This week's BOOK OF THE WEEK is Lloyd Jones's urgent novel The Cage.
>> Read Thomas's review.
>>Lloyd Jones will be talking with Philip Woollaston at the VOLUME MAPUA LITERARY FESTIVAL on 21 September. Click through to find out more and book your tickets now.
>> Jones discusses the book with Gregory O'Brien.
>>Jones wants you to hate his book.
>>Louise O'Brien reviews the book on Radio NZ.
>>"Vivid and meticulous." —The Guardian
>> Radio from across the ditch.
>> Some book club notes!
>>Other books by Lloyd Jones.
 | Peat by Lynn Jenner {Reviewed by THOMAS}
If words are the currency both of poetry and of the interface with bureaucracy, what is the role of a poet as a ‘public intellectual’ in New Zealand? What is the relationship between the ‘creative’ and the ‘responsive’ parts of a writer’s mind? Are these parts distinct, or does one somehow inform the other, or does each inform each? Lynn Jenner’s bookPeat is the sort of book that keeps thinking inside your head after you have finished reading it. It is at once a record of the effect on community, history and land of the building (between 2013 and 2107) of the Kapiti Expressway, a so-called ‘Road of National Significance’, near Jenner’s home, and a record of Jenner’s tentative and sensitive quest to get to know Dunedin-based poet Charles Brasch (1909-1973) through his poetry, memoir and letters to the editor, through historical residua, by visiting the houses in which he had lived, and by touching his books in the Otago University Library. The first half of the book consists of essays of varying length, concerning one or the other topic, or both (when relating Brasch’s visit to Douglas Lilburn in Kapiti in 1950). The essays generally arrange their contents temporally, as narratives or micronarratives. The second half of the book consists of two alphabetical ‘glossaries’, or archives, on the two subjects, arranging their contents spatially and providing depth and colour to terms and entities referred to in the essays. It is as if these archives are the strata, the histories, the settled ‘facts’ from which the essays — the hesitant and uncertain trials in what Jenner calls “the unshapely present” — arise and into which they feel for meaning. “Stories of the present resist endings,” writes Jenner, and the unifying element of the book is Jenner’s attempt to see whether the enigmatic Brasch can provide some way of aligning or usefully arranging the outward-facing and inward-facing lives of a poet. As soon as the Kapiti Expressway was proposed it began to change the relationship between the local community and the land, and between the various people in that community. Jenner seeks to understand some of this change. “From the moment the project had received consent, the Expressway began to speak with its own voice, and for more than three years, it had not stopped. ... In 2017 I still believed that the Expressway had a character and that I could discern that character from its behaviour, as you might a person.” Once completed, it is the noise of the road that impacts most heavily on the community (“Noise is a short word. Say it slowly and it sounds a little like a dentist’s drill”). Because this noise (eventually) falls within regulatory standards, and because it affects the community unevenly, it becomes a divisive rather than a cohesive element. “The fact that the community at large ‘moves on’ so quickly, and the unpleasant situation still happening to a few becomes invisible, bothers me.” In Charles Brasch’s letters to the editor and other writings about his community, he expresses strong concern about developments that deplete rather than enhance the aesthetic life of Dunedin’s citizens, and shows a keen and almost pained interest in the quality of change. “Brasch was first and always concerned with beauty,” writes Jenner, and he believed that the experience of beauty, be it in art, nature or civic life, was a vital way in which people of all sorts could improve themselves and their lives. Although Brasch was white, male, and wealthy, he was also very much an outsider in the New Zealand of his time: Jewish, sensitive, socially and sexually enigmatic. “Brasch doesn’t fit into any single category,” Jenner observes, and this reflects Brasch’s thoughts about himself, when he speculates that the writing of the ‘outer’ concerns of his life (so to call them) may provide some sort of pivot around which he might swing such ‘inner’ concerns as the writing of poetry: “These sketches, I see now, have a purpose, a use for me: they will remake me, create an image of myself & so give me in my own eyes a reality & a stability that I scarcely possess even yet, & a continuity which I have never achieved. They may offer me a centre to write poetry from, possibly a hint of direction too.” Peat may well be reaching for the same mechanism, a calibration of inner and outer concerns, of the individual with society, of the physical world with time.
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>> Book your ticket to hear Lynn Jenner in conversation with with environmental planner and social scientist Charlotte Šunde at the VOLUME MAPUA LITERARY FESTIVAL in September.
>>Read Thomas's review.
>> Radio NZ review.
>>"A scalpel-sharp tale of misadventure."
>>"Would you consent to going under her scalpel?"
>>Shuker talks with Kim Hill.
>>Q&A with Carl.
>>"Carl Shuker is a novelist; a good one, too, an award-winning one."
>>Carl Shuker will be speaking with Naomi Arnold at the VOLUME MAPUA LITERARY FESTIVAL on 22 September. Book your tickets now.
>>Start reading.
>>Books by Carl Shuker.
"You’d think Carl Shuker couldn’t get any better, but A Mistake is the novel at its visceral and emotional best. This is the most compelling book I’ve read in years. It pulls you along at breakneck speed through questions of failure, exposure and manners. Shuker reinvents the form with every novel and A Mistake is a masterpiece which feels more like a body than a book — the life pumps and glugs and flexes inside its pages." —Pip Adam
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A Mistake by Carl Shuker {Reviewed by STELLA}
Medical misadventure is the stuff of shouty headlines and third-hand anecdote: told, embellished and finger-pointing. We all know mistakes happen in all professions but when it comes to medicine we are quick to blame and sharply condemn. Accountability is fine, but where is the line between personal responsibility and institutional culpability? In Carl Shuker’s A Mistake, his latest novel, we are in crisis mode from the opening pages. A young woman with severe abdominal pain is in A&E — immediate surgery necessary. Elizabeth Taylor, perfectionist, surgeon, 27 hrs on her feet, is in charge and the theatre is ready — the stage set. We know that this is just the beginning of a disaster, and just as we, the reader, are shunted into the midst of this medical freneticism, the author calls cut and the clapper board comes down and we are taken back to 1986 — to the launch of the space shuttle Challenger. The tension is the same, the anticipation and our watchfulness as the audience just as intense. From the small confines of the theatre and looking down through Elizabeth’s eyes at her patient (well, her patient’s body — her awareness of the woman sometimes seems absent), we are suddenly surrounded by the hype and immensity of space science and we are looking up at the sky in wonder — waiting and on tenterhooks as the countdown begins. Shuker cleverly moves between these two situations building an energetic forcefield — and what some readers will feel is a distraction is anything but: technical language — medical in our hospital theatre and astrophysical at NASA mission control, blow-by-blow action — as the surgeons operate and as the NASA team relay information (the as-it-happens variety), the power hierarchy — who’s in charge in each scenario, and the realisation of the error (too late to save anyone). It all piles up around us — the chaos growing. Yet it is what happens next that will reveal more: the consequences for the medical team and for the engineers. Shuker’s Elizabeth Taylor is not the easiest character to slide along with — she’s a perfectionist, dedicated, frustrating, sometimes a lousy friend, brash, dismissive of fools, and is described variously as a brilliant surgeon and a ‘fucking psychopath’. Yet she's loyal, takes the rap for the mistake and, unlike the bureaucratic nightmare she has to work under, she’s not looking for the ‘good’ PR story even when there is wriggle room for her to distance herself from the crisis. But it’s hard to tell whether she has been altered by the mistake or is ultimately only concerned for her own record. Ego, power and success are themes that you expect in this story, and with these comes the flip side: young doctor burnout and suicide, overwork, failed relationships, doubt, recklessness and the unrelenting pressure to be right always. Shuker’s new novel is a departure in style from his previous work. The Method Actors, his first novel, which I read back in 2005, was a big, brilliant, complex book. A Mistake is sharp, scalpel-fine. Shuker has pared this novel back to bone and gristle, letting the reader feel, by being stabbed repeatedly with attack language, reckless behaviour, fleeting insights and snide dialogue, the intensity of this life and this error. The ending is as abrupt as the start and you will be wounded — but intrigued by that scalpel cut. Long after you read this novel you will have a scar to remember it by. |