushrooms”… We walk into the dark forest where just a little sunlight makes it through the canopy of tall trees. We encounter basket fungus, which is very smelly, and then the starfish fungus known in Latin as aseroe rubra “disgusting red juice”. Yet both were eaten by Maori, so long as they were harvested in the right season. They can be “poisonous without proper preparation and can cause its victims to stagger about uncontrollably” (p.23). As we walk deeper into the forest, where there is no gap in the canopy at all, we see the luminescent harore, a fungus that feeds on decaying wood; and pouch fungus which may (this is a theory) once have been eaten by moa. When the moa defecated, says the theory, the seeds of the pouch fungus would be excreted out. An interesting way of spreading the pouch fungus and producing progeny. Nature is of course very cruel. In the forest, the parasite awheo is able to destroy caterpillars either by drilling into them or laying microscopic eggs which feed off the caterpillar until the caterpillar dies… and yet the same awheo produced the black ink that was important for Maori tattooing. Magic mushrooms were inadvertently brought to New Zealand by European livestock, only later being hunted by people looking for a psychedelic trip. They are now designated as Class A drugs. Having no negative effects, but not really edible, are the beautiful blue mushrooms, known as werewere kokako as Maori lore said that the kokako [bird] must have rubbed itself with the blue mushroom to brighten its blue wattle…. And there are puffballs which can be prepared as food and taste something like tofu… and there is hakeke, or rubbery ear, a helpful parasite very edible to the Chinese and therefore once an important export.
Now all this is found in only the first of the five chapters of The Forgotten Forest . I brusquely sum up what follows. Chapter 2 moves us into mountain country, analysing lichen and especially highlighting the “wool-dyers lichen” which literally became that. Chapter 3 looks at mountain pools where liverworts proliferate, growing on land but mating in water very much as their ancestors did millions of years ago. Incidentally, the leafy liverwort wairuakohu pumps out cannabinoids with very, very vaguely similar effects as the effects of cannabis – but they are so mild that even dedicated potheads are not particularly interested in it. Chapter 4 is in the wet rainforest and examines mosses, including the absorbent sphagnum moss, the kohukohu which is soft and healing enough to be used in bandages; and the dung moss which flourishes on excrement. And finally in Chapter 5, encounters with delightful slime moulds, including the “dog vomit” slime, slime always being amoeboid – meaning it is like a much enlarged form of one of the simplest and lowly of living things.
What more can I say? Enlightening to the non-specialist, written in an engaging way, filled with information and anecdote and certainly vivid, The Forgotten Forest is a great education for adults and other human beings.
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I rejoiced when American author Charles Frazier’s best-known novel Cold Mountain was published in 1997. It struck me as having a unique and original perspective on the Confederacy in the American Civil War. I wrote a very positive review of it for an Auckland newspaper and I thought the movie that was made from it, a year or two later, was pretty good. But the quality of an author’s output is not necessarily consistent; and the next novel I read by Frazier Nightwoods, in 2011, [reviewed in this blog] struck me as leaning too much on melodrama, coincidence and formula, in spite of some of the descriptive sections at which Frazier is very talented. Frazier’s latest novel (his fifth) The Trackers has many of the merits but also some of the flaws of Frazier’s work.
The story is set in the late 1930s (1937 to be precise). The Great Depression is still eating at America, even though F.D.R.’s “New Deal” is in full swing. The government’s W.P.A. [Works Progress Administration] busily makes work for some of the unemployed. One W.P.A. programme funds artists who are willing to produce “public” art. The main character and first-person narrator of The Trackers is Val Welch, an artist recruited by the W.P.A. to paint a mural for a post office in faraway Wyoming. Val has to travel from his native Virginia, half a continent away. As he sets about his work he becomes involved with an ambitious and wealthy rancher, John Long, who is a big wheel in Wyoming’s politics and who hopes to become a U.S. senator. The opening sections of the novel are very promising. Val Welch gives his dry and ironic views of the rancher, his cowboy workers and the small town whose post office he is adorning. At the same time, he has to learn that these rural folks are not idiots and they are often both shrewder and better informed on some things than he is. Some of them can even discuss art intelligently.
So far, so interesting. But then, about a quarter of the way through [please note I do not disclose and spoil the outcomes of new novels], there comes the main thread of the plot. Wealthy John Long’s much younger wife Eve runs away, we know not whither. Long wants her back, and who does he commission to track her down and bring her back? Why, the inexperienced, callow, non-he-man, non-detective, Val Welch of course. At which point credibility crumbles a little. How come Long’s tough and experienced trackers weren’t given the commission? A reason is given, but it’s not a very credible one. In his quest for the missing wife, Val has to go to a backward county of Florida where he is confronted by a homicidal and slightly moronic family who seem to have emerged from an Erskine Caldwell novel. He goes to raw young Seattle where there are shady doings on every street. He hits the glamourous and the tawdry streets of San Francisco … in short, he covers a huge part of the map of the U.S.A. and drives down many a dusty rural or desert road.
Frazier lays on heavily fragments of the Depression era. There are tales of “Hoovervilles” (shanty-towns populated by impoverished unemployed men and some women), runaway youngsters riding the rails looking for work, devious bankers and references to iconic 1930s things – the newly-made Golden Gate Bridge; the crash-and-burn of the “Hindenburg”; movies with Ginger Rogers in them etc. All very interesting, even if it makes the novel a kind of cross between John Steinbeck and Dashiell Hammett. But my beef is the improbable and, alas, the cliché premise. Wealthy man getting somebody to find a runaway wife with some sex and violence wrapped in? Hmmm… that one goes back as far as films noirs like Out of the Past (Robert Mitchum tracks down Jane Greer) in the 1940s. And of course the missing wife in this novel is a temptress. Why else would she be called Eve?
But don’t let grumpy old me put you off this entertaining genre book. Maybe I’ve just seen too many old films.
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Here's one of those silly mistakes that turns out to be fruitful. On their list of new publications, Harper-Collins included Bruce Ansley’s Down South, subtitled on the cover as In Search of the Great Southern Land. I’d never heard of this book and naturally assumed it was a new book. Only when the kindly people at Harper-Collins sent it to me did I discover that it was a new “edition” of a book first published in 2020 – and in this case I suspect “new edition” really means “newly reprinted”.
No matter. I sat down and read it with great pleasure. Bruce Ansley is a seasoned journalist who has made his mark in many newspapers and in the NZ Listener. Born and raised in Christchurch, he now (post-Christchurch earthquakes) lives in Auckland, on Waiheke Island, but he loves the South Island and Down South essentially revels in the long island. Personally, I’ve always been an Aucklander and I like it here, but I have stayed on the West Coast, have walked as far up Fox Glacier as one can walk, have tramped the length of the Heaphy Track, the Kepler Track and the Mount Richmond Crossing (where my then-teenaged son and I got lost in a snowstorm) and in the Catlins. I have been hosted by good friends in Nelson, have visited (yeeech!) Queenstown, enjoyed various visits to (pre-Earthquake) Christchurch and thoroughly enjoyed a year in Dunedin. This is all by way of saying that, contented Aucklander though I may be, I know how enticing so much of the South Island is. So I understand Bruce Ansley’s enthusiasm.
Ansley’s general technique is to give an anecdotal history of South Island locations and then chronicle his own engagement with these places. He begins by reminding us that in the nineteenth century, the South Island had a much greater population than the North Island – but the balance changed over the years and now the South Island carries only a quarter of the nation’s population. Unco dour Presbyterian Dunedin was for years New Zealand’s largest city, and it was radically changed – to the consternation of the city fathers – when gold was discovered in Central Otago, bringing in miners and gold-hunters with money on their minds. Ansley tells quite a few tales of those goldrush days (maybe too many) then gives his own impressions of the terrain as it now is. He crosses to the West Coast and ponders on the old coal miners. West Coast industries are dying and we now have a different attitude towards fossil fuels. This is followed by tales of the sheep barons of the nineteenth century who made huge profits from grazing their stock on vast estates that were bought for tuppence from Maori who didn’t really endorse the deal… but New Zealand ultimately did not live off the sheep’s back and dairy farming became the more dominant form of farming on the Canterbury plains… which now means problems with effluents (cow poo) fouling the waterways. Systems to limit pollution are now demanded. And after sheep and cows, in the later 20th century more niche animals began to be farmed. Apparently without great success, Ansley himself spent some years farming deer, for the “velvet” as much as for the venison.
Ansley takes a critical view of tourism, which is now one of New Zealand’s major industries. His chapter on tourism is the longest in the book. As often as not, he shows how much an invasion of tourists destroys environments and usually destroys the charms of the locations that attracted tourists in the first place. In fact, this is true of tourism in all parts of the world. He is scathing about Akaroa, touted as a quant “French” town, but now tramped to pieces by cruise-ship hordes. He admits that he himself has been a tourist (he visited White Island-Whakaari a few years before it exploded) but he still charts in detail how older communities have been destroyed by interlopers.
And then, using his original home-town base Christchurch, he introduces the South Island’s problems with earthquakes. The terror and destruction of Christchurch are centre-front, together with the very mixed – and sometimes very questionable – attempts to mend and re-build the city. There is the fact that, though the North Island had the Napier earthquake in the 1930s, it is the South Island that is most often struck in this way. Christchurch, Kaikoura, Murchison. The South Island lives on the great Alpine Fault, waiting to move and destroy much of the South Island, as seismologists know. It’s only a matter of time…The book’s tone becomes less sombre when Ansley turns to Nelson, how it almost became the country’s capital, how habitable and friendly it is. The bill of health he gives for Nelson is so positive that he almost seems to be offering the city a free advertisement. It’s more fun when he recalls his student days, long ago, when he picked tobacco for what is now a defunct and despised industry. Oh, and there are also now craft beers produced in the Waimea Valley. He fades out with memories of living in a bach on Golden Bay.
Ansley style is breezy, sometimes a little sarcastic (especially about pompous people from the past) but still packed with information, with vivid vignettes of cities, towns and deserted places, and with a real sense of the outdoors, the majesty of nature and the contours of the land. A great pleasure to read.
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