Something New

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

     “ABOUT NOW”  by Richard Reeve (Maungatua Press, $25);  “DEPARTURES” by Dunstan Ward (Cold Hub Press $NZ30); David Gregory’s "Based on a True Story"; Leonard Lambert’s "Slow Fires – New Poems"; Te Awhina Rangimarie Arahanga’s "Tsunami With Mushrooms"

A personal note. I first encountered the poetry of Richard Reeve with his first two collections Dialectic of Mud (2001) and The Life and the Dark (2004), followed by his long-form poem The Among (2008) and In Continents (2008). Some years passed before his next collection came my way, Generation Kitchen (2015), after which I heard no more. About Now brings us up to date after what had to me seemed like a long silence, apart from the sequence Horse and Sheep (2019). Reeve has always been concerned with ecology and the preservation of indigenous flora and fauna, but [unlike too many New Zealand poets now] he rarely preaches or hectors us. He looks closely at what nature is for good or ill, and frequently presents nature as a metaphor for human behaviour. As he is based in Dunedin, his imagery often refers to the South Island. He can be ironic and/or satirical but not to excess. About Now is dedicated “For departed friends” and opens with a reminder from the ancient epic Gilgamesh that life is fleeting and ultimately we all die. Reeve, now in mature early middle-age, has seen some friends die and writes elegies. I note that this book declares it was “Published without the assistance of Creative New Zealand”.

Reeve has a very distinct style. Some years ago I wrote “Reeve’s own engagement with the raw matter of the world is evident… Another is his awareness of form – not a slavish adherence to traditional poetic forms, but an ability to reference them as he presents his own worldview. In this he is almost unique among his New Zealand contemporaries.” I stand by this statement. Reeve does use orderly stanzas meaningfully and in a standard and traditional form. Sometimes he uses rhyme as in his poem “End of Days”. “Ancestors” is a sonnet in pure form, while “Canto the First” is a long poem heroically written throughout in crossed rhymes [a. b. a. b. / c. d. c. d. etc.]. “Second Thought” makes use of repetition and rhyme in imagining the relentlessness of the rain. This does not mean that Reeve is working only in traditional forms. He also uses blank verse and modernist styles, but he certainly shows prosodic skills that are now alien to too many poets.

About Now is divided into six sections. As they often overlap in their ideas, I’ll simply look at Reeve’s main interests.

There is of course his concern for flora and fauna. He opens with a reflection on “Recycled Rimu” – how this wood has been used, perhaps abused, placed in different environments, admired, carrying a history of its own in Dunedin. He is not a sentimentalist but a realist in regarding a blackbird trapped in a nearby flu, but aware that we human beings often unwittingly torture animals, noting  “There it is, / the coming of death for that poor soul, / hopelessly caught up in a human world / of devices and contraptions, not built for birds.” The same sort of empathy with animals appears in “Dog with its Head out a Window” about the joy a dog feels in a speeding car while watching the scenery rush past. Similarly “Dogs on Beaches” celebrates the anarchic pleasure dogs feel running freely around a beach and barking at one another. The capping salute to animals comes in the final section of this collection  “And the Pukeko Shall Rule”. It is a sequence of eleven poems in which, despite the rain and other obstacles, the resilient bird become almost a symbol of poetry re-encoding itself. Water is another image that interests Reeve. “Judicial Notice” suggests a poetic metaphor wherein the actions of a judge in court are seen as thinking in terms of fly-fishing… perhaps with an ironic tone. Is the judge day-dreaming? “Our Patch” uses the image of water clogged with junk to suggest the endeavours of human attempts at immortality.

Most of the elegies are very personal. “Westies Camp” is an unvarnished eulogy for an old trapper with his flaws and eccentric behaviour. “Last Days” begins “Old friend, my heart breaks. / Witnessing you, shrunken / in a hospital bed, beautiful smile / anticipating an end…” but goes on to suggest that there will be remembrance of him. “Postcard to Mr Clare” salutes mainly forgotten poets whom he remembers. And there is a special elegy for the South Island poet Peter Hooper, who died when Reeve was still a child. [There is a review on this blog of Hooper’s collected works Rejoice Instead] Moving to a wider version of elegy is “Ancestors”, a sonnet dealing with the idea that we carry the marks and ways inherited from our forebears. “Living and Dying in Taranaki” comes close to being an elegy, dealing with an old woman who remembers much of her province, who knows the past well and who eventually, in death, becomes a part of the land. “The Dead” in effect salutes those who fought in wars but admits that most were for pointless causes. In all this, Reeve is drawing on the idea of mortality and how we should approach it.

In the realm of the present age we meet satire and much pessimism. “Unsustainable Preservation” basically damns many categories of people from “derivative poet” to bureaucrat to investor to liberal hypocrite. The collection’s title poem “About Now” does indeed deal with the present moment, part of it hinged on a group discussing (or arguing over) the rights and wrongs of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine… but this is part of a greater question. How right or wrong are our perspectives of our own era when weighted against all of history? “When it is so clear now our times are on the way out, / what to write, what to say, to the civilization in denial? / There are ways yet to live. They are not your ways.” And once again, some of Reeves’ images call into question the nature of poetry and current reasoning. There follows “Be Happy” which ridicules facile optimism about the future; and “End of Days” begins “Counting down the decades, years or days / till everything we know has turned to ash, / we ask ourselves if there are other ways…”

Yet after Reeve’s forays into nature, elegies and satire, we come to the matter of poetry itself, creating some of the most thoughtful work in this book. “Angling” once again uses the imagery of fishing as the poet understands that with age, poetry come harder for him that it did when he was younger, thus “I cast my line for a word. Wonder at my inability / to call up a suitable specimen. / When first I fished from the pool, shoals of phrases / flickered in the depths, every cast was a strike, / I brought home fat bags of ballads, as though the abundance would never end, / which however it did, a few less each time, / or undersize, scrawny things, belly-hooked sprats of verse / as the stock thinned…”.

The sequence “Horse and Sheep” consists of 13 poems, all having seven lines with a rhyme scheme and a final single line which has the effect of closing the case. “Horse and Sheep” is apparently a sort of allegory with the narrator crossing rough country in cold weather. A horse becomes [as I read it] a figure of life and steadiness, while the sheep are more vulnerable and perishable. The narrator’s way is daunting: “Brilliant and daunting and ignorant, / this intellectual shrub that tears my toe / will penetrate the doubt of pig or ant. //  Near everywhere, it does not cease to know / in guts or steeps; it undermines the air, / the gentle gusts that fill the scree below, // the roar of seasons in the pooling year. / On sun-cut rock, or buried under snow, / it gets in everything, lives everywhere, // infesting so that no new life can grow.”           

And then there is the heroic “Canto the First” clearly inspired by Dante Alighieri and once again presenting a perilous journey by a wanderer – but the wanderer is not seeking Paradise. He is seeking justice for his late friend and poet Corin. He addresses Dante thus: “Master poet, harking from other parts, / nine ages dead, you walk our southern rim, / what brings you to this country of false starts?, / is there a wrong that you were sent to fix, / our culture of administrated arts? / Our leaders thrive in pond-life politics. / What other reason could you have for coming? / Is God caught up in tax avoidance tricks?”  Reeve suggests an idea of Hell different from Dante’s – the torture of a poet who did not achieve what he hoped… and in the process he mocks official arbitration of poetry, as in “our culture of administrated arts”.

If you have read this review to the end, you will note that I have produced a catalogue of About Now rather than a real critique. This is the old problem with reviewing a substantial collection of poems. How does the reviewer make it clear what the collection has to offer without mentioning many poems – unless one is to focus in detail only on a very few poems.

I have one confession to make. I do not understand the poem “The Elite” – it appears to be criticising various types of people who regard themselves as superior, but it presents so many examples that we might as well conclude that we all have such an assumption of superiority. That said, I see About Now as wide-ranging, thoughtful and challenging in the real meaning of the word.

Footnote: In 2018 and 2019, Maungatua Press, edited by Richard Reeve and David Karena-Holmes, produced a set of slim collections written by Nick Ascroft, David Karena-Holmes, Cilla McQueen, Michael Steven, Blair Reeve and Richard Reeve, all of them illustrated with woodcuts by Manu Berry and all of them “Published without the assistance of Creative New Zealand”. Maungatua Press appears to be proud of its independence. I was happy to receive them when they were sent along with About Now and I note that the “Horse and Sheep” sequence of About Now was originally on` of these slim collections.

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            Dunstan Ward, now in his eighties, is an academic who has lived in France for longer than he has lived in New Zealand. Among many other things, he co-edited the collected poetry of Robert Graves,  assisted by Graves’ widow. He does have deep New Zealand roots as well as Catholic roots. And he has been careful when it comes to producing collections of poetry. At an advanced age, he has produced only three collections, Departures being the third. The long [8 pages] opening poem called “Departures” gives a full account of  his forebears. In the 19^th century, the Wards settled in New Zealand, more than once clashing with Maori when it came to the ownership of land. The Ward family produced the prime-minister Joseph Ward and many land-owners, as well as being close to the Redwoods from which came a Catholic archbishop. But many in the family tree decided to return to England. What are departures? Literally leaving a country and friends to go elsewhere, but also departing from things and ideas – in other words changing one’s mind over the years. In a way, this very civilised collection could just as well be called Reminiscences as Departures.

            A gathering of poems recalls Dunstan Ward’s childhood – images of old Dunedin, dreams and nightmares, father’s farm and the occasional loud arguments of father with mother in the hard times – a very clear and vivid account of time and place. And after the account of childhood, there is the awareness of ageing and knowing time is limited… even if one is old. The poem “Swallows” declares “I part the curtains, watch for the first swallows / today, the day of my birth, and my father’s. / Seventy-eight already I’ve outlived him / by six months, the other half of the year / he must at this date have known would be his last: / disfigured by cancer, he refused treatment, / quoting the sergeant at the Great War front, ‘Come on, you bastards – d’you want to live forever?’ ” His terms of reference show a strong awareness of British and [especially] continental European culture, with one family forebear dead at the battle of the Somme. He loves Paris (it’s basically his home of choice) and its opportunities to enjoy high culture… like listening to Otto Klemperer conducting the orchestra.

            There are very personal poems about the sickness and death of his brother. The familiarity with funerals and their rituals leads to poems about Catholicism and his upbringing in the poem “Education” which reads in full “Not to learn the names of birds and flowers, / cities and rivers, or the constellations, / to parse one’s own body, it’s hidden grammar, / sight-read sheet music, translate Latin unseens, / but to repeat the types of sin and grace, / mortal or venial, sanctifying, actual, / Immaculate Conception, hypostatic union, / transubstantiation, the real presence, / to chant ‘tower of ivory’, ‘house of gold’ / ‘mourning and weeping in this valley of tears’ / ‘the hour of our death’ – the most important in life: / beatific vision or tortures of hell, forever.” He chronicles the deaths of acquaintances and gives virtual elegies for such as Frederick Page, the musicologist.

            Then he takes on the difficulty of writing poetry. He claims (in the poem “Failure”) that he took to poetry only after he had failed at so many other things. “Imitation” suggests that you cannot really translate a poem from another language – a view with which I heartily agree. There follow accounts of many poets he admires, such as “In quest of Fernando Pessoa”, the Portuguese poet. And Elizabeth Bishop ; and Robert Graves of course; and most important of all, two poems about his friend Vincent O’Sullivan, “Friendship” and “Fortitude” – the latter being written after O’Sullivan’s death.

            But ultimately he comes back to Paris and Italy. He witnesses the fire that gutted Notre Dame cathedral. He is inspired by Venetian glasses; he dramatizes Renaissance Italian scandals. In “Infected Spring” he paints a portrait of Paris when plague of Covid 9 hit. And finally he gives us “In My Street”, a kind of paean to the Parisian street when he lives. with all its historical culture.

            I hope I have made it clear that this is an erudite collection of poems coming from a civilised man, touching the major issues of ageing, the importance of culture and the joys of friendship. A solid collection.

 

Added Footnote: After I posted this review of Dunstan Ward's Departures, the poet corrected me noting that his poem 'Fortitude' was not written after Vincent O'Sullivan died, but was read to O'Sullivan by his wife.

 

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            To all writers of poetry I apologise for not being able to give full space to every collection that comes my way. Here, then, is a selection of poetry I have recently read and enjoyed, but have to deal with briefly.

 

            David Gregory’s Based on a True Story (Sudden Valley Press, $25) is a collection of [mainly] lean, short poems, many short enough to be aphorisms. Gregory has much irony and wit.  The ironic title reminds us how dishonest so many movies are that claim to be “based on a true story”. Memory cheats us and perhaps memories of childhood cheat us most of all; but there is some place here for joy and a questioning mind as in the poet’s visit to the Chatham Islands. Robust and very readable work.

            Leonard Lambert’s Slow Fires – New Poems (Cold Hub Press, $19.15) is, understandably, the work of an older man who has much experience behind him. The title poem is a warning against extremism and elsewhere he shows awareness that current ideas always fade and are replaced. But these are not his chief preoccupations. Painter as well as poet, he delights in being retired. He is aware that life is short, accepting its fading joys.          Sometimes he expresses a nostalgia for places he once knew, but he is not naïve about it. And in his most impressive poem, Elements, he weds the joy of flying birds with the working of the human mind. 

 

            Am I allowed to speak of fun when I speak of  Tsunami With Mushrooms by Te Awhina Rangimarie Arahanga (Steele Roberts, $25)? It is a hybrid of poetry and short stories, illustrated by various artists. The poems are mostly (but not exclusively) connected to sea and shore, with mountains. The poet lives in Kaikoura. She can joke, be ironic and be deadly serious. See “A Week of It” for laughter. See “Tsunami Assembly Point” for seriousness. And see a mixture of the two in “Zoom Attenborough”. As for the four short stories, they are closely built on real situations.

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.

“ TUTANKHAMUN – Pharaoh, Icon, Enigma” by Prof. Joyce Tyldesley (published in 2022)

 

Sometimes one has to bow down to a whim. A couple of years ago I just happened to see in a bookshop a new book about Tutankhamun, titled Tutankhamun – Pharaoh, Icon, Enigma written by the formidable English Egyptologist Professor Joyce Tyldesley. She has so far written 17 books about ancient Egypt and she is regarded as an expert in her field. I am no Egyptologist, but I knew at once that this book would not be one of those pot-boiler books that give readers a sensationalist version of an ancient civilisation. So I bought the book… and then I left it on my shelf for two years without reading it. I had so many other books to read and review. Finally, this month, I got around to reading Tutankhamun – Pharaoh, Icon, Enigma. And how enlightening and informative it was! After all the fantasies we’ve been given about ancient Egypt; after all the nonsense about deadly curses for those who disturb ancient tombs; after Hollywood movies where mummies come back to life and cause havoc [entertaining though they may be] – I found a courteous, matter-of-fact book about Tutankhamun and his times, as best as we can uncover those times. Joyce Tyldesley is a scholar, but she does not condescend to her readership, explaining things when needed, but keeping a clear narrative.

Tyldesley divides her book into two halves. The first deals with Tutankhamun and the world in which he lived. The second deals with how archaeologists found and dealt with Tutankhamun’s tomb and how it was treated 3,000 years later. Her preface and prologue tell us that Tutankhamun reigned from 1336 BC to 1327 BC – that is, he reigned for just under nine years. He died when he was about twenty. But she does not accept the idea that Tutankhamun was a “boy king”. Though his reign might have been short, and though his rule began when he was only about eleven, he grew to maturity and acted as a ruler should. It was quite common then for people to die in their twenties and it was very rare indeed for people to reach the age of fifty or older. In the era when Tutankhamun lived, the 18^th. Dynasty, pyramids were no longer raised to honour pharaohs. Instead, pharaohs were buried in the remote Valley of Kings on the west bank of the Nile, their tombs cut out of hard rock.

So to Tyldesley’s account of Tutankhamun’s life and time.

The pharaoh Akhetaten was a sort of heretic. He moved his capital from the traditional court in Thebes / Luxor to the smaller city Amarna and he set about abolishing many of the gods. Some historians have mistaken him for a monotheist – a believer in one god – but this was not true. Akhetaten was a henotheist – one who believed that there were many lesser gods, but only one really important god. Akhetaten shut down many temples and built his worship around the sun god alone. His consort was Nefertiti. Among Egyptologists there is still much speculation about who were Tutankhamun’s parents. Was his mother Nefertiti? Or [a possibility] one of his older sisters? Or what some Egyptologists call “harem queens”? We do not know because a pharaoh would keep his sons very much in the background and not publicise the birth of a son.

 

What we do know is that after Akhetaten died, young Tutankhamun became a semi-divine pharaoh.  He had grown up with Akhetaten’s henotheist beliefs … but he set about reversing Akhetaten’s “religious experiment”. Tutankhamun brought the court back to Luxor / Thebes, restored the status of the gods, and repaired neglected temples. Why did he do this? It appears that at this time, Egypt was threatened by former vassal states to the East. Egypt was beginning to lose territory, especially to the growing Hittite empire. Temples and places of worship had been allowed to decay when their favoured gods were not revered. Morale had plummeted. Restoring the traditional gods was one way of raising morale in the face of foreign threats. This is not to say that Tutankhamun was not himself a genuine worshipper of the many gods. Indeed he appears to have been devout.

Once again, Joyce Tyldesley emphasises the mental maturity of Tutankhamun and insists “This is not a ‘boy-king’ : it is a thoughtful mature ruler.” She also, using existent forensic evidence, criticises recent attempts to reconstruct what Tutankhamun’s face looked like. She refutes the idea that Tutankhamun had tuberculosis or had been murdered. There is no real evidence for either of these scenarios.

At which point she turns to the matter of how Tutankhamun was preserved and buried in death. She discusses the methods and importance of mummification – the draining of the brain which was the first thing drawn out of the corpse by a hook. Then the removal of the heart and other essential organs… and only then were acres of linen wound tightly around the mummy. Precious masks (often made of gold) covered the young pharaoh’s face. Riches and jars were sealed behind the various chambers that comprised the tomb. Elaborate blessings to the gods were carved into the tomb to help take Tutankhamun to the other world. Archaeology has proven that Tutankhamun was originally going to be entombed at a different site from the one where he was eventually entombed. This meant that the purified mummy had to be dragged on a sled over the bumpy sands to finally be put to rest.

What of Tutankhamun’s consort? His wife was obviously of regal pedigree. But Tyldesley is clear that the pharaoh had the right to marry many women for his harem. It is also clear that royal women could sometimes be used as bargaining chips with foreign countries. There survives a document which some Egyptian bureaucrat wrote, suggesting that an Egyptian princess could marry an important Hittite leader to make an alliance… though it apparently came to nothing.

And after these chapters, Tyldesley turns to burial customs for the commoners and peasants, and then the activities of thieves, who stole precious things from the tombs in the Valley of the Kings. Commoners who could afford it had tombs with images of happy lives and partying. This was really a fantasy of a hope-for after-life. At very most, only 10% of the population was literate and had some wealth. Grave robbers would know that that they were violating hopes of an after-life, but were often involved in stealing whatever riches there were in the graves of the impoverished. There were very severe penalties for those who robbed graves, but theft was still an attractive way of life for the poor. There is also the fact that often one tomb would be ransacked to furnish another tomb, even by those were in charge of royal tombs. In this way, undertakers would take shortcuts to furbish an appointed tomb. It is possible that some of the artefacts found in 1922 in Tutankhamun’s tomb had in fact been taken from other tombs. Tutankhamun’s tomb was attacked by grave robbers very shortly after his interment. But then higher security was used, and there is evidence that the robbers had to work quickly and were therefore responsible for the messy way some of the tomb’s artefacts were found 3,000 years later.

Rounding off her account of Tutankhamun’s times, Tyldesley tells us that only after the young pharaoh died, Egypt fell apart in various ways and the Valley of the Kings was no longer used as the burial place of kings. All but the overlooked tomb of Tutankhamun, royal tombs were removed from the valley. At which point Joyce Tyldesley concludes her account of Tutankhamun’s times.

Professor Joyce Tyldesley with ancient Egyptian head of a queen.
 

The second part of Tutankhamun – Pharaoh, Icon, Enigma brings us to archaeology leading up to the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb and its aftermath.

Europeans began to be interested in Egyptian antiquity in the 18^th century, with European travellers writing books about what they had seen -  but barely understanding the ancient civilisation. Only when the Frenchman Jean-Francois Champollion de-coded the “Rosetta Stone” could early Egyptologists understand and read Egyptian hieroglyphics. By the late-19^th century, most of the [ransacked] tombs in the Valley of the Kings had been discovered, but the search went on. Egypt’s Antiquities Service (mostly controlled by the French and the British) said that too many diggers were spoiling the valley. They decreed that only one team at a time could work there, under a legal warrant. In 1902, a wealthy American lawyer Theodore Monroe Davis – who was not an archaeologist – was given the warrant. He was wealthy enough to hire a very large team, American, European and Egyptian (Howard Carter was part of his team), and they made some real finds, including the [empty] tomb of Yula and Thuya. His expedition did not make use of cameras, meaning Theodore Monroe Davis could later not verify where exactly some artefacts had been found. Like many others, Davis wanted to find the tomb of Tutankhamun, not because Tutankhamun was a major figure but because his tomb had not yet been located. In 1914, he gave up his warrant, declaring the valley was exhausted and there were no more tombs to find. The irony was that his team had come very close to the site of Tutankhamun’s tomb, but they had overlooked it.

The extremely rich dilletante English aristocrat Lord Carnarvon was in no way an archaeologist, but it 1915 he gained the franchise to resume excavations in the Valley of the Kings. However, work was suspended for much of the [First] World War, and it began again only in 1917. Officially, Howard Carter was Carnarvon’s employee; but in fact it was Carter who led and supervised the whole expedition. Carter adopted the strategy of digging deeply to the bedrock of the valley and, in 1922, he finally found the steps that led down to the entrance of Tutankhamun’s tomb. He did not open the tomb until, one month later, Carnarvon joined him so that Carnarvon could take the credit for  being one of the first to step into the tomb. At this stage, British newspapers gave Carnarvon all the credit for finding the tomb. There followed the long and careful categorising of every artefact in the tomb. This time, photography was used to verify everything – from 1922 to 1930, over 3,000 photographs were taken inside the tomb by members of the expedition. It was soon understood by Carter that in ancient times, some things had been robbed from the tomb and much of what was found was left in disorderly disarray.

The tomb was protected from tourists. Carnarvon withdrew very soon after the discovery of the tomb – but he still had exclusive rights to the tomb and the only journalists he allowed to enter the tomb and report on progress were from the Times of London. This greatly annoyed other newspapers who hungered for information about the great find. So they turned to writers of fiction to pad out what little that they knew about the tomb and its discovery. Enter sensationalist tales about ancient curses that damned anyone entering the tomb. There were no such curses in the tomb, but when Lord Carnarvon died from an accident beginning with a mosquito bite, the sensationalists had a field day. Add to this a report claiming that at the very moment Carnarvon died, all the lights in Cairo went out. This too was fiction. So began the whole tradition of tales about mummy’s curses, occult events etc. etc., leading to entertaining horror movies. Archaeologists could either sigh or shrug their shoulders in the face of such nonsense. Throughout the 1920s there were still fierce quarrels about who had the right to see the tombs of the Valley of the Kings.

There was another attitude brought on by the excavation of ancient tombs. At this time, Egypt was basically ruled by Britain, though it officially had a king of its own. Egyptians were becoming increasingly nationalist in their views, as they often saw archaeologists as intruding on their treasures. They took badly the idea that it was a foreigner who had been the first to discover Tutankhamun’s tomb. So there was concocted the fictitious tale that the steps leading down to Tutankhamun’s tomb had really been discovered by a humble little Egyptian water-boy who had just happened to be doodling around ahead of Carter’s excavators.

There was another, and perhaps more reasonable, controversy. An English bishop raised the question of whether it was ethical to dig up corpses from the tomb. There was also the belief that it was unethical to dismember ancient bodies with autopsies. Inevitably, even the best doctors and pathologists destroyed or maimed part of Tutankhamun’s body, breaking bones in order to discover whether the young pharaoh had suffered from various diseases. Their conclusions were very contradictory. In her epilogue, Professor Tyldesley says that scientists are now using DNA to determine ancient Egyptian aristocratic bloodlines… but given the decay of blood over eons, she believes their efforts are not likely to yield an accurate result.

I think that, as in so many controversies, Tyldesley is right.

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.   

               THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT

“From goulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night - may the Lord protect us.”  Nobody has ever tracked down exactly who originated this prayer but apparently it comes from centuries ago. Because it is so quaintly presented with words such as “goulies” “ghosties” and “long-leggedy beasties”, it now seems more amusing and funny than serious, which indeed it is. But the fact is that even now many millions of people in the world believe in things we would regard as superstition.

When I was a kid (about 10 years old, I think) there was an English woman who lived two doors up from us. She was a generous woman and she would allow me and one of my brothers to scrounge the odd biscuit every so often. But one day I visited her on my own, and for some reason she told me all about the ghosts her family had encountered, and those who had second sight. She informed me that a seventh son of a seventh son would always have second sight. She must have known that I was a seventh child, but she didn’t realise that her superstition wouldn’t work with me, because one of my siblings was a girl, not a son – and besides, both my parents came from families who did not have seven sons. But (being 10 or so, remember) I was completely taken in with her tales. So ghosts really existed!

I spent the rest of the day terrified, wandering around, thinking that the world was filled with ghosts who were looking at me, spying on me, haunting me. I was shaken and upset. Finally it was nearly dinner time. Mum was making the dinner. I told her the awful truth that I had been told by the woman up the road. Mum was a very religious person, but she immediately laughed and told me that ghosts were not real, just things told in storybooks. Good old Mum! It was the laugh as much as anything that broke the spell, and I’ve never believed in ghosts ever since.

And yet and yet and yet… put me is a dark house on a dark night and all the fantastic ideas will resurrect themselves. Down that dark corridor, behind that closed door, there would be some ghostly thing waiting for me. My reason would say otherwise, but my instincts would  dissent.  Of course I reason that a fear of darkness is something that has been built into human beings since primeval times – in the darkness, we lose one of our essential senses, sight, and hence there is the possibility that we get hurt by falling in the dark, bumping into something or [from very ancient times] not seeing some voracious animal that would be happy to eat us.

There is another matter to consider. Ghost stories are very entertaining, and the best writers of ghost stories can send tremors up my spine. Sheridan Le Fanu, M. R. James, Edgar Allen Poe and other masters were (and are) often enjoyable light reading for me. Even if I know they’re fantasies, they can still trigger a unique type of unease. Delightful. And may I add that supernatural stories can also cause a delightful frisson. Horror films too, though not the crass ones that rely on blood and guts. Give me the early (1930s) films that gave us Boris Karloff  blundering around as Frankenstein’s monster,  Bela Lugosi as a creepy Dracula and various other films in the 1940s as The Uninvited and the English film Dead of Night. Creepy but not disgusting.

Now, you ask, why am I writing about all this?

It is because of something I recently heard - through my ear plugs -  a podcast while taking my longish morning walk. It was about the “Devil’s Bible”. This was (and is) a late medieval Bible, hand-written by monks in what is now Chechia (formerly Czechoslovakia). The Bible is a thoroughly orthodox Bible written in Latin – the standard text of the Bible for the Catholic Church before the Protestant Reformation came along. It is famous for its size, the large bound book standing about four feet tall. It is also famous for its lavish illustrations of the text. Two of these large illustrations face each other – on one side, an image of heaven; on the other side an image of the Devil. It is this image of the Devil that has caused the book to be called the Devil’s Bible.

So far, so clear. But now comes the funny stuff. Apparently this Bible was so precious that it was often coveted by wealthy people. During the Thirty Years War it was stolen and at one point it was taken by Christina, Queen of Sweden – but eventually it was returned to Prague. This is history, but alongside it, there is legend and superstition. Apparently many believed that this particular Bible had occult powers. There were curses related to it. It could never be touched by the impious. And all this was caused by the ferocious image of the Devil with his horns and claws and his two tongues because he was, after all, the father of lies. And, as I listened to the podcast, I heard some of the commentators using such giveaway phrases as “some people believe that” and “it has been seen that” – phrases which always tell us that we are listening to made-up tales. Mercifully there was also one steady-headed chap in the podcast who said that stories of curses were probably made up by the monks who wanted to deter thieves from taking their precious book.

So after hearing all this, I looked up on line what this fearful image of the Devil looked like. And, like my dear old mum, I laughed. See what you think.

 

 

Something New

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

     “THE MIRES” by Tina Makereti  (Ultimo Press $39:99) ; “SERVICEMAN J. The untold story of an NZSAS Soldier” by Jamie Pennell  (HarperCollins NZ $39:99);      “THE SURVIVORS – Stories of Death and Desperation” by Steve Braunias (HarperCollins $39:99)

 

Tina Makereti’s novel The Mires is in many ways written like a fable – that is, a story meant to point a moral, or in this case a number of morals. It begins with a clear conservation statement about the importance of “swamps”, or if you prefer, wetlands. They conserve water and are in a way the heart of life for human beings. “Swamps” feed trees, nurture many animals, and provide people with water. We are reminded that all the waters of the world ultimately join one another, and this relates to the novel’s reminder that ultimately all peoples are connected too. There is a oneness to everything.

The main narrative is set in a small suburb near a “swamp”  in Kapiti on the West Coast of the North Island. In the same driveway, three women live close to one another in state houses.

Keri is Maori but her whakapapa also includes many Irish. [NB When Tina Makereti presented her first novel Where the Rekohu Sings, she made it clear that while she is Maori she had some Pakeha and possibly some Moriori ancestors.] Keri lives with her teenaged daughter Wairere [often called just “Wai”] and with a younger kid Walty, who come from different fathers. Both of Kere’s partners have long gone and she is a single mother relying on a benefit. But she is hard-working and optimistic, generous and gets on with people - although she worries about the moodiness of Wairere. Wairere often goes walking to the swamp and has basically mystical ideas about nature and the gods.

Then there is Sera who, with her husband Adam and her little daughter Aliana, has come to New Zealand as a refugee. We are not told exactly what country she and her family came from – only that it was somewhere on or near the Mediterranean Sea. But this vagueness may be relevant to the fact that the story is set in the near future, where the northern hemisphere is burning up and heatwaves are literally killing people. This is very clearly a tale about the dangers of climate change, and the novel has much to say about ecology.

Both Keri and Sera are welcoming and generous people, with Keri often enlightening Sera about ways in Aotearoa / New Zealand. Also both are partly reliant on public assistance, Sera and Adam with assistance as refugees and Keri with “The Ministry of Public Assistance, Work and Development” - a ministry which, as the author admits in her notes, she made up, presumably to represent all forms of annoying bureaucracy.

But the third woman is a different kettle of fish. Janet Bloom – sometimes rudely called Mrs. B. – is a Pakeha who doesn’t particularly like his Maori and refugee neighbours. She is sometimes polite to them, even giving a gift to one of them and trusting Keri’s daughter Wairere to walk her dog Zadie. But she still sees Maori as a threat and refugees as unwelcome. She too has been deserted by her husband and has a very bitter demeanour. Some way into the novel, we learn that she has a layabout son, Conor, already in his thirties but a loner and a keyboard jockey who spends his time filling his mind with extremist ideas. He is well on his way to becoming a white supremacist. Where this leads him to go is not for me to say. Not being a swine, I do not reveal the endings of new novels.

Most of The Mires concerns the interaction of these three women. Men – apart from bigoted Conor – are very much in the background. Sera’s polite and thoughtful husband Adam is a minor character and of course Keri and Janet Bloom no longer have husbands or partners.

Tina Makereti’s prose is admirably clear and she can create believable situations. One of the best is the episode where Keri goes to pick up her benefit and witnesses a Pakeha beneficiary losing his temper and turning to violence when he is denied the benefit he needs to feed his kids. Not only is it believable, but Makereti is giving a nod to the fact that some Pakiha go through hardship too. Another engaging situation is when Keri attends a party, flirts with a man but then, when she begins to see through him, she has the problem of getting rid of him. This event leads later in the novel to problems with the man she flicked off. At it’s very best in the prose is when Makereti has teenaged Wairere going to the swamp and sees the majesty of nature in the raw. I cannot forebear to quote it in full.: “One time she saw a matuku out on the water, a thick eel caught in its beak. The eel squirmed and wriggled until it found the heron’s neck, then coiled its body around the bird while the heron tried to swallow the eel and keep hold of it simultaneously. They were locked in a battle like that for twenty minutes: the heron swallowing as much of the eel as possible, then regurgitating it when it wouldn’t stay down; the eel never letting go of the outside world, holding fast to the body of its predator. Wairere felt the wonder of it, this drama playing itself out right in the middle of suburbia, houses all around her but no other humans to be seen. It was glorious, and she was all alone. Maybe that was why it was glorious.     Eventually, the heron began to triumph. The eel went down more and more each time until the bird managed to close its beak over its sleek, dark opponent. Wairere had been rooting for the eel, but the bird was strong and graceful, and deserved the prize after the battle. Neck bulging, the bird swam to a post, knocked a smaller heron off, and perched there, content in the sun. The heron would be sleeping it off for hours, days maybe, confident in its status and capacity to survive. Wairere left the scene, filled with the birds contentment. If an eel had to go, she thought, good for it to go to a bird rather than a human. She had this other feeling too: that they came out for her, the beasts of the swamp, that they had let her see things they revealed to no one else.” [Chapter 16, pp.168-169]. 

This is a brilliant depiction of struggle between two animals, and acknowledges “nature red in tooth and claw”. But Wairere’s belief that “ the beasts of the swamp… had let her see things they revealed to no one else ”  is a very teenage impulse to interpret things as if they were staged just for her. In the novel there is a clear clash between realism and fantasy. The apparently sharp insight of the unhappy teenager Wairere, who intuits things that others cannot, is very close to fantasy. This is particularly true in the denouement. A flood fortunately brings people together and resolve their different perspectives. In fact I would go further and says it’s a little neat to bring together as protagonists one nice Maori woman, one forbearing refugee woman and one very grumpy Pakeha woman. They are set there to make a point about tolerance, bigotry and accepting different ethnicities – almost like a homily. There are really extremist nutters in New Zealand, like gullible Conor… but how representative are they? Maybe more than we would like.  [In her notes, Tina Makereti refers to the mosque massacre in Christchurch – so extremism can rear its head in New Zealand.]

As I said at the beginning of this review, The Mires is designed to point a moral (or morals). But nothing I have written here is meant to belittle this novel. It reads very well. The author has a strong skill in framing and resolving situations, she has a sharp eye for relevant description, and it scores by being very readable. 

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“Serviceman J” was the code for New Zealand SAS soldier Jamie Pennell. To protect individual soldiers from being targeted by hostile groups, personal names were not used in communications when forces were engaged in operations. Serviceman J is Jamie Pennell’s first-person account of his years in the military. It is a chronicle as much as a narrative as Pennell takes us in sequence from event to event.

It took him a long time to decide whether he wanted to join the military. When he did sign on, his aim was to join the elite SAS. At Waiouru he underwent tough training, but in his first attempt he missed out on being selected by the corps. He tried again years later and did make it, but only after very gruelling exercises and training – indeed to an outsider like this reviewer, much of the training sounds as daunting and dangerous as actual warfare. He thought about joining the British SAS but changed his mind and rejoined his New Zealand battalion joining ops in East Timor maintaining the disputed border with Indonesia.

And then, in what is really the core of this memoir, he and the NZSAS were engaged in Afghanistan. He writes vividly of moving into Taliban areas in the mountains (this was at a time when Afghanistan still had a more-or-less democratic government trying to ward off the Taliban). He was involved in searching caves that could be stashing Taliban weaponry and ammunition. The NZSAS had to deal with warlords who were not Taliban but who controlled the massive opium trade – basically, the NZSAS was instructed to ignore this trade.  He quickly understood that most of the villagers they met were not Taliban but simply wanted to be left alone. When he took leave in New Zealand, like so many military men he was perturbed to find that few people in New Zealand cared about what was going on the Afghanistan. After he had been promoted to sergeant, he was often called to be part of a protection team escorting New Zealand government ministers to foreign countries. When he returned to Kabul, he was part of a team training the CRU – Crisis Response Unit (Afghan National Police) which was trying to build up a stronger force against the Taliban.

Inevitably, the NZSAS had to deal with fire-fights and real combat. Jamie Pennell was involved in a major fight clearing out a hotel in Kabul which the Taliban had infiltrated. They were setting the hotel alight while shooting civilians. Many died but the Taliban were finally forced out. Pennell was also engaged in the major fire-fight in one of Kabul’s main market places, Pashtunistan Square. It was in this fight that Willie Apiata won his Victoria Cross, the highest military order. Jamie Pennell himself won the second-highest military order, the New Zealand Gallantry Star.

Like many servicemen, when he finally left the NZSAS and returned to civilian life in New Zealand, he went through periods of deep depression before he found his feet again – but he now appears to be enjoying life training adolescents in outdoor projects and physical fitness, as well as helping to train the Warriors (top Rugby League team).

Serviceman J is strictly about Jamie Pennell’s experiences. While we can admire the soldier, we can also be saddened by the way the war in Afghanistan ended, which Pennell does not discuss. Basically, intervening countries gave up and left, and the Taliban took over once more. Instead of caring for those Afghans who fought against the Taliban, the U.S.A. failed to protect them and left them to be imprisoned, tortured or killed. A pity that the story ended that way.

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Steve Braunias is a very capable journalist and reporter, and he has often written about cases of crime, murder and unexplained disappearances of people in New Zealand. Often this has placed him in courtrooms, hearing and reporting on trials. His two earlier books in this genre were The Scene of the Crime and Missing Persons. But in his latest book The Survivors he declares in his introduction that he will, after this third book, no longer do any more crime reportage. He says he is now worn out by witnessing the sordor and the soul-destroying nature of so many trials, especially in cases involving the plague of methamphetamine. The Survivors follows the structure of The Scene of the Crime and Missing Persons, with cases of murder but also with profiles of harmless, likeable or eccentric people. Of the twelve stories told here, only four are directly about murder and there are two that dig into unpleasant events from nearly a century ago. The remaining six stories are accounts of harmless and sometimes admirable people.

Let’s start with the positive tales. The opening tale concerns Volker Pilgrim, a German who disowned his aristocratic family because they had sided with the Nazis. Pilgrim first moved to Australia and then to New Zealand. He had already become well-known in Germany as an author, he wrote prolifically in New Zealand, but he lived like a pauper in very straitened circumstances. There is no mystery about this man; just the interest of a man who was able to live so frugally and remain dedicated to his writing. Braunias goes back to Pilgrim in the last tale, where we hear of Pilgrim’s theories about Vampires [possibly metaphorical] who disturb peoples sleep. This Braunias expands into a discourse on the nature of sleep and insomnia.

The story of the young Frenchman Eloi Rolland is not really a crime story although the police did follow it up. While visiting New Zealand, Eloi disappeared and was never seen again. Apparently Rolland had some sort of mental breakdown. He was last seen walking into the Waitakere ranges. Possibly he was killed by somebody. Possibly he took his own life in the bush. But the fact is nobody knows. His body was never found. Like so many unsolved mysteries, reading this story leaves an unnerving sense.

Two tales are very positive profiles of people whom some would see as handicapped but who in fact lived fulfilled lives. One is Tim Fairhall who had Downs Syndrome but got on well with many people and generally enjoyed his life. The other was a man who had some mental problems, apparently couldn’t find a job, but happily turned himself into “The Singing Cowboy” performing often in clubs and bars where he was much admired. These upbeat stories are built on Braunias’s interviews. Then, quite different, there is the story of the Holocaust survivor who connected with Braunias because he had acquired a complete 42-set of books of all the documents authorised by the prosecutors of the Nuremburg Trials.

And what of the two stories of long ago? One excoriates the loudmouth John Yelash, who thought he was a great writer on the basis of one very thin ephemeral book; and deals in more detail with the poetaster D’Arcy Cresswell, universally disliked for his pomposity assuming that he was a great poet – but even more hated now because, although he was homosexual, he was the man who, in 1926, dobbed in the homosexual mayor of Whanganui Charles Mackay. At that time, homosexual behaviour was a criminal offence and Mackay had to do jail time before he left New Zealand  (Cresswell eventually left New Zealand too). The other ancient event deals with Leo Hollobon who had sex with Frank Sargeson in 1929 and went to jail for it. In this case Braunias does rather draw out this tale very long, carefully explaining why young Sargeson was not sent to jail.

As for the four cases of murder, they are inevitably very depressing. One is essentially about the daylight murder of Constable Matthew Hunt. Another concerns the “Innocent Agent” Stephen Ewart, a simple-minded man who was lured into committing arson and died for it. Very unhappy is the tale of the Chinese man Chao Chen, provoked into killing a colleague who had apparently slandered him – but he immediately repent what he had done. Most wrenching of all, however, are the two accounts of infanticide, when young men, irritated by noise and crying, killed babies.

Any readers of true stories, and especially true-crime stories, will feel they have enjoyed a sort of prurience in taking in other people’s sorrow and tragedy as entertainment. Thus in this collection. But Braunias does examine things carefully and does question some conclusions that others have made. It is clear 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.  

     “ LET THE RIVER STAND” by Vincent O’Sullivan (published in 1993) 

 

  
                         Vincent O'Sullivan at the time his first novel was published

            Often I have examined the work of Vincent O’Sullivan, who died this year at the age of 86. [Look up my tribute to him Remembering Vincent O’Sullivan, in which I list all the works by O’Sullivan that I have examined on this blog.] But I was always reviewing new works when they were first published. Only now am I reading some of his earlier works that were published before I began reviewing on this blog. Apart from his academic work, his plays, biographies and short-stories, O’Sullivan was best known for his poetry. He was in his fifties before he produced his first full-length novel. This was Let the River Stand, published in 1993. It was widely acclaimed and it won the 1994 Montana Book Award, as our national book-awards were then called.

            So recently I set about reading Let the River Stand for the first time. Let me admit that, despite its many vivid episodes, I found this novel very hard reading. The novel is organised in five different parts, each of which moves us into a separate time-space, and each of which appears to be dealing with different characters. Ostensibly the novel deals with members and offspring of the MacLeod family, and only gradually do we understand how some characters are related to others. The novel is mainly written in the third person, but one part is written as a woman’s [first-person] confessional diary and there are, between the five long episodes, flash-forwards in which characters comment on events that have not yet been disclosed in the main narrative. Most [but not all] of the novel is set in Waikato between the 1920s and the 1940s, somewhere in the shadow of Pirongia and not too far from the town called Cambridge. To put it bluntly, this is a novel that requires concentration of the reader.

 

 

            This, in my messy synopsis way, is how the novel works.

            First Part: Old Alexander MacLeod, with his conservative and colonialist attitudes, buys a farm in Waikato. He marries Emily, who is much younger than he is. Old Alexander dies, by which stage his fortunes are falling apart. His wife looks after their only son, called Alex. Alex is tall, gawky, and the epitome of mediocrity. Nobody thinks he will amount to much. He’s a bit of a loner. The only person he really likes is Bet (Elizabeth), the freckle-faced girl from the farm next to the MacLeod’s farm, which is smaller than the farm old Alexander had. He’s teased a bit at school. But things change when a girl called Barbara Trevaskis turns up. She is non-conforming. She refuses to wear the school’s uniform. And there is much gossip about the old man with whom she lives in a run-down shack. Is he her uncle or guardian or something very questionable? Is he eccentric for raising pigs?  But Alex is taken with Barbara. She is taciturn. She says very little. But she deports herself in a stately way so that Alex sees her as a princess, and she gets “Princess” as her nick-name. Alex is the only person who talks with her and he protects her from typical school bullying. Yet her reactions are at best impassive…. And in all this we have an account of something very different. Dick Norwood, a cousin, has a mother who often leaves her husband for adulterous liaisons with another farmer… and she ultimately dies of shame because of it. As presented so far, the Waikato of the 1920s and early 1930s is gossipy, back-biting, filled with ill-will, often angry and with all sorts of tension as a Depression moves in.

            Second Part:  Now we hear, in the first person, the diary of Emily McLeod. These memoirs are mainly set shortly after the First World War… although, in her narrative, she often amends with afterthoughts what she thought years later. She came from what passed as the upper-class in New Zealand. Her Anglophile father fed her with stories of studying at the University of Cambridge in England, and a Mr. Wallace seems to have the same views. Emily’s father constantly rails against Harry Holland and the Red Feds. But Emily’s cousins, unlike Emily, have jobs and some of her Auckland cousins are already joining the Labour Party. There is an odd dichotomy about Emily’s diary. Emily has the polite vocabulary of a well-bred Anglophile colonial. But, unlike her father, she is adopting the reality of New Zealand politics, embracing the Left, and moving away from her father’s ideas. She has fallen from the wealthy home she once shared with her father and now lives in more modest means. Remember, she is young Alex’s mother, and much of what she says in her diary is anterior to what we have already heard about young Alex’s life.

            Third Part: And suddenly we are thrown into the life of somebody who appears to have nothing to do with the previous characters. Here is the story of a rough-house boxer (prize-fighter if you prefer) who calls himself Collins, although his father’s surname was Schwartz. Apparently his father was a bully who used to regularly beat up the boy and his mother – so young Schwartz discards the name and calls himself Collins. He lives in old, rickety, proletarian Ponsonby in Auckland, which was Vincent O’Sullivan’s own childhood stamping-ground, long decades before Ponsonby became gentrified and expensive. Collins is on the run. His trainer and backers are angry because he failed to understand that his big fight was planned to be rigged. Collins had taken it for real and so lost much money for his crooked backers. They would like to beat the hell out of him. Or worse. So, reverting to the name Schwartz, he scarpers to deep Waikato, picking up jobs here and there when he can and finally settling down with a woman called Jess who runs a store and with whom he often beds… and by the way, Jess has a daughter called Barbara. So at last we get the connection. Schwartz becomes the guy who later lives in the run-down shack with “Princess” Barbara.

            Fourth Part: Barbara appears briefly in this part. She is ridiculed by her fellow-workers for her high-hat ways, and Alex is ridiculed for standing up for her… just as it was in school days. In this part of the novel, we hear more details of unsavoury sexual behaviours of the wider MacLeod family. Meanwhile Alex has a cousin called Rory who is a red-hot socialist. It is now the late 1930s. Partly inspired by the pompous Mr. Wallace, who is by now a very-comfy middle-class Red, Rory is keen on going to Spain to fight in the civil war there. Rory and Alex are both teenagers. Rory persuades Alex to come with him. Alex is only 18. So off they go (via Australia) and end up in Spain… where Rory is killed and Alex comes back a little disillusioned but still kind-of Left. [Incidentally Vincent O’Sullivan throws in an in-joke when Rory and Alex in Spain briefly bump into a joker called Johnson who has run away from trouble in N.Z. … and if you don’t get that one you’d better do some basic N.Z. reading.]

            Fifth Part: It is now the mid-1940s, post-Second World War. Bet (Elizabeth) now runs an hotel, and she is married to Alex, who has fought in the recent World War. Bet had had a wild run cohabiting with a rough Irish man called Burke, decades older than her; but she cast him off for Alex. Bet is herself now more-or-less Communist in her beliefs and frequently expresses her views to anyone who will listen. Alex is more restrained about these things. He never was one to say much. In fact it is clear that Bet is very much in charge of things… but at least Alex has married the woman who was once the only real friend he had… before the “Princess” Barbara came along. Speaking of whom, we learn that Barbara died in a messy car crash which smashed into a river. And we learn that Barbara’s supposed guardian, Schwartz, committed suicide. We are not told directly why he killed himself, but it is possible that he had sexually interfered with Barbara. [ This is not stated in the novel. I am speculating as obviously there was something strange in the relationship of Barbara and Schwartz.]

            And there the novel ends.

 

            As a panorama of rural New Zealand long ago, Let the River Stand is persuasive with the loneliness of farming people, the furtive sex that will be gossiped about, and the withering away of those who regard themselves as superior to other toilers. Society changes and the “colonialists” who still thought of themselves as British are becoming obsolete. New political parties emerge, with some people allying themselves with the extreme. And yet there are still family ties running through this particular mix of people. In the character of Alex, there is also the whole issue of growing up and seeing the world in a more mature way. In reality, Alex is dominated by three people, Bet, Barbara and his cousin Rory. Barbara proves to be fantasy. Rory leads him to a lost cause. Bet in the end dominates him, but he is ready to resign to that in the end. This is what life is for some people – accepting second-best is a way to survive. We are told early in the novel that he is the epitome of mediocrity, but he is happy with that.

            While the novel teaches some hard lessons, there are still things that do not click. We are not told exactly how Schwartz was able to run away with Barbara from Jess, who had taken him in as a partner. What exactly happened to Jess? Or did I miss something? And after the great build-up of the character of “Princess” Barbara in the first section of the novel, why does she so quickly fade away in the latter parts of the novel? Or was this O’Sullivan’s intention – to show us that callow young men like Alex can over-rate young women whose apparent mystique adds up to little? Again, it could be suggesting that this is part of the process of maturing and adjusting to the world as it really is.

            The title Let the River Stand is important. There are many allusions to rivers and streams in this novel, including a river to be crossed in Spain, the river into which Barbara crashes, and many streams in Waikato. The metaphor seems to refer to the river of life, the process of growing and yet at the same time providing precise images. Often what images characters recall are somehow related to water, rivers and streams.

            In the end, though, I find myself thinking of this novel as a series of stories tentatively roped together, rather than a coherent novel. Event by event, it is very engaging, with moments such as young Alex confronting a wild rabid dog in the school playground; and Collins dashing through night-time sinister Ponsonby; and Rory suddenly roping Alex into his Quixotic crusade in Spain. I do not think I am the only reader who has become confused by which character is which in the narrative. Years later, O’Sullivan produced a much better novel All This By Chance [reviewed on this blog] which also had a profusion of characters, but which was able to make clear which person was related to whom – and with a more telling idea of what New Zealanders are.

Desperate footnote: I feel sure that I have missed some of the nuance of this novel because of the confusion between characters and the ambiguous ways they are presented. I might have even missed who was related to whom. I wouldn’t object if somebody could set me right about this.