Vivienne Jepsen

KIWI & EMU: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Australian and New Zealand Women, Edited by Barbara Petrie,

THE LINOLEUM ROOM

By Katy Robinson,

Vintage, $26.95

ISBN 1- 86941-697-X

HER BODY RISES: STORIES & POEMS

By Tracey Slaughter,

Vintage, $27.95,

ISBN 1-86941-726-7

New Zealand Books

_________________

The day I was asked to review this book the morning paper's cryptic crossword had the clue: It was confused twice with real men of letters. The word was literati. The weight of the old world's “real men of letters” would, by itself, continue to produce a bulge in the form of the new world of women's writing, even if no other factors were involved.

This first anthology of Australian and New Zealand women's poetry has a coherence unexpected in view of its shifts back and forth across the Tasman according to the accidents of an alphabetical order. There is here a “weaving of voices” in which Christianse's Candlemass ¾ for two voices seems to be speaking back a page to Campbell's Nikou Church where “the women sing/ spirals of high sound/piercing as sea-birds”. The garden in which Anker sets Ellen's Vigil for three dead sons seems somehow connected to that on the facing page in which Beveridge burns an ambiguous Incense for her dead father, and to Ensing's Fires from Chagall for her dead father.

The preoccupations are with migration, memory, identity. Parents, husbands, lovers feature heavily ¾ often through loss. Couplings abound, but offspring have been edited out. These 58 women have more than a hundred children between them, but this is not information to be deduced from the poems. In this not entirely natural selection we are more likely to find “a bellyful of snow”, “a pristine womb”, a red baby “miscarried & scraped out”. Even an anthology from the “real men of letters” would have more of parenthood than this does. Apart from Sibley's sleeping baby there is only Harwood's astonishing image of The Sea Anemones provoking the thought: “A newborn child's lips moved so at my breast”, and the knowledge that these are “Not flowers, no, animals that must eat or die”.

Survival is the major preoccupation: as Day's Natural Selection puts it: “Her dialectic's tough:/gotta look after them-selves/this virago's no earth mother”. The emphasis on survival through self-creation, not procreation, may be the very thing which best justifies an anthology of women's writing ¾ especially combined with an image predominant in this anthology ¾ that of walking on beaches, which in Fahey's poetry becomes explicitly the “dissolving script”: “my ten thousand prints mark/ sand.... So much work/ to be done ¾ patterning, obliterating”. The business is that of “Marking another unmarked shore”.

Editor, Barbara Petrie ¾ a New Zealand-born Australian, hopes the anthology will “increase cultural exchange” trans-Tasman. But the assonant, emblematic title is a barrier: Kiwi & Emu ¾ it's awful; the humour fails to redeem it. This is a serious anthology. These are real women of letters. Whoever gets past the cover must feel a magnetic force at work in the contents of this impressive book.

Even in Glory Days the rot had already set in at the heart of Auck- land. In this jungle full of weasels and other wildlife, Glory with her “bastard vigour” and her “white-trash heritage” was inclined to put herself and her friends into the category of “genuine under-class”; describe her own decadence as “the real thing”. Decadence was a thing affluent Aucklanders still wanted to play with.

In Feral City ¾ Auckland twenty odd years down the track ¾ "Underclass" has been reduced to a sentence all on its own. Affluent Aucklanders have retreated so far north and east that the reader of this tale told from “the ghetto” at the centre may be resistant to the idea that they exist at all. Huge areas of Auckland have become a no-go area, where hardly anything functions and thousands are homeless. It rains constantly and unwholesomely due to “some global sickness”, and this malaise extends to the bottom of the North Island where “something to do with soil degradation” has caused huge slips, deep cracks in the earth, and cut the railway. “No one in their right mind travels by plane now,” we're told. Squatters are clearing the bush reserve in the Waitaker-es and religious nutters are sacrificing children on Karekare Beach. It's all the unnatural fallout of “the post-Thatcher/Rogernomics holocaust”: the policy of “Take what you want from weaker people, by violence if necessary. It's the system. It's what the government's taught everyone.”

It seems a little hard to square this with the claim that elsewhere in the city it's business as usual:

But these credibility gaps might only be seen as an extension of that between the naive narrator, Faith, and her urban guerilla sister, Violet, the ostensible focus of her attention. The feral city is constructed throughout with the kind of dream-logic which Scott is remarkably good at putting into language. There is plenty in the text to suggest that the whole novel might work as the nasty delusion of Faith, an ex-junkie who's been in a “time warp” down south. And the language of Auckland hasn't changed much between Feral City and Glory Days. Back then Auckland was an ugly mean place. The police were nastier. The child sacrifices were less clean. Everything was “poisonous”, “muddy”, “sour”, starvell-ing”. The air was always “dangerous”. Only the queens were nicer. Decent people still made the mistake of taking their kids to Queen Street on Friday night, but that obviously wasn't going to last for long.

Glory, however, was too busy constructing something positive out of her “grotesque heritage” of squalor, bad genes and bad parenting to simplistically blame recent governments. And Scott was writing hard to involve us in the tale of a teller who was too fat to get away with anything flabbily sentimental; too involved with survival to be self-consciously absorbed in the creation of the “urban myth”. Scott's Glory wasn't into providing recipes for the conversion of old bookshops into “real” utopian spaces, or serving up guilt-free diets of politically correct authors and books.

In terms of size, Glory Days is almost twice the book that Feral City is. Huge Glory has dwindled into ambiguously con-structed Faith. The Senseless Violets Glory paints “in heartless skin colours” have shrunk into Faith's embarrassed homage to the anorexic figure of her sister Violet, the “good nun” whose favoured “paint-up” is Don’t mourn, organise. What Faith organises is the saving grace of the novel ¾ the covert green cave which Violet is destined never to see, the womb that won't bear fruit, the key to the novel's real theme ¾ one destined never to emerge from the subtext.

On page 80, buried under one of Violet's overtly didactic speeches about “human dinosaurs” still denying that “even in those days” (the reader's own) it was clear that “the scientists and busi-nessmen were dismantling the natural systems and pulling out the connecting threads”, the sister finally gives tacit approval to Faith's works by saying that the renovated bookshop reminds her of the old Domain hothouse. Six pages later, at the heart of the novel, we may miss the point of Faith's reminiscence about this power-fully symbolic edifice which she knows cannot have survived.

The hothouse is a recreation, in microcosm, of the hotly female sexual jungle of Scott's exquisite novella Nights With Grace. The whole jungle island in which Grace inherits her mother's defiantly libidinous independence has been shrunk to a memory of the “flimsy structure” which the sisters (both now “barren fruit”) always “entered timidly as if it was a rich man's garden.” This “magical forest” with its “Venus flytrap”, its “creepers” and its “irresistibly exotic” “fleshy plants” is only ever a temporary diversion for Violet who, even then, has other ideas about where she is going:

playing of an old record on which Joan Armatrading sings “Save me” allows for the possibility that Faith's desire to save her adored

Somehow Scott has avoided telling us what we really want to know. Why is each of these nearly middle-aged people always "like a child"? Are Faith and Violet and their respective admirers (Boz the celibate “little boy”; Redfern the street kid in his thirties) all permanently locked in childhood because that's what happens to sexuality in a world rife with AIDS? Or is it (as the hothouse memory would suggest) more than that? If Violet's motives have more to do with anorexia than altruism ¾ with not wanting to grow up than with wanting to save the starving ¾ a less anorexic novel would have saved itself from the waste of a superb idea, and it would have saved its really quite powerful ending from being pretty well lost on the reader.

I feel I should almost be able to gleefully put a name to this fusty literary gentleman for whom Scott has predicted extinction.

The patterns made by Elizabeth Smither's precisely framed images often allow for the possibility that the blackbirds will escape from the pie, or that the black dogs of delusion will slither out of bounds and run amok. But it is this possibility that gives the poems their “love-bite”; creates the tension in which the emotional control gained over the monsters does not finally diminish them, but requires the poet's constant presence and care. In Two Medieval

The poetry is the “skilled performance” with the power to turn chaotic experience (anything from mental illness or death or the fatal stumble of a racehorse, to the “surreal landscape” of a literary conference or an error on a quiz programme) into something coherent, tractable, reassuring, and even beautiful. The poems are like the Stubble fields with “small infelicities” which make them “more beautiful than the perfect/ Skinhead fields they emulate”.

These “infelicities” aren't always easily harrowed into smallness, and there is nothing reductive about the kinds of smoothing and shrinking the poet brings to bear on the inner landscaping of “This suburb, street, cul-de-sac that deals in/ Black dogs” (My Mother's Black Dogs):

The poetry works by constantly playing around with the scale of things, and by the transubstantiation of one thing into another, or simply the juxtaposition of things, in order to maintain a delicate (sometimes fragile) control over emotional experience. Underground Video of a Mouse's Embalming sandwiches the writer's process-conscious view of her embalmed father between two views of dead mice. Humour and horror are held precisely in balance.

Often the control is achieved by an enlargement of the image: the scar on a cat's face becomes a fallen tree in a forest; a slater “would make an equal progress” with a poet among the stars.

A Cortège of Daughters transforms the “ordinary” into something royally mystical. Music composed for a royal occasion can “cross borders” and join, in “some kind of espérance”, with the trains in A Pattern of Marching which has them

The title is reassuring. It promises us the Wellington we know and love: small, gentle (even if it gives us a lashing now and then). These scenes will be quiet ones. And, yes, it would be easy enough to read the poems the way you might listen to the marine forecaster ¾ hearing only the predictable patterns of the words and having it slowly dawn on you that the familiar intonation has forecast nothing less than your own extinction.

In poems unruffled even by their own talk of dirty weather, the urban landscape seems to offer reassurance in the very banality of its debris. A whole poem can look to be written off into incon-sequence under the heading of Scrap. Town Belt might draw, like Mein Smith, “the lines of this green encirclement/ that was to hold like a gentle hand his/ little city”. But under the quiet, urbane surface of the poems there is the carefully maintained “steady pulse” of this fragile line which only ever remains “among a thousand failures”.

yellow jonquil in a jar” surrounded by the usual comfortable household still-life of pots, bananas, books ¾ nothing disturbing

(unless it's the “not-very-settling tilt” of a ponytail in a Picasso print), “not even/ a phone to wake us”. But by the end of the poem we know that the “Composure” with which it began was working at double time in its effort to ward off the sense of alienation and loss which invades all of these composures.

There is nothing safe in this small city. “This rough hill, where/ houses tilt to the tides of the rowdy/ dark, gives just a hand-hold”. Here, even the daisies (Certain Flowers) are forced to live a resolutely double life in Edmond's deceptive shifts of language. “This is/ a tough place, you live here by learning/ to tighten the sinews ¾ as they do”. The poems have a gentle lyricism, but the life they sing of is ever “fragile” and subject to The Law which is “always a price/ exacted by nature”. This is a repeatedly “brief habitation”, where voices do not imply communication, happiness dissolves under the logic of loss and “the law of solitude”, and “home” doesn't convey possession.

Don't expect the inherent violence of these subtle poems to grab you by the throat: even the little, immediate things tend to creep

Edmond's is an impressively understated poetry in which the smallest wax-eye provokes the biggest question: “How many of us,/ large as we are, know to find/ love in a life support system,/ in subsistence, delight?” From the beginning this small city is only “my camp,/ my resting-place along the never-ending/ lines that cross the world.” In the end “Earth is its own home; not ours.”

We meet Isaiah Rung as a babe-in-arms “wrapped up in a blanket like an ornamental lamp”. It's an odd little simile for an odd little fellow in an odd little novel, and one in which the characters tend to remain as distanced from the reader as they are from each other. Isaiah's childhood comes across like something in a competition for the most deprived background. When mum, Zoe, doesn't come home one night Isaiah eats “bread without butter or spreads in case he used everything up and Zoe flew off the handle”. For his birth-day she gives him an iced cake made of soil, and laughs at his disappointment. Which, he decides, is quite in character for a woman who spits on her food to stop her husband and son from stealing it.

This son has a big grudge against mother, but the dad, we are told, has “something about him which is calm, attractive and

In Bornholdt's first three books of poetry there was often a slightly disturbing sense of the female image captured and “held” in photo-graphs, in houses, or projected on the landscape with gaps and absences, so that the subject often moved through the static object in a search for the “the detail of/ the missing person” who is never quite found in the snapshots, paintings, sketches, genealogies, memories. We were, “as always, going in from the garden/ not having found what we were/ looking for/ not even sure what it was/ we were looking for”. It was as though the world was just a bit too big, and the self not quite solid enough.

Bornholdt's poetry has always been at its best, its most exciting, when it has moved out of the structures, the frames, the shelters; out from behind the hedges, and into spaces where people meet and interact and are “overjoyed by the drama of it all”. This fourth volume, How We Met, does that: it leaves house and home, picks up its bridal skirts and runs off with the kind of energy and joie de vivre that carries you along with it. The world has suddenly got much smaller and more together; it's a song you can dance to. Home has become “mobile”; a kind of gypsy caravan in which you can travel, love, take risks. You're married. You've got bigger, more expansive: even your clothes can house more. You're free now to “Love the world of the garden...”

If you prefer the intimacy of poetry on the page to the distractions of pubs and poets, it might be hard to come to these books by Sam Hunt and Gary McCormick without feeling that the poems are never going to measure up to the performance. But things have changed. There's a new elegance here; more careful poise and, mercifully, no photographs. The poems stand by themselves.

Hunt apparently no longer needs to run his muse on alcohol, and there's hardly a trace here of the old V8 lout doing his

hit-and-run in the rusty Holden. Instead there's a man who has found “a place/ a man can park his car/ between a highway, say,/

& a river”. The simplicity is deceptive. Down The Backbone announces itself as something solid as mountains. “A man”, not

But the mountain has been cut adrift. What seems so normal that it doesn't need to be spoken of has already subtly shifted into the almost unspeakable: “no one makes any/ mention of the mountain/ adrift above their town.” The poetry is clever, subtle, much deeper than it wants to sound. Even the “Fucking Poem” degenerates from crudity into a haunting lyricism: “the song of some lost lover/ who forgot there were/ two sides to the river/ so never crossed over.”

McCormick's Lost at Sea has the immediate appeal of a simple man's Dover Beach. The drowning man lost in the “distances between” stations, shores, people, and the lighthouse keeper who wakes and finds himself exiled in his own (phallic) tower, sometimes sound like plaster men, but the poetry almost revels in “that hollowness at the centre”. “I practised being a man/ but never reached that point/ where I became one”, sings the lighthouse keeper's demon, while Across Cook Strait the public bar full of “unmanned gambling/ machines singing sad songs to

Some things refuse to be lost at sea: the old Holden becomes a launchpad for an irrepressibly singing daughter. And Love has the last word:

“There are two kinds of poem” wrote McCormick (Naked and Nameless) a couple of decades ago: the kind that “whirls with

precision/... and leaps before tiring/ in libraries”; and the kind that “knows no life other than the brawling street/ and refuses to come in.” Hunt and McCormick are still taking their poems out on pub-crawls, but the poems want more quiet attention than they'll get on the street. They want to come in.

The title promises something a bit closer to Mills&Boon than we are used to getting from Stephanie Johnson. The dark turbulence of the cover, and the blurb which tells us that “The Heart's Wild Surf is a bold exploration of love in a time of confusion”, suggest that here is our own answer to Love in the Time of Cholera. But we New Zealanders are used to thinking that this kind of romance and exoticism belongs to other, more colourful parts of the world, while we're stuck with the bleak antipodean realities prescribed by “Frank Sargeson, the godfather of New Zealand letters”, “icon to a school of New Zealand writers” (Listener 18.11.95).

of Johnson's fiction. Her first novel and the two volumes of stories have all the walking wounded a New Zealand school could want. What a relief, then, to find that this is one book that can be judged by its wonderful cover. OK, so this, strictly speaking, is Fiji, and it's Love (and War) in the Time of Influenza, but it's still ours and it certainly isn't bleak ¾ even if the corpses are piling up in the background and people cough alarmingly all around.

as an end for any of these lovers tossed about in The Heart's Wild Surf. But it is Romance. Johnson hasn't lost her eye for the strange, the cruel, the grotesque; but there's a delicious streak of magic colouring everything here. The impending sense of disaster focused in the dying body of Adela McNab, burdened with influenza and a seventh pregnancy, is offset by an infectious sense of health and libido that emanates from the unmarried women ¾ particularly from the pubescent Olive, who is brought along on the dangerous ride to the “magic” crater lake, and expected to “bring a curious energy to a pilgrimage such as” that of the irresistible Constance Prime-Belcher, “Traveller and Naturalist”, and her new compan-ion, Agnes Perkins-Green, “Artist and Unaccompanied Lady Traveller”.

makes an attempt on young Olive, the novel takes whatever it wants to feed its own mythologies, and leaves a loose end tendrill-ing here and there. It makes a tantalising snatch at Rupert Brooke and keeps some bit of his heart beating on these beaches. Like Aunt Maud's “lovely [laudanum-laced] tea that softened the edges of the unforgiving world”, this is a New Zealand novel to make you feel good, to increase the world's possibilities. Lushly exotic, deliciously amusing, The Heart's Wild Surf flies from page one, with never a let down.

This is a super book, in spite of its cover ¾ almost a plain brown wrapper with a seemingly uninspired title and four little pictures of the poets with their shadows eaten out as if their identities are being carefully concealed behind the masks of war-criminals. In reality the poets are all pretty decent-looking people and the verdict has to be favourable, even if what emerges from between the covers does present us with some of the crueler facts of love.

A biting precision in the language or image keeps the aching hit-or-miss of human relationships sharp in these poems. The busker of Adrienne Jansen's Harmonica (“the one/ who cuts music/ through steel squares/ into tinny strips” and puts it into “the hollow space/ where you wait downtown”) seems unwilling to give up the tension of not quite connecting. In Jansen's poetry the darkness is taut with sensual possibilities; physical dissolution is only the pleasurable fantasy of Night Swimming.

For Harry Ricketts ¾ “Forty something, you know/ the goods are likely/ to be damaged; that's just/ how it is” ¾ the risks are less likely to be satisfying. In Under the Radar, not quite connecting becomes an involuntary and permanent condition of love and war:

These poems deal with separation, lost children, lost parents, missed communications, forgotten selves. The humour is still here, but this much darker Ricketts poetry is better than ever.

provides the title of the volume, but it could just as easily have come from JC Sturm's Under Threat, with its insistence that “All stories have the same ending”. Sturm's poetry is the carefully preserved calm in the eye of the storm. “Still stranded” in the confusing (and lonely) world, Sturm is obscurely haunted by Jim, but the late poet is still holding out on her, unwilling or unable to send the “One omnipotent, omniscient/ Syllable explaining all.” Perhaps the best known of the four, Meg Campbell is a more playful poet than she has seemed before. The image of suffer-ing is precisely poised between humour and tragedy, between the momentous and the everyday. The cross comes down off its high hill and now has “an old woman/ her feet in the swamp/ pegging up her old Son,/ Christ, to die again/ in damp agony” (Not on a Hill). And, in the last poem, Once, reality (how things really are) is always waiting under the child's joyful image of Christ (crucified) poised to bungy-jump into our own remade country:

The Whitireia students have chosen well: the poets work together, and there's not a dud poem in here.

It's a risky Rumplestiltzkin business, spinning straw into gold, especially for a manikin who can't keep himself from letting his own name drop. Even here, in the pick of five decades of poetry, the transubstantiation doesn't always take place. Stead sometimes forgets that there always has to be something in it for the reader. What tends to remain most steadfastly straw is stuff that seems spun for the literary biography industry, or to establish the name of Stead in an international brotherhood of poets. Who wants to read the number 48 sandwiched 48 times on a page between London and Paris with Stead's date of birth at the top and his date of

travel/ 48th birthday at the bottom? And who would ever get drunk and start reciting “Hey God/ dis poet/ laCKS TEA Do/ somethin'/ will ya”?

Thank god for Catullus! It's a relief when C.K. Stead steps aside from himself into someone else's shoes. Straw Into Gold brings together most of the old Catullus poems with some new ones as well. The bitch, Clodia ¾ his muse, is back to inspire more of the poet's best sharp, witty, malicious, self-aware lines. Stead was, from the start, a great novelist, but he's always had trouble with his muse, and his determination to be a poet has sometimes had him toiling away in her absence.

With all that classical education, the Latin and French, the inside information on the literati, Stead's was never going to be poetry for the uninitiated. He has said (Note,Voices) that “explanations get in the way of poetry”, but what really gets in the way is the deliberate-ly created need for explanations. In the new poems Pound, Smithy-man, Brooke and Graves are coyly disguised by initials and dates, as if they are private property. It's a sort of test ¾ if you don't get it, you aren't in the club. Poetry doesn't have to be immediately accessible, but must it bristle?

Then again, Stead's is an elaborate and seductive game, not easily put aside. He's a poet's poet. His preoccupation with the solid unreality of words, with “what a marvellous meal/words made of the world/of the real”, does set the magic whirring, even if gold isn't always easy to swallow. The first of the new poems, These Poems are Safe ... and Clean, invites us alarmingly into his (fork-tongued) “parlour”, but then assures us that we're too sophist-icated to fall for that one ¾ or for the indecent proposal that follows. A reader may find herself in some very ambiguous subject-positions, being greased up with a bit of the French, and teasingly assured that this is all just "a matter of language":

It's very clever. It may be friendly in its intent. But it's guaranteed to arouse resistance.

Stead still writes the occasional poem that should have been tossed aside (A Discursive Poem About Poetry and Thought is pure straw), but there's often gold in what might seem to have been easily tossed off:

Perhaps Stead is right when he assures us that history will vindicate his opinion. But does that "Montana Book Award Prize Pen" erect the Rumplestiltzskin in him? "One day" when his intimations of mortality have turned "slavering lion" and eaten him up:

There's gold, all right, and plenty of it, but it sinks under the straw. Send me his next novel. ]

At $29.95 this latest dip into the pleasures of Hone Tuwhare's poetry doesn't come cheap, but Steele Roberts have produced a handsome volume with 120 pages of mostly new stories and poems, lavishly (and colourfully) illustrated by Shirley Grace whose work is as seductive as that of the poet himself.

great love affair with life that is the subject of so much of Tuwhare's poetry. Sure, there are the angry political poems like Niu Tireni (Long White Shroud) with its railing against greed and destructiveness. But even here, as in The Champagne-Box Inquiry Has Helped Me, that “glimmer/of the comic” is retained in “the popular holy hymn:”

Tuwhare has the rare ability to never let anger or grief or serious-ness quite obliterate a sense of humour or self-parody. So the Champagne-Box Inquiry becomes a seriously comic opportunity for the fleeting moment of self-examination which almost literally disappears up its own “arsehole” (to quote the final word from Nui Tireni).

If the Shape-Shifter of the title story is a destructive ghost, Tuwhare's own shape-shifting qualities are hugely creative. He has a knack for getting playfully under the skin of things almost indis-criminately. Rarely self-consciously Maori, he seems totally at home with himself ¾ and everything else ¾ no matter where in the world he is. Nothing on the planet is out of place ¾ except greed. And no matter whether his sun is “One/fried egg coming up” or “busily/recycling itself/to appease/the roosters” or “beguil-ingly” attractive to Norfolk Pines, there's a “natural religious feel to/it”, without ever a hint of piety.

These are love poems. They read like a series of thankyou notes to all creation, to a wide-eyed universe in which everything is involved in a feast of mutual admiration. “When The Karaka Trees Whistled And Said To Us: Kia Kaha!

There's a serious playfulness in all of it, and a delight in words, in any kind of babble: the comic rhyme (“and she yielding/at last to my surly/hurly-burly, come-in-early”), the mischievous pun (“But I protest/my love for you/isn't minimal:/it is animal”). This is poetry with a huge grin, an amazed ir/reverence.

Buy it, read it, share it, keep it. Where else will you find an antidote to depression for less than thirty dollars?

I loved In Translation, Annamarie Jagose's first novel. It wasn't until about a dozen pages from the end that I began to have a sense of unease about where it was going. Even so, I read on unsuspecting to the last page which left me feeling as if I'd eaten my way through a tin of peaches only to find the arse-end of a dead rat at the bottom. For this reason I approached Jagose's second novel, Lulu: a romance, with perhaps more caution than was necessary, reading the subtext carefully, treating that subtitle with a high level of suspicion. Others seem to have found the end surprising. Not me. Not this time.

in Lulu. And this time I did at least get to understand why things turn out the way they do in the end ¾ given what they are in the beginning. But where I was deluded, for most of In Translation, into thinking I shared some common humanity with Helena, Lulu's married couple of voices are fairly immediately identifiable as those of another species.

having arrived at their mid thirties without children, do the sensible thing and adopt an infant chimp for research purposes. Kate, a linguist who considers herself more “scientific” than her psychologist husband, doesn't want to give the baby chimp a name, but Mitch calls her Lulu, and it's all downhill from there.

One of the surprises the novel has to offer is that, assuming Jagose knows what she's writing about (and she writes with such conviction that we never doubt her for a moment), baby chimps are such a breeze to rear compared to human babies. Kate and Mitch (well, Kate at any rate) are able to spend Lulu's early years focusing on their research into her ability to understand English and communicate by signing, without the usual all-consuming hassles involved in house-training and civilizing her human counterparts. We have to wonder, really, why people go to so much trouble to adopt human babies when chimps are so much easier. Even as a sexually mature five-year old (more than a handful in anyone's terms) and let loose “out of sorts” in a television studio, Lulu is amazingly manageable. She has enough intelligence to tell lies and to get her own way by signing “bite” instead of acting it ¾ which makes her smarter than a lot of human teenagers ¾ so things never get chaotic.

Kate, however, is not very smart at all. She apparently fails to understand that, in claiming to have conducted research which “made no distinction between animal and human subjects” (having reared Lulu as if she were a human baby under conditions which would “meet the requirements of international child-welfare organisations”), she is not addressing the objections of the Animal Liberation Front communique which says, “LISTen. cHiMps doN'T WanT TO be uS. THey wANt tO BE left iN ThE JungLE.” Kate is not smart enough to figure out that Lulu is capable of telling lies ¾ until she does it so inescapably on television at the ripe (if not old) age of five. The less “scientific” Mitch has, of course, known of (and exploited) Lulu's potential in this respect for some time. Which gets us into some distinctly slippery territory juggling undecidable propositions on the nature of science, intelligence, humanness, and (inevitably) sexuality.

Some readers may end up feeling cheated by Jagose's refusal to actually confront the question of inter-species sex. Others may feel that the few descriptions of sexual acts which do make it into the novel get quite close enough. Kate's premarital “car sex”, and its engrossing effect on her husband, tells us more than we might want to know. Kate's account of Mitch going at it (“head down, as against a strong wind”) over her, having “let” the five-year-old Lulu out of her “cot” so she can jealously interrupt the proceedings, is almost off-putting enough to make us forget, for a moment, that chimpanzees are agile enough to swing from tree to tree and are therefore unlikely, at any age, to need to be let out of a cot. As for Kate's hardly explicable, video-enhanced, encount-er with Dr Sharp (as in prick?), and her very oddball decision to carry on with a “counterfeited” (and one-sided) “deranged passion” for him ¾ if it isn't quite enough to make you wonder what planet Kate beamed down from, it is certainly enough to finish the term “affair” for good.

If it slowly dawns on us that Kate's whole life is her research, and that language acquisition is a lot lower on her unwritten list of priorities than she will ever admit, Mitch's overtly hidden sexual agenda ends up being less “creepy” and “slithery” than some other agenda operating in the novel. The earnestness with which the novel is narrated by both Mitch and Kate should not distract us from the fact that it is, of course, a have, a joke, a clever and interesting con. Well, isn't that what fiction is all about?

Raewyn Alexander's Concrete and Jagose's Lulu are as unlike as any novels by fellow New Zealanders could be ¾ even though both concern themselves with the nature of realness, communication, deception, sexuality. Concrete, like Lulu, has a dual narrative, but where the alternating voices of Kate and Mitch neatly balance Jagose's novel, there seems less purpose in the short sections of third person narration which interrupt the “I” of Alexander's big “By-by” (bi?) Byron. Byron and her sisters, Shelley, Keats and Frost, were all named after poets by their mysterious “Dad” (p.102) who wanted them to be “clever”, but abused them like crazy. Except, hang on, wasn't that the “step-father”? Well, I'm confused.

If Lulu seems determined to make us wonder why women and men are ever attracted to each other, Concrete seems, at the outset, determined to go one step further and call into question the reason for humans to want human company at all. We might find, in both novels, a sort of inevitability about the outcome. In Lulu, from the moment on page one where we're told that Mitch has torn his wife out of the photo of Lulu he keeps in his wallet, we have to suspect that if the guy has to make a choice between a supposedly thinking woman and a sexually frustrated female chimp, he's always gonna run off with the chimp.

Alexander's novel is never so focused, and it lacks the overtly meaningful subtext that makes Lulu so positively sleazy at times. As a consequence, the outcome of Concrete isn't quite so predictable. But the image of men takes a battering early on. Byron expects men to hurt her. She used to have a boyfriend who burnt her with cigarettes, but left, she says, because, “He wanted to hurt me, but for me not to like it.” One of the few halfway human males in the story is an endearing fellow called Wolf who plays with dolls, but when Byron's temporary obsession with him seems to be going nowhere and she toys with the idea of giving up on men, a reader might be tempted to think she'd be better off with a big friendly dog than with anyone from the pool of bitchy humans around her. We can be pretty sure she's gonna end up with the girl. Then again, she does have that masochistic streak.

to be able to handle only short sentences, limited syntax, the interminable “I”. If Byron has to look at mirrors all the time to make sure she hasn't disappeared, she seems to have to say “I” for the same reason. When she finally does get laid on page 153, it's a relief to have the “I” abate and the sentences get marginally longer ¾ for a whole paragraph.

Byron is a real human ¾ even if she is all over the place physically as well as emotionally. The other characters (including the concrete city itself) are never really allowed to emerge from behind their heavily made-up personas. But Byron has a hard time seeing through the cardboard cutouts so why should the reader see it any differently. Alexander can't write long sentences, but she is a poet, and quite often the whole structure of Concrete, with its cast of spray-painted characters, seems hardly more than a convenient wall to carry the poet's almost brilliant, almost epigrammatic observations where words make unexpected collisions to stop us in our tracks.

Both Alexander and Jagose have an interest in the way people relate (or don't relate) to each other. Their characters have, in common, a difficulty with making sense of themselves as social animals, an almost compulsive tendency to misrepresent themselves, and a high level of mistrust of others. But where Jagose's modulated, controlled, but highly suggestive prose never lets down its guard for a moment, Alexander's unrestrained and hyperventilated writing never holds back enough breath to manage a sentence capable of subtlety, but still has a heat and life lacking in Lulu. Jagose's is an elegantly conceived novel with an interesting idea, but it may leave us unmoved by its refusal to meet

passion (or whatever drives the human animal) head on. Concrete is a chaotic novel which often (especially at the start) seems unbelievably bad, but grows on us as we become immersed in Byron's prestressed world.

The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories is an impressive selection from more than three decades of writing. Its 400 pages take us from early uncollected stories (all excellent) to new work of which the last, Tell Me the Truth About Love, is no less than a triumph of storytelling.

Kidman's work has remained remarkably consistent without ever becoming predictable. There have been some changes. The earlier stories are more likely to focus on a sense of foreignness, a sudden understanding in the midst of cultural difference (Sweet Blackberry), the “one tiny moment” of unity between the “normal” girl (On the Train) and a narrator who calls himself “marginal”.

In the later stories overt difference is replaced by a more subtle isolation from which no one is immune. While The Torch (from Mrs Dixon and Friends) has the exiled Vlado heartbroken that history has happened in his absence, Veronica, the history teacher of the final story, finds that she has failed to see history happening even when she's been there at the heart of it all along.

transition or realisation, a “shiver of recognition”, the resolve to stay or leave. Increasingly there is an interest in the process by which these moments are recorded in memory and art, and recovered from the past. The photographer sees the “flaw” in her “system of collecting images”. The history teacher who has insisted that history is “not definite... the connections and clues are limit-less” is forced to see also that “history is history” because “we don't see what's happening at the time”.

inevitability and accident. Natalie, the television writer in Marvellous Eight is grateful to have been rescued from her own script.

The stories themselves are like that. But the “extra factor” always emerges from the ordinary. The credible never becomes merely predictable. The quirk of fate is never totally arbitrary.

gives it careful consideration, and the results are always satisfy-ingly seamless. Her characters are 99 percent ordinary, but each has a distinctness, a separateness, and Kidman delivers them to us in stories remarkably free of anything overtly political or judge-mental. Unlike Cassie, Kidman has not become merely “a recorder of human foibles” determined to “show the mutilated hand” of the potter rather than his “beautiful strong pots”. Kidman's characters have a compelling kind of fragility about them, one that keeps us hooked to the stories, worried about which way they will go. But they also have a solidity, a strong sense of the real and enduring, an open-endedness which lets them escape the page. We may worry about the characters, but the writing never gives us cause for concern.

“It's a weird household”, says the young detective, “The dead man lodged with this relative called Edith Harris, and she's got three daughters, but there's no sign of a husband or other visible means of support.”

The characters in this crime novel set in North Wales seem, at first, somewhat less than interesting. A once-promising scholar is found dead in his room by his “faded”, neurotic cousin and her “overweight, overwrought and over-imaginative” thirteen-year-old daughter, Phoebe. After a lifetime of illness, old Ned's death seems unremarkable even though his ailments are thought to have been largely psychosomatic. The police become involved only because Ned's regular doctor is away, the locum can't be sure of the cause of death, and someone may have rearranged the body. It's hardly worth investigating, and perhaps the real reason this house of women is put under scrutiny is because it lacks the guardianship of a suitable male.

Enter Detective Chief Inspector Michael McKenna. Unsettled by some important failures in his own life, McKenna finds he has nothing better to do than use the unexplained death as a pretext to keep returning to the house, and slowly stripping away appearances till we find that everything is either more or less than it seems.

McKenna, himself, is not quite what we may expect in a detective. A might-have-been academic, he occasionally comes out with statements like: “Sickness is an existentially precarious condition... whatever the reasons.” He hears his cats giving a “recital of atonal modernism”, and tells young Phoebe “I rather envy them, because whether they think or not, they don't have to spend a lifetime constructing themselves, as we do.”

finds room for inquiry into a number of things that may or may not have a bearing on whether or not Ned was murdered and, if so, by whom. The nature of illness, the integrity of scholarship, the persistence of racism, the question of fatherhood: these illuminate the novel the way the stained glass window spreads pools of colour in the hall of Edith's house. In the end, the life of the characters, and the background of Welsh landscape and history, make this more than a good crime novel.

The third in a series of 100 short short stories, this is nevertheless a first rate collection. There’s a whole world in this easy-to-hold little book. These essentially New Zealand stories are set here, there and everywhere: Finland or Fiji, Berlin or Bali ¾ we do the distances easily. Iain Sharp’s prizewinning story Chopin’s Jump-ing Fleas sets the tone at the outset with a masterful performance which turns the world on its head and shakes some amusing fictions out of its pockets. Isa Moynihan’s The Paper Factory also plays the distances with a fine sense of irony towards cultural myth-making. But then in Jane Blaikie’s The Long Way we find that the distance from Wellington to Auckland can be subtly terrifying when you’re stuck in a car, a relationship, a power-struggle.

Distance is really a metaphor, and many of these stories have at their core the threat or the reality of a kind of heart failure, but there is an astonishing diversity in the way these writers deal with it in such brief stories. Kapka Kasabova’s haunting Farewell to Maria distils the cliched brief encounter in a foreign city to a few seconds of dashed hope and “a thick sadness... like old phlegm.” In Diane Brown’s Bushed, or Maureen Langford’s The Last Boat to Tiri, being found, or being the right one, or not missing the boat seems possible, but only tenuously and temporarily.

Then again, wit and humour abounds here. Hell does a Clip Clop into Kevin Ireland’s suburbia. Irony is worn round a hundred necks in Bernard Brown’s charming Trinkets. Will the supermarket ever be the same after John McCrystal’s sinister shopping list? Be warned: you may find it difficult to forget the image of someone’s old dead mother emerging like an anti-Venus from the “limpid swell” of Norman Bilbrough’s Takapuna Beach. Or Vincent O’Sullivan’s truly awful famous poet mistaking his wife’s hearing aid for an off-switch. Or Sheridan Keith’s image of Mick Jagger looking “like chewing gum that’s been stretched out between two places and left to harden”. You may find the seduc-tion of Raewyn Alexander’s Good Lies, or Linda Burgess’s Fathers Don’t Skip, irresistible. You may be troubled by the persistence of desire in the face of death in Philippa Christmas’s subtly powerful A Memory of Roses. And the sheer magic of David Lyndon Brown’s Calling the Fish might come right out of the blue at you.

Many of these stories are so densely and cleverly written, you’ll want to read them more than once, so it really is a good book to hold onto.

Both Smither and O’Brien write as if at least one of their senses is always tuned for the ineffable ¾ for that which, if it could be put into words, would make sense of everything. For O’Brien it is an exercise of faith. He’s a magician who knows that although he is deaf to the meaning, it has to be there, and if he can just keep up the dazzling word-play and name-dropping, the smokescreens of disrupted syntax and the reverberations of great art; if he can locate himself (and his sons) in significant places with significant men all over the country, he’ll pass it all off as mysticism rather than mystification, and establish a dynasty at the same time.

We’re too often obliged to be intruders at some very private function where we have only the vaguest notion of who is being addressed and what is happening. When we do get that hot flush of recognition it might be at the uncomfortably Freudian slip of a ring-finger ¾ “the one/ that steers the boat/ that most/ grips the warm/ tiller” (Tall Woman Story II).

O’Brien is at his best when ¾ as in House and Children ¾ he’s up-front with his insecurity: “A house, the walls to stop those you love/ falling out of your life.” Or the wonderful end to Sat Up And Watched Go By:

After the high poetic sound and obsessive dynastic concerns of Winter I Was, the poems in Smither’s Lark Quartet might appear deceptively like the small verbal irrelevancies of someone “skirting subjects” ¾ as two women do in Irene’s spa. But where O’Brien’s poems may announce themselves as Art and turn out to be circular lists of man-made trash (eg. Contents of a Stream III), Smither’s subtle, sometimes ambitious poetry sets the absolutely ordinary sailing for Byzantium without the least show of bottle-smashing. That mind intent on the unheard music seeks the potential for art in anything. In A television image of looters the chaotic figures who look “like angels departing a tomb” seem only to want a garden in the “teeming crush” to transform themselves into quiet statues.

Smither’s poetry never fails to rise above the personal, never fails to transfigure whatever it sets its sights on. From the earthenware occasion of Three women sharing a bowl of crème brûlée she shows us how the communion of poetry lifts the culinary accident, the desperately banal ruins of female aspiration, into the cradling arms of art like

If life is cooled in the transformation it keeps its beating heart. The heady mixture of compassion and celebration has the three nameless friends swooning in a shared drunken stupor where everything (paradoxically) makes perfect sense. Maybe this sounds like you need to have been there. The point is you don’t. You need only read the poems.

When Evelyn abandons her husband in the middle of the night and takes her daughter on a 151 hour car trip across America to her old home town under an erupting volcano, she enters the territory of the temporarily accident-prone.

But Evelyn is no victim. She’s a bully from way back, and the possible candidates for the bit of metaphorical stone-throwing directed her way start lining up thick and fast. From the boy she once kicked at the Christmas church service who “went down like a handkerchief, the lace of his outfit landing gently after him as in a parachute”, or “loathsome” Lenny who Evelyn still blames for the collective brutality she perpetrated against him, to the victims of her accidents, the unhappy husband, the stepfather she has presumed upon...the list goes on.

This, however, is no Hammond Innes — though it does toy with that genre. And it’s no mystery novel either, though the notion of “mystery” is raised and deflated repeatedly. Wilkins has a reputation for making an art form of losing the plot — and he doesn’t disappoint us on that score here either. The novel is full of godforsaken characters with improbable deathwishes, and the unlikely Evelyn is selected by at least two of them as an angel of death who can deliver them from the tempation to go on living. Wilkins insists on naming all the extras in the cast — except the Nineteen Widows of the title. They are merely an inadequate hook for essential parts of the plot which fall off the edge with the widows (who also provide an epiphany for loathsome Lenny — himself the victim of a tedious illness-as-metaphor routine). No, this novel about how things and people fail to deliver, is not gonna do what it oughta.

But, as with the odd wilful lapses in point of view which serve to remind us just how clever this New Zealander is with his American woman’s story, nearly everything in this novel is a “hider” — like the dying priest who is imagined as a young man lumbering up the mountain “with the rolling liquid grace of a bear — that sense bears always gave her of another bear, or even a man, some machinery anyway, inside the loose outer garment, as if bears were in costume, with a zip somewhere.” The language — the observation — is stunning.

It isn’t giving too much away to say that, of course, the mountain has the last laugh in this strangely compelling novel.

In 1996 Horatio Nelson, that most English of heroes, was accused of a war crime by a descendant of the Neapolitan Admiral Caracciolo who was hanged for treason at Nelson’s command in 1799. With history up for grabs all over again, it seems almost inevitable that someone like Barry Unsworth would construct a novel around the event. In Losing Nelson, Unsworth has attempted the almost impossible and actually managed to pull it off.

The combination of history lesson, flawed romance, exploration of Englishness and paternal authority, and study of mental illness, might sound less than promising. Obsession necessarily involves repetition. Unworth’s novel is narrated by Charles Cleasby, a man with a personality disorder who is writing his own book, The Making of a Hero, to “extricate Horatio with honour from the languors and horrors of Naples”. Charles is convinced that his life is connected with his hero’s, and that to rescue Nelson is to save himself. Many solitary enactments of Nelson’s battles take place in his basement operations room, and much agitation is kept in check by obsessive pacing rituals in which the reader must participate.

Through Charles’s painstaking reconstructions we are treated to a fascinating sense of the history, with two of Nelson’s “long dead” biographers, A.T.Mahan and his evil twin Badham, (a “waspish close reasoner” and a less fictional character than he seems), fighting it out for Horatio’s reputation, along with others in the “phalanx of robust, deep-voiced males” opposed by the “more feline” knockers.

A parallel battle is played out in Charles’s reconstructions of his fanatically repressive father, and his “lost” mother. The grip of the brutal, authoritarian myth-making machinery of traditional English history is challenged by the inconsequential remarks of “Miss Lily”, solo mother and sum total of “Avon Secretarial Services”, whose aid Charles enlists because he has a phobia about computer screens. Miss Lily has “no sense of history” and asks questions which are typically “difficult to answer and at the same time quite beside the point”. “What was there in it for them? she asks of the fifty doomed men Nelson took up the river in Nicaragua. She just doesn’t understand that they were expendable because they “had no destiny.”

Miss Lily teeters fascinatingly between gender stereotype, transparent device for constructing an argument, and most real and likeable character. The Neapolitan Mr Sims brings another lungful of corrosively fresh air into the proceedings. And Unsworth’s irreverent Nelson Club shouldn’t be confused with The 1805 Club — president: Mrs Lily Lambert McCarthy CBE, www.admiralnelson.org — whose many web pages gloss nicely over the events at Naples.

Unsworth has the hero industry in his sights. His wargame, played out with “real” ficticious history, seems at first a somewhat mechanical contrivance with just enough tragic humour to keep us headed towards the inevitable. But Unsworth doesn’t forget that he’s writing a novel, and the pace of its ever-decreasing circles picks up and holds us to the bitter end. Something has to get shattered, but what?

I have to say, at the outset, that I enjoyed reading Kapka Kassabova’s second novel. It’s a good story, told in such a way as to keep the reader engaged to the end. This is quite remarkable in view of the fact that the writer’s command of English is not yet of the standard we would normally expect of novelists. It is even more remarkable when we consider what an insubstantial bunch of characters the story hangs on.

Theo is an Australian of Greek and Macedonian descent who has arrived in Thessaloniki to research a PhD thesis on “Cult and Deity in the Life of Alexander the Great”. We might therefore expect him to have an original idea or two on the subject. In fact he has no idea at all. Insensitive to Greek politics, he offends the people whose co-operation he needs in his research, and he uses this as an excuse to be deflected from his purpose altogether and run off on an expensive trip around the Mediterranean with an heiress he encounters in the street. He’s so thick that he insists he ought to pay his way — even though the trip is her idea, and he has all the financial resources of — well — a PhD student! He’s just too cardboard-cutout to care about. But he does have extraordinary eyes.

Neither can we give a toss for the unpleasant heiress, Véronique, with her heroin habit, her hereditary pointlessness, and nothing of any significance in her life except the empty shell of a relationship with her recently deceased father. She has a beautiful exterior but an ugly tendency to see other people as characterised entirely by their appearances. Like her counterpart in Kassabova’s first novel, Reconnaisance, Véronique is fascinated and disgusted by fat people, and she sees a lot of them. But then she does have extraordinary eyes.

Being French, Véronique complains (with, we suspect, considerable authorial indulgence) that "English is such an impoverished, withdrawing language sometimes", but English in her creator’s hands is a very blunt instrument, used without awareness of its subtleties, its potential for subtext (and without the use of the pluperfect or even a spellchecker). What we get is awkward and abrasive prose which erupts with frequent bursts of grotesque imagery. The relentless similes stud the text like elaborate gargoyles set in roughcast concrete:

She was strangely affected by the sight of her grandmother Pauline, who, like a rare species of bug surprised in amber, was caught in the astonishment of having lost her only child... He sat still...his heart soaked with melancholy like a piece of cork forgotten in wine.... His heart stopped, like a dreamy sentinel crashing into the wall of the enemy's abrupt apparition.... Her pupils dilated like bugs flying into the liquid amber of her irises.... the kiss flowering in a corner of his lips like a fresh sore.... He would fly...alone and caught like a bug in the hardening amber of his bafflement.... In the blinding sunshine the television van glistened like an extravagant and repugnant bug.

Mercifully, the plague of similes is less insistent in those parts of the story concerned with the grandparents, Daphne and Pascal, and the Greek civil war in which they encounter each other. The blurb tells us that this is a “more poignant love” — and it is — but Daphne and Pascal are hardly more convincing characters. We know far more about the inner workings of most Harlequin Mills & Boon lovers than we do of this pair. Our sympathy for them is generated almost entirely by the literal minefield we see them in, and by the grotesqueness of the Greek men-in-charge Kassabova particularly likes to set against them. The reader is engaged, but the writer compels an emotional distance.

One of the reasons for this is that too often Kassabova ignores the basic rule of fiction: show, don’t tell. The tragedy of Pascal’s abandoned wife, for example, is put before us repeatedly, but it leaves us cold. It is not enough to have us witness conversations in which she is referred to as “a complex woman.... a formidably complex woman...an intelligent woman” when our only insights into her make her seem shallow, obsessive and destructive. Likewise we are told that her disappearing husband “had an intellectual’s mind and a humanist’s heart” and that he was “destined for big things”. Mostly we see him as profoundly stupid and tragically overrated by those he endangers. When the plot requires him to do the irrational he is more than equal to the task, and his bizarre behaviour (explained with just “he didn’t quite know why”) is rewarded with key to both the whole plot and his transformation. But, then again, he does have extraordinary eyes.

That Kassabova does not have much respect for her reader’s intelligence is again evident in the way many stories from Greek mythology are retold in conversation, without novelty or irony or anything that could not have come out of a tourist brochure, as if the reader is expected to be entirely ignorant of them. The whole Midas thing becomes tedious without ever really making more than a superficial symbol. Sometimes it descends into plain silliness.

Love in the Land of Midas is not a book about love (and Midas is generally more at home in Turkey). And if it’s not about love, it certainly isn’t about sex. Unlike a romance novel, the sex here happens mostly in the gaps between paragraphs, and there is nothing remotely sensual or even erotic about the bits we do get:

Their lips merged, followed by a merging of hips and loins, flat stomachs and sharp breasts, a swan-like neck, an arched back, pointed hips, hands which gripped not only shapes but surfaces, so avid were they.

And yet the novel has nothing of the grim realism New Zealand writers struggle so suffocatingly under. Kassabova writes with the unselfconsciousness of someone who hasn't yet learnt the pitfalls of the English language, or the literary cringe at romance. Her characters are never subject to everyday reality. They make taking near overdoses of heroin or getting both legs blown off seem romantic. They are beautiful people in beautiful places and this is enough to make them worthy of fiction.

So, the characters are two-dimensional, the sex is bad, the editing inadequate, and many of the small but pivotal details of the plot do not bear close scrutiny. Why, then, is the book so compelling?

Notwithstanding the reliance on an extraordinary amount of luck and some big coincidences, this is a well structured novel with most of the right ingredients: war, romance, hidden relationships, mysterious disappearances, a great location. And the way the story unfolds — with the grandchildren haphazardly on a path to uncover the fate of the grandparents (whose romance is what the story really turns on) is just brilliant. We know what they must discover, and we want to see it played out. But the fate of Daphne and Pascal does sneak up on us, unexpectedly providing the novel with real characters by the very process of their disintegration. And the land of Midas — supposedly such a petrifying desert — wins our admiration from the start. It could have been a great novel.

If Tim Corballis’s first novel were a film, it would, I imagine, be a grainy black and white with insidious bits of colour. There would be lots of detail eerily divorced from its context.. We would note a preoccupation with surfaces and proximities. There would be rare moments of connection. The sound would be murky, with bits of stilted conversation and lots of audible breathing. The audience would feel a curious mixture of claustrophobia, tension, fascination, disconnection, and boredom.

Below lowers us into the other world of the caver, where young Todd Duval finds himself in Deadmans Cave repeatedly in pursuit of an older man who seems to be repeatedly in pursuit of a lost caver (if nothing more Oedipal is going on). Todd’s only foray into solitary caving takes him as far as he can go — into a place where he must go backwards just to turn around:

...he found his body in a curved position, bent in the middle and knees. The position of the body, if rotated to the upright, was as though he was seated in his office.... Here the posture was supported by the shape of the cave, and felt inevitable, as though he had found ‘his’ place.

When he isn’t in his small flat or caving, Todd is up at the university trying to work on his mathematical thesis which involves “looking for some secret in space”, or he’s wandering around Auckland having strange encounters with people (often mother and father or their substitutes) and looking for “some truth about space itself”. For all of Todd’s ostensible focus on abstraction, the language of his interior world is one in which the words felt, sensed, imagined jump at you from every page.

But the invitation to connect this world with sex/ death/ the unconscious/ the crawl back to the womb... is subtle enough, and countered by the attention to surfaces which are not penetrated.

And every time we take the plunge into Todd’s thoughts, we’re obliged to negotiate the gratuitous obstacle of a colon. These colons, along with the infuriating habit of putting every “he said” at the start of every bit of dialogue, tends to make our potholed route through Todd’s world a little slower than it might have been.

Nevertheless, it’s a fascinating first novel even if the end gives you a funny feeling of having missed something. And it has a great cover.

Eiji Miyake, nearly twenty and long ago rejected by his mother, arrives in Tokyo on a quest to find the father he has never met and whose name he doesn’t actually know. Eiji cannot afford to spend all day in the Jupiter Cafe staking out his father’s lawyer and watching the girl with the perfect neck, so he gets a job in Lost Property, and gets led seriously astray by a fellow he meets in a bar.

Eiji has long had a tragic penchant for doing dodgy deals with the wrong gods, and this very human characteristic, along with a kind of wise foolishness, gives the narrator of David Mitchell’s number9dream a warm humour even when his tale drops us into the midst of a horror story. Tokyo is a vertical “Venice with the water drained away”, a vertiginous city where you never quite know where nightmares begin and daydreams end. Everything has a down-the-rabbit-hole or through-the-looking-glass feel, and the inescapable sense of tragedy is tempered by the overwhelming sense of wonderment.

number9dream is a thriller, a love story, a map of the human heart. It’s a book about dyfunctional families, about notions of honour, about Yakuza empires built on drugs, sexual slavery, murder and the Asian organ trade. God may be a vivisectionist, or a hippie on a flying surfboard having father-trouble in the manuscript of a deaf fabulist. Or he might be John Lennon who unobtrusively informs almost every page, discusses the meaning of his songs, and shares a laugh over the chorus of Ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé in # 9 Dream. Xanadu, Valhalla and Nirvana are gangland constructions. The holy grail is a trick site for hackers.

Mitchell loves to play with the scraps stolen from the great feast of languages — and mythologies. Each of the many memorable characters has a take on the meaning of life or the meaning of dreams. Their stories become part of a fantastically multilayered, compelling whole in which the writer manages to examine the processes of reality and fiction and dreams without ever making us want to skip a single paragraph in 418 pages.

Written with enormous energy and brilliance — and a kind of joy — number9dream really is a fabulous book.

Michael Morrissey’s Heart of the Volcano is the entertaining tale of Grant who seeks out the dangers of Guatemala because of “Woman trouble”, because “Being alone is the key to adventure”, because “He doesn’t know what he is”.

Grant felt overwhelmed with a terrifying sense of peace. He was alone in a cage of birds — dazzlingly attired Guatemalan women displaying their pineapples and bananas…. The sole male present, he felt absorbed by their gaze which neither invited nor repelled. In that swooning instant he was conscious of the intense rich otherness of this sensual central American world…. Grant felt weak in this warm female atmosphere, he was losing his male separateness.

Morrissey captures brilliantly the psyche of the male colonizer whose sense of self is utterly dependent on a sexuality so insecure that he has to take refuge in a Hemingway fantasy. The Guatemalans are just a flock of colourful extras in an exotic location to which the real men have come to find themselves. Suloski, the American cloud painter, would like to die with one hand on a paintbrush and the “other feeling the brown breast of a senorita”. The mandatory Brit, a retired Major Blewett, keeps losing his wife. The inscrutable Spaniard, Juan, doles out peyote as if he’s just stepped out of a Castaneda tale.

Then there are the unreal women. The “disagreeable” German girl, the covert focus of much of Grant’s guilty fascination, is a blonde cardboardcutout nude who has nothing to say except in hostile reaction to our hero’s intrusions. Back home in New Zealand there’s Helen who probably isn’t eagerly awaiting Grant’s return. Helen has “always been big on invisible forces”, but, through the filter of Grant’s one-track imagination, the Helen we see has all the depth of Rousseau’s Dream Venus.

We do get a glimpse of a potentially interesting character in Poppy, wife of Major Blewett, who seems to have accompanied the Major to Guatemala in the hope that the earth will “swallow him up”. She pops up in the middle of nowhere and addresses complete strangers with questions far more profound than the hackneyed observations they elicit in response:

“I think I’ll stop here.” The woman sat down on the rock…. She dropped the plaster cat into the dust.

Morrissey’s story is about jaded men who know that they’ve already misspent all their energy pursuing the mastery of women. As Suloski says: “Women are a curse, aren’t they? You can’t live with them and you can’t live without them. That’s why we have to climb mountains, right?” But Grant worries about the fact that women climb mountains too, and better than he can.

What the grumbling Heart of the Volcano boils down to, if you analyze all the clues Morrissey so archly presents, is that Grant can’t keep it up with women (he’s never got a relationship into “double figures”) because he’s so easily duped into believing that they have latent “muscle wasting disease”.

If only Grant could become a character in David Lyndon Brown’s book. If he could smell the roses, slay the phoney leopard on the book’s cover, deck out his boudoir with the skin, entertain women as fellow beings, and snuggle up to the muscle he so clearly admires, he’d die a happier man.

David Lyndon Brown’s Calling the Fish & Other Stories is what Morrissey’s story isn’t. I first came across “Calling the Fish” in a stripped-down version among the short short stories of The Third Century where it leapt up at me like the one, the flash of magic in a hundred little brilliants. In Calling the Fish & Other Stories, that particular story becomes the magic heart of a story among stories so coherent that I’m tempted to see the book as a novel, with each chapter able to stand alone, but richer — more complete — in the company of its neighbours.

“To a point” — an in-joke here — this structure is the moral basis informing the stories as well. If the central character, Martin Glass, too often ends up being man alone, it isn’t through any terror on his part of losing himself in someone else, or catching some sort of muscle-wasting disease.

Martin has “leopardised” his home with gay abandon, and invited a world of people in to drink the “millions of gallons of vodka and wine and cider and beer that have been slugged” at his round table. On this golden table, Martin has, “in a reckless moment of drunken insight”, tried to lay out “the functions and aspirations of human beings” by stenciling “FAITH, SHIT, TRUST, FUCK, HONOUR, EAT, LOYALTY, PISS” around the edge. He has left out DRINK, but figures it “goes without saying”. In Brown’s double-edged words, “Honour’s wearing a bit thin.”

He’s had trouble with “Faith” too, but that’s been restored by “the beautiful couple” in “Faith” — the ethereal blonde and her attentive “swarthy” man with “powerful eyebrows” and “tooled boots”. He could have stepped out of Morrissey’s story in which “Faith” is a female Grant has rejected, instead choosing to go to bed with “Hope”. Poor Grant. In Brown’s “The Triumph of Hope”, the name is merely a curse. And “Triumph” is bound to have a hollow ring to it.

There’s a great deal of darkness in Brown’s stories: blacked eyes, broken hearts, wounded egos, people so caught up in denial that they can’t be real about anything much. There’s also a lot of death — another word that doesn’t get laid on the table.

But while death is just a con for the gullible Grant in Morrissey’s story, dying and death go for much more than just “saying” in Brown’s.

Here is the triumph. While Morrissey’s “real” men-alone fail to understand the delusory nature of the power they feel shut out of, Brown’s inherently “illegitimate” characters already know that, in patriarchal terms, their lives are more or less meaningless. The confidence trick of deferred pleasure and power for the ultimate reward is never an option — except for those in denial. And, in these stories (or any others, for that matter), denial is the major source of tension and unhappiness. Life has to be loved in the here and now.

Love and Charity aren’t stenciled onto Martin’s golden table either, but “falling into a kind of love” is the commonest accident befalling these characters. Godfrey learns to see himself as the willing father of an autistic child. Crippled old Mr Glass discovers a secret joy in the “queer and different” place his local mall has become. A small boy is delightfully rescued by a “big brown man” in “Why I Never Learned to Swim”. Heather, watching her brother die of AIDS while the scent of roses enters his “draped and festooned” bedroom, suddenly sees that: “No…It’s not awful at all. It’s so beautiful I can hardly believe it.”

To call Brown’s stories “warm and uplifting” would be to make them sound much less than the funny, queen-sized, bitchy, clever, sad, gay, and totally unsentimental stuff they are, but there is real treasure here. This is joyful, beautiful, wishful, magical writing.

I imagine a marlin leaping, leaving a comet trail of blue light…. And I see Joe standing on the prow, looking down into the water, and all the fish of all the seas and the rivers poised far below, motionless like memories, like wishes, waiting to be called.

There must be something in the water down in the bayous of Mississippi writer, Barry Hannah’s, American South something that makes women sexy and men bonkers. The front cover of Yonder Stands Your Orphan, Hannah’s first novel in ten years, quotes Truman Capote calling Hannah ‘the maddest writer in the USA’. If you have the stomach for a story thick with sin and religion, congealed with mud, blood, jealousy, revenge, abuse, redemption, lust, insanity, magic, electric wit and murky humour, this one is for you. Here, women are either desirable, dying or whores. Men are mostly mad. Children survive largely by being ignored.

Of course there is, indeed, something in the water — a great many corpses, and those of a mother and child emerge from a sinkhole down behind Carl Bob Feeney’s place, in the trunk of a car owned by Man Mortimer and driven there seven years ago by the drug mule, Egan, now the local preacher with a large black cross tattooed on his cheek.

The car is recovered by the young sons of nurse Dee Allison, who is cut by Mortimer when he discovers she’s been two-timing him. Mortimer goes on a cutting and killing spree while Dee’s boys parade the mother and child skeletons round town, audit the naked singer, and observe the comings and goings from the Orphan’s Camp founded by the Ten Hoors who went mad after the death of their son and nailed each other to the walls.

Everyone is an orphan in this overpopulated novel which spends about a quarter of itself setting up enough characters for War and Peace with bizarre histories. But it is the very nasty Man Mortimer, with parents who had a chicken yard back in Missouri, whose isolation is the core business of the novel. Because the Sheriff is out of his depth in blood, and scared, and wanting only to sink himself in the girlish body of Melanie Wooten, a seventy-year-old widow much sought-after by all the old fishermen who frequent Pepper Farte’s Bait Store, Man, unhindered by the law, is free to pursue redemption, or whatever, as he will.

Fascinating, sure, but wading around, trying to keep track of all the orphans in the bayou, is a tad tiresome too.

C.K.Stead learnt from Sargeson that it is “still possible to write criticism which is a pleasure to read – if only you have the talent.” Stead has the talent. This is a very readable book, free of jargon, full of entertaining details and illuminating argument – especially against the enduring myths surrounding some New Zealand writers. Stead has a laudable willingness to take on the “pieties”, challenge his fellow writers and critics, and tell it the way he really sees it – even at the risk of having the weasels leaping for his jugular.

Stead doesn’t like to get caught up in value systems which won’t have a future. Despite the clawmarks, he has the comfort of knowing he’ll turn out to be right eventually. Meanwhile, we see his compulsion to set the record straight. Criticism “should have individuality, character, a personality, a voice…. some sense of a conversation, a community of interest.” But, having abandoned the safety of pretended objectivity, he gets enmired in personality. And while he’s digging up the dirt under the mounds of mythology erected to a Mulgan or a Middleton Murray, he’s also at work making a few of his own. There he is, the twinkle in an eye, as schoolboy Mulgan passes by grandfather’s vege garden. Here he is in Oxford sending postcards to Elizabeth Knox. And Curnow, Sargeson, Frame… all Kin of Place. But there’s C.K.Stead on Christine Hansen’s gorgeous cover, a lone tree in an empty landscape.

I’ll risk offending people I admire by saying that I particularly enjoyed watching Stead giving Lauris Edmond’s “Woman poet” a post-mortem savaging – even thought he misreads her poem, “The Lecture”, and cleverly uncovers the deceit which is its very point. This – and his preference for male writers (fourteen of the twenty are male) – suggests that, like many of our male critics, he reads only the surface of women’s writing and sees its subtexts as dirt.

Like Bertram, who praised Mulgan’s Man Alone for “such clean, direct masculine prose”, Stead admires R.A.K.Mason’s poems for their “muscular, direct and efficient” style, the “purity of their enactment”, their “vigorous exclusion of discursive extension”, their “uniform syntactical muscularity”.

But Stead’s no sexist. He calls Maurice Shadbolt “that portentous Masculinity” who writes like “a man with his thumbs in his braces, speaking ‘significantly’”. He champions Sylvia Ashton-Warner (against blatantly sexist criticism), favouring her “straight expository prose which has the clean sharp efficiency of a first-rate mind.” He lavishes praise on the “intelligence and imagination”, the “genius” evident in Knox’s Oxen (before giving other aspects of the novel a good rubbishing). And although Frame’s “fiction is not ‘pure’”, he likes it anyway.

Seriously, this is a book I couldn’t put down. Nor can I fault Stead for reading like a man, but I’d love to see him write essays on twenty of our impure, unmuscular writers.

[This review was delayed and the editor got stroppy with me and said he’d ”call it quits”. He didn’t edit the Dom Post Books pages for long]

There are some myths about writing that are guaranteed to incense writers. One of them is that if you put endless monkeys front of endless typewriters you’ll eventually get a novel. Those who espouse this theory fail to understand that a novel has to be a deliberate construction. It’s like saying that if you repeatedly drop all the Twin Towers debris from a great height you will eventually reconstruct the WTC. You won’t.

Another myth is that everyone has at least one novel in them. They haven’t. They may have stories to tell, but that doesn’t make them writers. Neither experience, nor the desire to be a writer, makes a writer. I’m sure Bill Manhire understood this when he started Victoria’s Creative Writing course: entry was always very limited and required a demonstration of prior writing skill.

But Massey University has decided to exploit all those wanna-be writers out there by taking money off 359 of them and publishing the best of 66 of them in a volume which is a blatant piece of false advertising designed to attract more money from more wanna-be writers. There are several problems here. A lot of this writing originated in set exercises – and it shows. Are we all not thoroughly tired of those empty nine-ways-of-looking-at-a-tea-bag things? Exercises are fine for learners, but leave them in the bottom drawer, please. And there is a worrying similarity in the style, creating some doubt about just how much input the editors, whose pictures grace the back cover, had in this writing. Which leads to the biggest problem of all: the admission, in the introduction, that most of the wanna-be writers on this course have never been readers.

I will give you some advice for free. Before you try being a writer, be a reader. Read lots. But chances are that if you haven’t pretty well always been a reader, you’re unlikely to become a writer. And if it’s money you want, take up computer programming.

If these four novels were read by someone in, say, Prague, they might well convey the notion that New Zealand has a high level of morbidity and mortality, orphaned children are common, everyone lives in intense personal isolation, and yearning for a lost parent is generally stronger than libido. Oh my god.

Lynn Davidson’s Ghost Net is a ravishingly poetic first novel, full of depth and insight, and remarkably subtle. It is also an ambitious novel. Davidson brings three of her characters out of the specific history and the immediate present of Prague, and sets them down on the coast north of Wellington (where Davidson herself lives). Here Karel, like the ghost net in his garden, has washed up many years after setting himself adrift from his wife and two young children in Prague under the Russians. Here too, his Czech daughter, Ana, having abandoned her husband and taken a holiday from her thesis on the art of the revolution, comes to meet the father she no longer knows, and introduce him to her seven-year-old daughter Ariel. Or so she says.

Her husband, Milan, has other ideas. He thinks she’s gone there to get as far away from him as she can. He doesn’t get as far as questioning why that might be, but then he doesn’t like the way she ‘carries questions around like baggage’. Ana maintains that Ariel has ‘a right to meet her grandfather.’ ‘What about my rights as her father!’ Milan retorts. It isn’t a question. In Milan’s eyes it’s all about him. But then he makes a living restoring old masters, while Ana wants to live in the freedom of the present.

Ana does have her own reasons for meeting her father. She is reluctant to openly question him and she retreats into a sometimes tiresome, silent interrogation, as if she has deliberately confronted Karel with his granddaughter to test his response:

Karel lifted Ariel’s hand up and shook it gently, ‘You were like this when I saw you last,’ he smiled at Ana.

Ana felt anger chopping up her breath. More time. She looked at the pale blue sleeve of his shirt, she saw that where the shirt sleeve was rolled back his skin was slack on the bone. How much time did they have? She wondered. Karel touched her back with the flat of his hand and she flinched with surprise. ‘Let’s go and buy iceblocks, he said, ‘there’s a dairy up the road.’

As though they were all in this together, Ana thought. As though she were his ally too.

Ana is so angry about Karel’s abandonment of her as a child, that she apparently forgets to be surprised by words like iceblocks and dairy. Their conversations actually take place in Czech – though Ana has an extraordinary facility with English – but she registers little in the way of cultural surprises. After three days in the country she is already familiar with the notion of ‘taking to the bush like a real New Zealand man.’ Ana is a little too much at home where Davidson is.

But this is a carefully written, much researched book – perhaps too careful, too researched. We may be left feeling that it’s all a bit contrived, a bit too self-conscious – especially in its principal character. In some ways Ana’s mother, Eva, and her best friend, Kristina, back home in Prague, have more life on the page – even though their secret envy is drawn more crudely. Ariel, tantrums and all, is irresistible. But Ana, herself, remains resistant and unresolved, and we fear that her choices may lead her back into a claustrophobia that, as her father’s daughter, she will be unable to tolerate.

Karel, finally at home in his coastal kitchen garden, where ‘the buried carrots and potatoes, green fists of broccoli, the lumpy beans, all seemed to hold their breath’, buries the ghost net (like a placenta), but the umbilical tug remains like pain in a severed limb. This really is a terrific first novel: the work of a born writer with a gift for understatement, lyricism and startling observation.

Swim, Jackie Davis’s second novel, takes us to Gisborne where another solo mum has grown up missing a parent. It’s Maya’s 37^th birthday and she’s sharing it with eight-year-old son Charlie, buying herself a present and eating icecreams on the beach. Money’s a bit tight, but Charlie seems like a very normal kid, and Maya seems an average sort of woman.

But lurking in the casual details of the first few pages is the black birthday bra with ‘its dark and slippery shine’ in a bag labeled Dangerous Curves. And in the dark recesses of the eftpos machine there is ‘the man… with his quill of black ink that went scratch scratch’ as it adds up what’s left in her account. Is Maya dicing with Death? All it takes is the sight of a man and a boy walking along the beach, to bring to the surface what Maya has ‘been burying’ for seven years – the death of Charlie’s father, Philip, in a crash. Dark and slippery? Dangerous curves? If it’s true that ‘every seventh wave is bigger than the rest’, then it might be a matter of sink or swim for Maya – even before the itchy black bra leads to the discovery of breast cancer.

Like Davidson’s novel, Davis’s might seem to be arguing that sole parenthood is a too perilous business, but Maya doesn’t have any choice – though she has her less rational moments when she blames Philip for having chosen not to pull through. Maya (like Davis) is a nurse, so she ought to know better, but they both seem to think that survival is dependent on the choice of sinking or swimming. Whether or not Charlie becomes an orphan is a matter of belief.

Few sole parents are going to be as desperately isolated as Maya is. She has no friends except Kathy, an old friend from nursing training who is also her sister-in-law. Charlie has no grandparents and only one aunt. There are Maya’s work colleagues, but they take themselves off to the other side of the patient-professional divide. There are Charlie’s school friend’s parents, but they are easily alienated when Charlie begins to prefer their company to his sick mother’s. And when we get to the heart of it, we find that the matter is not a seven year grief, but one dating back to childhood when Maya’s own mother died of breast cancer and she had to go and live with her heartless Gran. Maya wants her mother more than anything else in the world.

Davis manages to convey the horror and banality of illness without alienating the reader. With patience, rather than pace, she details the progress of Maya’s treatment, her struggle to maintain her autonomy and keep Charlie, to deal with the accumulated grief and the fear that threatens to overwhelm them both. And the end is a satisfying one – even if, like Davidson’s, it leaves some of the big questions still troubling us.

Raumoa Ormsby’s first novel, Dreams Lost Never Walked, continues the theme of lost parents, but here something more malignant than either cancer or claustrophobia is at work in the making of orphans. Poi (boy) Paki, born along with his dead twin, inauspiciously, outside the pub the night Cyclone Bola hit his East Coast village, is an orphan-in-waiting from he moment of his conception – a rape at a wedding in the local Paa. His father, a Te Kiore (Rat), was ‘an outsider, an interloper who did it’ to [Poi’s] Mum at the back of the meeting house then shot through’, vanished into ‘the mist’ (died) before Poi’s birth – as did his mother right after it. Now Poi, raised by his grandparents, has left school and is waiting to hear whether he’s been accepted by the army.

So Dreams Lost Never Walked is a coming-of-age novel with a title that promises something mistily tragic. But this is a novel that loses its way early on. It sets out to be somewhere between rural-Kiwi-joker comedy and serious social realism. The humour doesn’t work – not on any level, and the social realism sinks too easily into diatribe and then suddenly soars into romantic fantasy, but without any sense of pace or tension – or even motive – to drive it. Ormsby’s villains are simply brain-damaged psychopaths. His Maori women are helpless victims. His heroes, apart from the stereotypical Watson (almost a dead-ringer for Bert on Always Greener), are just more likeable villains.

Pop is Poi’s ‘Genie’ and Poi wants to be like him, but this genie seems unable to magic away the injuries that happen all about him, some of which can be laid directly at his own door. Is his inaction the result of wisdom, or have his past mistakes destroyed his confidence to be an effective father or elder? Or is it that Pop, being Maori, has been subjected to ‘decades of feeling that [his] language and traditions have been trampled on and are of little or no value’ (from ‘Raumoa Ormsby Speaks About the Issues Raised in Dreams Lost Never Walked)?

No matter. Who needs a hero when page 130 introduces the deus ex machina in the form of a blonde goddess in a BMW, a tough-girl lawyer with heaps of the time to sort out the family’s legal problems – especially since she’s got the hots for Poi’s Uncle Mo. So is this really a fantasy novel? Or an ‘issues’ novel? Well, I’m an issues novel sort of reader. I even think ‘holocaust’ is not too strong a word for what colonization did to Maori. But I expect a novel to know its way and keep its reader up with it. This novel is all over the place, and Pop’s sordid little secret provides no ultimate coherence. There is the basis for a good story in here, and Ormsby has some skill as a writer, but this could have used a lot of critical editing and rewriting to get it on track.

The sizzling exception among these novels, Chad Taylor’s Electric is a thinker’s thriller with an unreliable narrator and dubious, but memorable characters whose propositions are provocatively undecidable. Sam Usher is not looking for a parent, but he is most definitely an orphan. After a smash at/on speed (and every other drug available) effectively removes the other half of the only connection in his retrievable memory, Sam is left totally friendless, out of work, but slowly settling into ‘a nice little routine’ having ‘scored some good shit with the insurance money’. His ‘only memento’ is the scarring on his right shoulder where embedded glass shards continue to usher themselves painfully, in little pustules, to the surface.

The scene is an overheated Auckland in which Asian flesh is cheap, drugs are hard currency, it seems to always be night with ‘kids’ everywhere and all the lights going out. It’s Auckland, yes, but not as we know it. The novel is prefaced by apparently hard, factual information in Courier typeface, and we all know about Auckland’s power crash and its unidentified corpses found in cars. But this is an Auckland with all the NewZild removed, nothing Polynesian. Even the footpaths have become ‘sidewalks’. Everyone has surreal names and international connections. We have to wonder if it’s all a bad dream long before the Chrysler Building starts appearing or Sam starts looking for Mr Goodbye. And we may be reminded of David Mitchell’s number9dream long before the end makes its Japanese connection.

But where Mitchell’s Eiji Miyake, looking for his unnamed father, gets a job in Lost Property, Chad’s Sam, looking for something he’s apparently unable to name, gets a job in Data Retrieval from a guy he meets in a bar. And even though he’s overworked, he sets about the unnecessary task of sifting through the data he retrieves from all the crashed computers, looking for clues about the people behind these failures. One day he sees ‘this wonderful thing…. a single formula’ which leads him to a new life, an obsession with Candy and Jules, a couple tilting deludedly at the cutting edge of science. He also adopts one of their ‘friends’, the shady Lars Dedit, who turns out to be (as his name might predict) a kind of godsend, another deus ex machina, when he appears in Grafton Cemetery ‘in his white suit, stepping between the headstones like a traveller searching for his seat on a foreign bus.’

It may seem as if Sam has a death wish, but it’s really just that he has some unorthodox rebirthing techniques. It might be stretching things to read Sam in reverse as a would-be Ma’s boy, but his touchingly trusting habit of sucking up any white stuff offered to him by very mortal strangers, like the tired Helen Anyway, comes very close to the desperate infant.

I sucked hard. I wanted to trash everything I had known. Everyone was gone now and I was the last one left. I was sobbing on their behalf. She tapped out more for herself. Her face became mine. I was crying because I was her, because she was tired and alone.

It’s not just the sex+drugs+alcohol=death/womb: Sam has a routine with speed+car+water=waterbirth. But this isn’t a novel to be reduced to or by any recognizable formula. It’s a fast read with a flashy surface and print large enough to see by candle light. It’s a novel with enough depth to fascinate the slow, careful reader.

Ranstead’s, Robinson’s and Slaughter’s are all first books by New Zealand women. They have in common a world of violence, dark secrets and women falling.

Gillian Ranstead’s A Red Silk Sea begins with Laurie, a “beautiful, intelligent and wasted… golden girl falling from the skies and dashed upon the earth” after throwing herself, reluctantly, from the window of a very high hotel restaurant. It all happens very quickly. We spend the rest of the long novel painfully uncovering the reasons, through the recollections of the two people closest to her: her mother Käthe, a “communist” survivor of Auschwitz, but not of the small South Auckland town where she has come to teach German; and Cam, who has lived all her life in the violent, racist, ugly society of Waipahu, and not known any better until Laurie arrives to shine her “sliver of mirror” on what is seen locally as “the ordinary and everyday”. Says Cam, “She lit it up and made it unbearable.”

Käthe survived the holocaust, but she finds Waipahu unbearable and retreats inside her house. This is a novel in which the term “holocaust” is not used of the Nazi horrors – though they are presented with disturbing force – but of the lasting result of dispossession, of people cut off from their history, their self-esteem, their open-heartedness. Old Rangimarie, for whom Käthe writes her terrible story, makes an inherent parallel in the history of Waipahu:

This war was the harshest cataclysm, the one that began in the locked down hearts and mind and stayed there. It had left a hundred-year sadness in Api’s eyes and a holocaust of violence, abuse and death that did the damage these days…

This “holocaust” is, however, not just a Maori problem in Waipahu. Fatherless Laurie is about the only teenager in town who doesn’t get beaten to a pulp by a dutiful father. Beatings and rapes are a ritual part of keeping people in line. A man kicks a pregnant girl so badly she loses the baby. Another is beaten and gang-raped because she takes the monstrous Betty-Jane’s boyfriend. Cam, herself, is beaten in the street by her father (who pulls her dress over her head to do it), then shocked by the unprecedented slapping, shoving, kicking and swearing from her mother. And next door, Käthe, the barometer of local violence, stays in her room for days.

What Waipahu and Nazi Germany have in common is the slow acceptance of normalcy in their horror. Perhaps, though, neither Auschwitz nor Waipahu are, in the last analysis, the reason for Laurie’s fall. There’s a more fundamental problem – men and their expectation of possession.

‘If it’s just one man you’re with,’ Laurie reckoned, ‘they want all of you, they want your whole life. But if you’re with lots of men, they can only have you for a night or a week and that’s it. You keep your own life for yourself, that part of you that’s just you and no one else – it stays that way, intact.’

A Red Silk Sea is a big, complex novel; all encompassing like the arms of the “isthmus city” with which it has a major love affair going; full of people and stories, and atmospheric as the cover Athena Sommerfeld wraps around it.

In The Linoleum Room, Robinson has imagined up a novel that keeps us reading to the burning end, even though we read a tale flawed in the telling. It’s a first person narration by Annabelle who has, for years, been locked inside her own hissy-fit about her father and step-mother having created a baby while her mother was still dying of cancer. The trouble in the telling is partly that Annabelle cannot know what has been happening inside the locked room of her even more disturbed step-sister, Mia, at whose invitation she has escaped from her life after finding her boyfriend in bed with her hated half-sister, Emily.

To get round this problem, Robinson inserts two sections of third- person narrations labelled “Mia”. And then, to make it look like a series of first-person narratives, Robinson inserts four short sections narrated by Gary, the farm manager. Gary’s function, besides breaking up Annabelle’s incessant “I….I….I”, is to provide comic relief, but he is not funny, and neither is he credible as a character. He’s just a bad caricature, a figure of fun for the horrible real characters of the novel to feel superior about. If the novel had been made a third-person narrative, then the problem of Annabelle’s overwrought whinging would also have been addressed.

Emily (who has just attempted suicide) and older half/brother Matthew – the two likeable characters in the novel – are sent by the parents to join Mia and Annabelle for a cosy, bonding Christmas, while said parents are happily holidaying down south. It seems particularly heartless, but, hell, it serves the plot to have the kids there in the deserted farmhouse at Domestic Violence time – and at the end of the millennium. And, just to ratchet things up, Annabelle’s ex-boyfriend is added to the mix. Given the family history of spontaneous combustion, things are bound to get heated, and they do – chillingly so – but only after Mia’s crippling fall.

It’s perhaps a mistake to criticise the characters for a tendency to caricature or sudden personality transplant (Mia from battered doll to butch worm-farmer, Annabelle from cold bitch to caring nurse), since they can’t be measured against real, living people, but seen rather as actors role-playing. The whole gothic performance makes perfect sense this way, fits nicely with Chris Coad’s surreal, claustrophobic image of net-wrapped trees on the cover.

If Ranstead’s and Robinson’s novels seem self-consciously fictionalised, Slaughter’s Her Body Rises consciously blurs the distinction by interspersing fictions with poetry, and by opening with the story “Wheat” in which the protagonist attends a class on writing autobiography. “Wheat”, which won the Katherine Mansfield Award in 2004, presents us with a perfect set of ambiguities which, like everything else in this book, rewards re-reading. Here is the lyrical beauty of a milk and honey (mother and child) world into which the nice policeman intrudes equivocally after hell has sucked them in.

The world Slaughter’s book hails from is much like the small town of Ranstead’s characters, but Slaughter conveys it all in language which permits no moralising: “The moon drove over the edge by the beach where young girls/ back down in station wagons”. When “he takes her to a dark flat/they go wild with patrimony”. The point is never laboured.

Matrimony is hardly a viable option in Slaughter’s stories. “Sleeping Over” seems to present the ideal father:

that mix of teasing fun and yes-sir authority all kids look up to…. the kind of Dad who got on all fours and gave you bucking pony rides, who told stupid riddles and poured extra goo on your ice-cream when no one was watching…

But we begin to see that he leaves a trail of neurotic and suicidal destruction behind him. And Slaughter’s subtly suggestive language insinuates something more than a hula when “he made us die of giggles from doing it with us”.

One of the troubles is the “childhood impression that women weren’t fitted with quite enough bones, so an extra skeleton was sewn into their clothes” (“Her First”). But, if her body does not rise, a woman’s bones have a habit of rising through her skin. The small daughter of the vet sees the “bones beneath her mother’s face seem suddenly to get very close to the surface” (“The Smallness of Bones”), by which we know that the woman is going under. In “Flyleaf” the disposed-of woman’s bones rise through her body and are picked up, through the rotten floorboards of the old house, by Chloe, who won’t heed her abandoning father. She handles the flyblown lamb, Cinders, which the father neither treats nor euthanizes. In Chloe’s world there are crusty sores “like scrapings from the barbeque”, coils of furry shit, and all the murdered woman’s treasures to observe and play with. In the end things will go to blazes for reasons that have nothing to do with “the plot”, as they do in Robinson’s novel.

The poems complicate the stories. The book’s title is from the poem “Ophelia practises her autograph”:

But Ophelia, spurned, is best known for having drowned and resurfaced in Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Even the titles of the poems – “Magnificat Falling”, “Gravida, Gravida” – tell us which way her body goes.

The final story, “Dialogue With Distance”, puts it all together without importing a holocaust victim. It’s just widowed Nana, having come from England for Christmas, “a woman who cannot stand upright here”, falling and falling only to “resurface each time without a piece of history”. Still, a photograph of her great-grandson leaping recalls her raising her arms to dance with a distant partner.

Through all the morbid straining for self in mirrors, the obsession with skin and bones, the endless insult and abuse and abandonment, survival might seem in doubt.

But the children are insistent. Their bodies are not constrained by our history, but straining forward into their own.

It’s a more hopeful end than that of A Red Silk Sea, though that novel does leave some room for hope. Those who inhabit The Linoleum Room are, fortunately, unlikely to produce any children.

Vivienne Jepsen used to be a Wellington writer. She is now a hopeless crip hoping to finish her travel book, Legless in Turkey, sometime soon.