Something Thoughtful

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

BIBLIOPHILE’S LAMENT

One day it will come, I’m sure of it.

That perfect book, which will end my quest and answer all my questions.

That masterpiece, which I will not question.

Its style will be beyond compare. Its world-view incontrovertible. I will greet it and read it and be complete.

I will never have to read another book because this book will be the summation of all books that are worth reading.

I will never have to feel abashed at gatherings where people praise books I have never heard of, and tell me that I really MUST read So-and-So.

I will never feel lost and small when unfamiliar titles are mentioned, by way of comparison, in literary articles.

I will find the book that will trump all literary discussion.

Look, I am searching.

Look, I am diligent in my search.

I have read publishers’ catalogues hopefully.

I have gone to well-lit libraries and modern bookshops and been overwhelmed by the acreage of print, the shiny covers, the making of books of which there is no end.

I have breathed dust in second-hand bookshops, fingered and fondled the pages of decay.

So often I have felt that I am near to this ultimate book.

So often I have thought that I have found it.

Hello Sir Walter Scott, I said at the age of fourteen. And then I blushed.

Hello Joseph Conrad, I said at the age of nineteen. And then I blushed.

Hello Nadine Gordimer and Honore de Balzac, I said at the age of thirty or thereabouts.

And hello Don Quixote, the nearest I have found to this perfect book; the one in which I could bury myself and ride and feel largeness of spirit.

But always the worm entered at some point and I knew I had not found perfection.

The analytical mind reasserted itself, and carped and found fault. The historical mind situated the novel in its context, and said it was all wrong.

Perhaps, I said, I should read some of those one-off masterpieces. Would the perfect book be Le Grand Meaulnes? Would it be The Last of the Just? Would it be Metamorphosis?

Close, but no apple in the back.

Was it a gender thing?

Was I reading too many men and not enough women?

Was I too Eurocentric?

Would I find perfection if I read translations of Chinese or African authors?

I stared at the spines and fading dust-jackets of the unread books on my own shelves.

Every so often I read one.

I looked to the new and just published.

I looked to the old and esteemed.

Surely I will find it soon.

Surely, just one more book, just one more title.

It must be out there, that masterpiece. Let me just go back and try again that one I tossed aside years ago.

Let me follow one of those dinner party suggestions.

You must be there, little book that ends my quest.

Let me try that out-of-the-way one

One more hit. One more injection.

I must read and read.

It is out there.

It is mocking me.

Where is it?

Something New

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

“THE EMBASSY OF CAMBODIA” by Zadie Smith (Hamish Hamilton - Penguin, $NZ17:99); “ENOUGH” by Louise Wallace (Victoria University Press, $NZ25); “LIFE & CUSTOMS” by Bernadette Hall (Victoria University Press, $NZ25)

            Zadie Smith (born 1975) is now a novelist who has considerable clout with publishers. She has written four novels, two of which have been especially praised by reviewers – her first, White Teeth and her fourth N.W. [a review of which you can find on this blog via the index at right]. Still under 40, she often appears on those “best young novelists” lists that some magazines persist in compiling towards the end of the publishing year. Cambridge-educated, the daughter of a Jamaican mother and an English father, she writes with authority and experience about the racially-mixed communities of her original stamping ground, North-West London (although, like so many British literary bright sparks, she now spends half her time in the USA).

            So she has a lot of bargaining power when her stuff gets published.

Now why am I labouring this point?

Because I think not many novelists would be given the privilege of having what is essentially a long short story published by a major publisher as a little hardback book.

To be specific, The Embassy of Cambodia originally appeared in The New Yorker, and is now published in book form. Its 69 small pages are on typical Zadie Smith themes.

            Fatou is a nanny from West Africa, working in Willesden (London) for a mean-spirited Pakistani family who withhold both her passport and her salary, which they say they are spending on her food and board. Fatou does not perform any acts of overt rebellion but, when they are not looking, she does make use of her employers’ membership card to swim at the local health club. She also has earnest conversations with Andrew, an African Christian man who is deeply concerned about the treatment of Africans and matters such as genocide. Zadie Smith has the courtesy to assume that her readers will understand that many of the things Andrew says are inaccurate, but are typical of the way people (of any ethnicity) often discuss world issues. In fact, they suggest one major idea in The Embassy of Cambodia – the idea that most people do not know exactly how the world runs, or what the specifics of other cultures are, even if they can talk reasonably intelligently about them.

The story’s dominant symbol is the walled embassy of Cambodia, which Fatou sees each day when she is waiting at the bus stop. Neither she nor we know what exactly goes on inside the walls of the embassy, and indeed we are never told. But Fatou hears the sounds of badminton being played there, sometimes sees a shuttlecock flying above the high wall, and imagines what the scene is like inside. This, as I read it, is an image of how we use pure imagination to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of other cultures. We do not know all Fatou’s immigrant experience; she does not know all her Pakistani employers’ immigrant experience; neither of us know the immigrant experiences of the embassy’s inhabitants, and so on. Given this, it is a little disconcerting that Zadie Smith sometimes cuts into her third-person narrative with a collective first-person narration (“we”) presuming to speak on behalf of the whole community of Willesden.

Not being a badminton player, I had to have pointed out to me that the short story’s “chapter” headings are in the form of the way a game of badminton is scored, running from 1 to 21. But who are the players of this scored game? Fatou and her employers, I would guess, if I am to judge from the story’s outcome. However, I won’t give that away.

This is an interesting short story, but do remember that it is a short story.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Why call a collection of poems Enough?

 

For purposes of ambiguity, I would guess. That expressive word “enough” could mean satisfaction as in “I have enough and need no more”.  Or it could mean intense dissatisfaction as in “Enough is enough!” Louise Wallace’s second collection of poetry seems to me to be balanced between these two emotions, even if the title poem “Enough” is about a father irritated by his son’s cough and lacking rest of spirit.

I emphasize that I do not use the word “satisfaction” here to mean complacency, but to mean a situation in which the soul is able to respond to its environment with purpose, clarity of thought and a certain exaltation. These things are very satisfying. This form of “enough” is what I get out of Wallace’s poems in this collection that concern her shift to the South Island, in some of which her husband Rory is mentioned by name and in some of which the poet is “I” while in others she is more objectively “she”.

“I pull the other island towards me, / hand over hand till I jump ship” declares the opening of the poem “This new place”, showing that the personal response to the new setting is paramount. So there are themes about settling in to, and becoming used to, living in a new place; about making food out of feijoas; about worrying over home security (the poem “We need to put new batteries in our smoke alarms”); and about adjusting to a very busy sort of domestic contentment (“The happy poem”)

Wallace is, in my judgement, at her best as a minimalist. For me, the collection’s most perfect poem is the direct statement of  “Getting better”, which I quote in its entirety:

“Today the sun shone

through my cat’s ears.

I could see a web – a map

of tiny veins, red

on his thin pink skin.”

The sun, the cat and a map – that is, a largeness of experience encapsulated in five spare lines.

            Yet there is the other “enough” in this volume – the “Enough!” of dissatisfaction or exasperation with the conditions of life.

Come jolting poems about death (“Jolt”, “Personal poem” “Ghost”) and what appear to be poems about the sickness of elderly relatives (“In the study”; “With her”) or about an elderly relative infantilised (“You wouldn’t cry about that”) and the awkward sense of being a younger person, and therefore risking being thought patronising when you set out to help infirm older people (“A hand”).

More pervasively, there are poems of uncertainty about the value of writing poems (“The feathered hat”) or arising from teaching writing courses (“The lonely girls”, “There are people better than you or I”, “What we’ll have to do”) and the difficulty of writing a book of poems (“I feel like I am having the world’s heaviest baby”) and the sickness of desperately wanting to make a literary splash (the poem “The thing” ends with lines about wanting to make “Something that makes normal people / feel worse about their lives”). “At the airport” seems an apologia for the randomness of much verse.

I admit to limited tolerance for too much of this sort of self-consciousness. Reading too many such poems is like hearing a performer cough and clear her throat repeatedly rather than getting on and reading. I am sure that the writing class situations are real but I am not sure that they make real poems. At least, though, there is the admission that literature and good advice can be limiting. I quote in its entirety the bracing poem “I’m always telling people”:

“I’m always telling people

not to use words

like ‘beauty’ or ‘sad’

because they are too vague,

too much

of an abstraction –

they don’t give us a picture, I say.

But when I say ‘love’ I see

your face, and your full heart

sailing towards me.”

Thus far, I have given a personal reaction and spoken about the collection’s ideas. I know this is not very proper of me. I should be weighing the language and the sounds – in other words dealing with the poetry as poetry. Wallace mixes free-form poems and prose poems. Inevitably, the prose poems, by their brevity, have to concentrate on a moment of perception or revelation or epiphany. In this respect they either work or they don’t, and I refrain from making critical comment on them, apart from noting that the one called “the millennium” is a wry comment on the nonsense of first-to-see-the-sun in Gisborne in 2000.

An interesting collection, which works best when the poet looks outwards.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Comparisons are odious, so I do not compare Bernadette Hall’s latest collection Life & Customs with Louise Wallace’s Enough.

Bernadette Hall can do the minimalist statement. If I quote her poem “How lovely to see you” in full, it goes thus:

“I went happily on the bus to Putney

over the beautiful Putney Bridge

I discovered Bishop’s Park

and a huge stand of oak trees

and an alms-house from the seventeenth century.”

Bernadette Hall also does prose poems, such as “The favour” and “How they ran into each other again at the Old Girls’ reunion”, both in the form of conversational dialogue; and the strange fusion of the Latin language and suicide that is “Millennia of silence and no rain”.

In the main, however, she more often favours the reflective, expansive, and developed poem than many of her contemporaries do.

The first section of this volume offers poems of childhood and recall and foreign journeys  - if they are more than imagined (Rome, Ireland, the Antarctic, Asia). In such poems as “The much vaunted map of holiness and truth”, “The angel of perfection” there is a seeking for the numinous in landscape and memory, even if antique attempts to convey the numinous are rejected.

The volume’s second section, “Sul: a ballet that awaits performance”, is like an eleven-part prose fairy-story, wherein a young woman retreats into a fantasy concerning an Ice King and a chilly winter world of non-growth, before being returned to the world of life and procreation. This story made most sense to me only when I looked at Bernadette Hall’s endnote. She says she was inspired by seeing anorexic young women, who were trying to remain children and not to grow up. In a way, “Sul” works as a critique of all adolescent fantasies of self-dramatization and separation from humanity; those fantasies in which adolescents see themselves as unique and heroic in their withdrawal (why do I immediately think of Romantic self-mythologization like Shelley’s “Alastor” when I note this?). But there is a sting in the tail – for the last suggestion suggests an adult nostalgia for such fantasy, even when the adult mind knows it is destructive.

I do not belittle this interesting work when I say it is like a fairy-tale. Any reader of Hans Andersen knows that fairy-tales often encode profound psychological truth. In its symbolic way, so does this prose poem.

It is the volume’s third section, however, which most justifies the volume’s title “Life & Customs”, it being essentially poems of many lands and cultures – Native American; Aboriginal; Death met on a beach in Maori guise; ancient Rome (the poem “Life & Customs” itself) and Antarctica (“Door”).

“Footnotes to the Oresteia” is a most ambitious cycle, partly modernising Aeschylus, but it does risk banalizing those ancient myths in the modernization (like Cocteau’s “The Infernal Machine”).

I have already admitted that I have difficulty assessing prose poems as works of literature. In spite of this, I see the jewel of this volume as being the generous prose poem “There’s something I want to tell you” which is, as I read it, the sensual stream-of-consciousness of an old woman. It works so well because it flows easily, by association, from thought to thought, and suits Bernadette Hall’s discursive temperament.

Life & Customs is a civilised and agreeable volume.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "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 five or more years ago.

“WINESBURG, OHIO” by Sherwood Anderson (first published in 1919)

            A number of times before on this blog, I have mentioned how difficult I find it to assess fairly a well-known book, when I have already heard many opinions expressed about it before I have actually read it.

For me, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio is the supreme example of this problem.

Before reading Winesburg, Ohio, I already knew that Anderson (1876-1941) was regarded as a faded early American Modernist, a small town “life’s enormous trivialities” man, and a stylistic precursor to Ernest Hemingway and others, who did the deadpan style better than Anderson himself did. I knew (because at one stage I read nearly all of Hemingway’s work) that Hemingway was at first influenced by Anderson, but then turned against him. Indeed, I’d read young Hemingway’s piss-take The Torrents of Spring, which is a kick in the pants to the man he once admired and a parody of Anderson’s novel Dark Laughter. Dark Laughter (which I have not read) was the only bestseller Anderson produced in his lifetime; but it is now out-of-print and scorned for its dated racial epithets and naïve attitudes to sex. Further, I knew that despite its modest reputation, Winesburg, Ohio continued and continues to have its devotees (in Sarah Shieff’s collection of Frank Sargeson’s letters, you will find a drafted fan letter the youthful Sargeson intended to send to Anderson). It is often re-published and studied on college courses, and is the only work of Anderson’s that has survived.

There now. All this I knew before I sat down six years ago and for the first time read Winesburg, Ohio. So quite a lot was jangling in my head as I read. And, to put it very bluntly, the book basically confirmed all the negative things I had heard.

Published in 1919, but largely written in 1915-16 when Anderson was about 40, Winesburg, Ohio is a short-story cycle. Its subtitle is “A Group of Tales of Ohio Small-Town Life”. Despite its date of publication, the stories clearly spring from Anderson’s youth and seem to be set in the 1890s. Buggies, railways, horses and lamplighters feature in the stories – not automobiles, electric lighting etc.

Some of the collection’s twenty-one stories concern George Willard, a young reporter on the local Winesburg newspaper. He is clearly Anderson’s alter ego, the equivalent of Hemingway’s Nick Adams. An early story tells us of George Willard’s mother Elizabeth, who had an unsettled and unhappy series of love affairs before marrying George’s father. George is witness to the actions of a number of other characters in the stories, and confidant to some of them. The final two stories in the collection have him farewelling the young woman whom he thought he loved, and heading off to the big city.

In one sense, then, the framing idea of the collection is the young man’s growing up, and out-growing the restricted Midwestern small town that the collection depicts. But, despite this, the collection does not really hang together as an account of a young man’s growth, which is what it may have been intended to be.

The chief impact is the impact of the individual stories. They are accounts of lonely, eccentric, isolated or emotionally-thwarted individuals trapped in small-town life. The homosexual schoolteacher (in the story “Hands”) escaping charges of child-molestation. The farmer who becomes a religious fanatic and sees himself as an Old Testament patriarch (“Terror”). The Peeping Tom parson (“The Strength of God”). The frustrated and ageing spinster who runs naked in the rain (“Adventure”); and any number of young men disgruntled by their limited horizons and the littleness of things.

In 1919, some of the sexual references (though very tame now) must have seemed very frank. Whether influenced by them or not (and I know nothing of Anderson’s working methods or inspiration), Anderson was in line of descent with Chekhov, Joyce and Mansfield in attempting to present psychological character studies in terms of focused events, rather than in terms of ingenious and developed plot. And yet he lacks the stylistic concentration that those other writers have. While on the verge of the type of clipped understatement that Hemingway and others developed, Anderson can’t hold back from passages of romantic dithyramb and sheer purple prose. Worse, he has the habit of explaining things that should be implicit; of spelling out in so many words things that we should be able to deduce from action and dialogue. Much of the book therefore seems very clumsy.

Or am I unfairly judging this collection because I am more used to the spare, allusive style that has become the norm in short stories since the time Anderson was writing?

A similar problem is presented by Anderson’s subject matter. The cold wind of loneliness now whistles through numerous books about small town life from many parts of the globe (reading Winesburg, Ohio, I couldn’t help having images of Ronald Hugh Morrieson’s Taranaki eccentrics). The subject matter has become a cliché.

Again, this is an unfair judgement. People confined and (literally) maddened by dull small towns may be a cliché now, but wasn’t in 1919.

How would I recommend this book, then? I would recommend it as an historical artefact – something to remind us what was advanced writing a century ago. And if that sounds too patronising and backhanded, I would add that it would be excellent to put into the hands of the right sort of adolescent. There’s never anything wrong in showing them that everyday life is worth writing about, and that extreme feelings can exist in the most mundane setting.

As I remarked of Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae [see blog comments thereon via index at right], I’m sorry I didn’t read this one when I was 16 or 17. At that age, Winesburg, Ohio would probably have bowled me over.

Something Thoughtful

FACEBOOK HYSTERIA

It began harmlessly enough.

On Facebook, a chap said he was doing a book cull and found it hard to throw out books, but he had found three or four that he was going to give to the Sallies. Two or three replies appeared in which other people added how hard it was to part with old books – even ones that would never be read again – and where they tended to take their unwanted books when they did decide to give them away.

Then the whole tone changed.

Somebody butted into the conversation with the posted comment “Don’t give it to those bigots!” because the Sallies opposed homosexual law reform and gay marriage. Somebody remonstrated that the Salvation Army was a genuinely charitable organization, which did many good works. But the intemperate polemicist now had the bit between his teeth. The Nazis did some good things too, he posted, like curing unemployment, but you wouldn’t give anything to them, would you? Other angry voices entered the fray, noting that there is now an international measure of how unreasonable an argument is becoming, and that is when somebody invokes the Nazis as a matter of comparison.

Insults flew back and forth. Posted remarks became as intemperate and hysterical as the polemicist who called the Sallies “bigots”.

Finally, the chap who had made the original comment (about giving his books away) shut down the conversation thread and deleted all comments. He had only meant to make harmless conversation and it had ended up as a verbal brawl.

This (true) tale from the land of Facebook is unfortunately not an unusual one.

Facebook is a good place for harmless chit-chat and socialising, all of which I regularly enjoy. But so-called “discussions” routinely degenerate into the equivalent of shouting and the trading of insults.

Why is this?

Partly, I suspect, because the medium is most used by a sitcom-fed generation who think debate and discussion mean the trading of snappy, un-nuanced one-liners. The medium is simply not the place to go if you are looking for reasoned debate. A “discussion” on Facebook – on any matter other than harmless social trivia - becomes a competition to see who can find the clinching zinger; the sort that sitcom characters say as they exit out the door to canned laughter. A real discussion on real issues requires paragraphs of reasoning. The Facebook medium doesn’t really allow these and readers of Facebook aren’t looking for them anyway. Possibly, also, those who attempt “discussion” on Facebook are rather frustrated people who have no other platform on which to vent their ideas.

There are worse things than Facebook out in cyberland, however.

Have you ever had the experience of looking at a clip on Youtube and then noting the comments that follow it? The clip could be anything – the latest sensation “trending” or “going viral” on Youtube and getting millions of hits; a piece of archival footage; a complete movie; music of any genre or period. Comments following the “viral” sensation will always be banal and often semi-literate. There are not likely to be many comments at all under a piece of classical music. But for everything else the routine is the same. Underneath the given clip, there will first be three or four appreciative comments thanking whoever it was for posting the clip. Then the Billingsgate begins. “What a load of s**t. Why did you post this?” In no time at all equally scatological comments will be defending said clip and soon we have what is apparently the standard insult among American teens “You’re just a retard” etc.

The ease with which comments can be made on Youtube [and Facebook] is one matter here – some people can’t resist expressing an opinion when it seems there is an audience to read it – but there is also the idea that one is obliged to express an opinion at all

In most cases, no opinion is really required.

Something New

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

“CHILDHOODS – Growing Up in Aotearoa New Zealand” edited by Nancy Higgins and Claire Freeman (Otago University Press, $NZ50); “PACIFIC IDENTITIES AND WELLBEING: Cross-Cultural Perspectives” edited by Margaret Nelson Agee, Tracey McIntosh, Philip Cuthbertson and Cabrini ‘Ofa Makasiale (Otago University Press, $45)

            Even when the contributions are lucid and well-written, it is often difficult assessing symposia, or books of academic essays. Each essay will present the results of research, or argue a viewpoint, that deserves close analysis on its own. Summarising the whole book inevitably seems cursory, unless the review is to grow to unwieldy length. Bearing this in mind, I have recently made my way through two collections of academic essays, and here present my inadequate report:

Edited by independent researcher Nancy Higgins, and Otago’s Associate-Professor of Geography Claire Freeman, Childhoods – Growing Up in Aotearoa New Zealand offers nineteen specialised chapters on aspects on childhood in New Zealand. The nineteen chapters are written by 26 contributors. (I note in passing that only 2 of the 26 contributors are male, which clearly says something about which sex is predominantly involved in both childcare and research into children). Higgins and Freeman divide the essays into three parts.

The first five chapters are “The Context” of New Zealand childhood, setting out the parameters of these studies, comprising discussions of what sort of country New Zealand is (part of this exposition seems written for overseas readers), what theories influence the study of childhood, how the physical environment of New Zealand children has changed, and the ethics involved in research into childhood. It is in this section that there is much reference to the “agency” of children – that is, to the concept that children are autonomous persons in and of themselves, and therefore not to be talked of solely in terms of their vulnerability. As the introduction tells us (p.15) the book was initiated by the University of Otago’s Children and Young People as Social Actors Research Cluster.

The next eight chapters (Chapters 8 to 13) are a diverse bunch, and are therefore fittingly called “Experiencing Diverse Childhoods”. They range from an analysis (by Helen May) of how different from today New Zealand’s elementary schools were in the early 20^th century; to a piece of sincere advocacy (by Anita Gibbs) on the needs of adopted and fostered children. There are also chapters on the special positions of disabled Maori children, the role of children in family law and the paid work that is done by young people.

It is the third section  - the last six chapters of the book – “Children and Young People’s Voices” that could have some of the collection’s most provocative material. This is where the essayists and researchers deal more with marginalised children – among others, the children of prisoners (Julie Lawrence); gay and lesbian students at high school (Kathleen Quinlivan); and Maori students facing barriers to getting into work (Moana Mitchell and Hazel Phillips). True to the section’s heading, these and the other chapters in this final section draw extensively on the testimony of children and young people themselves. There is (as there always is in such circumstances) sometimes a tension between the children’s comments and the interpretations given to them. [I noted this same problem in my review on this blog of Children of Rogernomics, which you can find via the index at right. The earlier book is sometimes referenced in Childhoods.]

Now that I have given you an inadequate overview, how do I react to this volume?

The very opening sentences of Professor Keith Ballard’s foreword say “This is a book about children. It will be of value to parents, family, whanau, professionals and any combination of these.”(p.7)  Possibly. As the parent of a larger-than-average family, I have an interest in the raising of children and in childcare, but I am not sure that this is really a book for parents.

It is more a book for professionals.

It is also a book which, despite the diverse interests of its contributors, runs to a general philosophy. There is an awareness that “in Aotearoa New Zealand we have some of the worst levels of child poverty and child health in the OECD”  (Ballard, p.8) and that “the serious decline in Maori well-being [in the years since neo-liberalism kicked in] reflected a ‘racialised social order’ of economic and health inequality.” (Ballard, p.9). This strain of thought is developed in Freeman and Higgins’ introduction, which says: “Aotearoa New Zealand’s neo-liberal economy is not conducive to maintaining support for the most vulnerable children in society, given its emphasis on individualism and economic matters rather than on social welfare.” (p.24) Later, in Anna B.Smith’s essay, it is noted that in some official reports on children “lip service only is given to children’s agency, while their vulnerability and need for protection [are] given much more prominence”. (p.34).

            What we have, then, is a book that is ideologically loaded as much as it is the product of research. Please let me make it clear that I do not necessarily disagree with the editors’ and contributors’ ideology. Probably the fallout from neo-liberalism has been bad for many New Zealand children. Probably there are various strains of racism at play.

Even so, the presuppositions must be noted, and there are some that are debateable.

It is one thing to assert, as the introduction does, that New Zealand is “bicultural”, which in terms of one founding document and some subsequent legislation does appear to be the case. But then as much evidence is adduced in later chapters to show that “multicultural” would be a more apt term for large areas of the country. Likewise, it is excellent to emphasize, as so many contributors do, that children are complete human beings in themselves, and not just adults in the making. But any discussion about their “agency” has to be circumscribed with an understanding that their powers to consciously choose are limited and in many cases still moulded by adults. Anna B.Smith speaks of one researcher who “described how teachers can invite children to take an agentive role by embedding them in narratives that put them in the role of agents.” (p.39) The paradox here is that it is the teachers who are taking the initiative in this matter – not a result of children’s agency. And this is a matter that lurks beneath some of my discontent with part of this volume. Does emphasising “agency” actually mean subjecting children to new rules and theories imposed by teachers and government agencies as opposed to norms imposed by parents? Just a rebellious thought on my part.

What I could continue to contribute here would, however, largely be niggles. While aware of the implicit ideology, I was informed by much of this book. I am very grateful that in all the contributors, there are only very occasional lapses into sociological jargon. Although it is primarily a book for professionals, it is not incomprehensible. I took delight in the chapter (by Christina Ergler, Robin Kearns and Karen Witten) on the different ways in which children’s games have been “managed” over the last century. And I note that it is a handsome piece of book production, unusually reproducing photos in colour within the text.

Enough said.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

When I open Pacific Identities and Well-being, I am entering territory that is inevitably far more alien to me than a general survey of New Zealand childhoods. Pacific Identities and Well-being is a collection about mental health as it impacts upon Polynesians in New Zealand, both Pasifika and Maori. More than twenty contributors wrote its eighteen chapters, which the editors have divided into four sections thus:

A section dealing with the whole question of cultural identity, both in terms of how much Polynesians are moulded by their inherited cultures in their lives in New Zealand, and how they relate to the larger, non-Polynesian society.

A section dealing with therapeutic practice in counselling Polynesians, being largely advocacy for cultural awareness in counselling and the continued relevance of traditional perceptions.

A section on death and dying in Pacific culture. Interestingly, three of the four essays in this section are specifically about New Zealand Maori and tangihanga.

And finally a section on responsive practice in terms of counselling that actually meets the needs of the (Polynesian) counselled.

There are two matters that make this collection quite distinct from comparable studies of mental health issues written by Palagi. First, there is an open and unabashed acknowledgement of spirituality in the healing process. Two of the editors have religious affiliations – Philip Cutherbertson lectures in theology at the University of Auckland, and Cabrini ‘Ofe Makasioale is a Catholic sister who works as counsellor and psychotherapist. The collection ends with an “epilogue”, by the Presbyterian minister Mua Strickson-Pua, on the value and power of comedy in Polynesian contexts, including free-form poetry with the damning lines “Palagi theologians / you have crucified comedy / sanitising creation with that mythology / for theology of comedy God is not funny / we shall never ever laugh again / or dare even to smile in public / rather some prefer a sombre theology / where the rock has not been rolled away / and we must mourn Easter forever…” (p.291)

There is absolutely nothing naïve in this attention to spirituality. Apart from reflecting the comparatively larger role of religion in Polynesian cultures (as opposed to European ones), the authors acknowledge openly some of the paradoxes of religious influence. For example, Chapter 8 (“On values and spirituality in trauma counselling”) addresses issue of sexual violence “in both church and community settings” (p.146) and considers how spirituality may be misused to cover up sexual abuse.

As will be implicit in some of the above, the other matter which makes this volume distinctive is the degree to which it calls upon imaginative responses as much as upon research-based responses. Each section is introduced with poetry, some written by Tracey Tawhiao and Serie Barford, but most written by the gifted Selina Tusitala Marsh whose volume Dark Sparring (Auckland University Press) I have recently had the pleasure of reviewing for Poetry New Zealand. In a manner of speaking, the poetry expresses the raw emotions, often of grief and loss, to which the essayists turn their analytic attention. And yet some of the essayists are also in imaginative (by which I do not mean falsifying) mode. Teena Brown Pulu’s examination of cultural identity reads, she says (p.85) “more like an autobiographical novel” and has the distinctly stroppy title “The lazy native’s quitting the daytime job. Going home to the village. Yeah, right.”