News Pigs by Tim Wilson (VUP) 2014

This is the first book that I haven’t finished for this blog.  I got half way.  I was looking forward to reading Wilson’s second book because I enjoyed his first novel but alas…I just don’t ‘get’ News Pigs.  The novel is about Tom Milde, a down and out poet and print media hack living in New York who has been wooed into TV news by poverty and a lack of options.   The invitation to TV news media sends Tom on a helter-skelter scramble to get to the location of a mass shooting for a live cross to the PLC news channel.

While hoofing it to location, Tom quips about his home-country PLC (which is meant to be NZ but isn’t), the media, America, his non-existent love life, and his journalist heroes and competitors.  The novel (well, the first half anyway) reads like a mix between a British farce and a satire, which sounds like fun - but the novelty of using symbols and bold type lets it down and makes it hard to read.

There are frequent swear words in the novel that are indicated by symbols rather than letters e.g. $#@&bird and Mother £%#$er which I just found annoying – if you want to say fuck and it’s appropriate to the character and situation, then just say fuck.  And then there’s the words in bold, and CAPS and black space and love hearts which all seems a bit juvenile, like when I was in form two and I had one of those pens that had 6 colours and I wrote each sentence for a homework assignment in a different colour.  And then there’s the footnotes which I ended up ignoring.

Perhaps using all these whiz-bang affects could  be a commentary on the short attention span and frantic pace of media, and the juvenile cuss words and fonts perhaps reflect the lack of maturity of Tom and the media he works in, but I just found it exhausting.  John Gardner talks about reading novels as entering a vivid dream, but Wilson’s writing continually shook me out of the narrative dream.  This could have been Wilson’s aim, but I’m not sure why.

The last novel I reviewed (Carnival Sky) dealt with journalism, and I read a review where Marshall was panned for not using the right language in regards to a tweet.  While I felt completely assured that Wilson knows the media he was writing about because he was the TVNZ correspondent in New York, I finished Marshall’s book because of the characterisation and his proficiency with emotional language as the novel went on.  However, with Wilson’s novel the character seems superficial, as perhaps it should be for a farce/satire, but the language and the use of every bell and whistle was distracting all the way through.

Carnival Sky by Owen Marshall (Vintage 2014)

My friend Maggie calls Owen Marshall the Chekhov of Timaru, justifiably so given his incredibly successful career, while I refer to him as the Big OM, and my father calls him “your mate the writer” mainly because he can’t remember anyone’s name (he can usually remember where they live and who they are related to, and what they were up to twenty years ago, but a name - no), but he’s also ‘my mate’ because I did Owen’s fiction writing course at Aoraki Polytechnic in 2001.  Doing the course was for me, a moment of personal transformation, and Owen’s latest novel deals with the same theme.

            

Sheff is a jaded journalist in Auckland who is trying to deal with the flux of print journalism.  He is also increasingly frustrated that tabloid fodder is valued over the informed investigative journalism that he writes.  Amongst the concerns about his profession, Sheff is also dealing with (and reeling from) personal tragedies, and his father is dying.  Sheff decides to chuck in his job, and after a bit of dithering, goes to his home town Alexandra with his sister, to be with his parents.  It’s while Sheff is in Alexandra that he starts his emotional transformation.

            

In some respects, the novel reminded me of the film adaptation of  Maurice Gee’s In My Father’s Den, mainly because of the film’s Central Otago location (and also because it’s a son returning to his home town).  Central Otago is a place of weather extremes – stinking hot in summer and hoar frosts in winter.  Being so far inland gives it a sense of isolation, containment, and acridness.  Lloyd Jones notes in his writing that he is interested in coastal dwellers because they are continually looking out to the coast, to possibilities and otherness, whereas a Central Otago location, absent of a coast line, suggests that characters are hemmed in by the hills which means they only have themselves to look at, and into.  This is done extremely well in Owen’s novel.  The contained physical landscape parallels with the family’s sense of stasis as they nurse their father/husband, and essentially, wait for him to die.  The containment of the physical landscape and family circumstances allows Sheff to get to know his home town, his family, and re-evaluate his life.

            

Gee’s novel, and the film of the same name, is about puritanical repression and the fatal consequences of it.  Owen’s novel does deal with puritanical repression, in terms of the male characters inability to be emotionally present and available, but it’s not as intense; it is more hopeful.  At the end of each chapter there are little vignettes where Sheff recollects incidents from his past, and reveals his dreams for the future.  The vignettes are at times humorous, and show Sheff’s depth of feeling.  I really enjoyed the succinct incidents, and how they show the randomness of memory at such an emotionally fraught time. 

           

While Sheff is undergoing an emotional transformation, the physical is also represented.  Sheff is very clumsy and seems to attract random physical accidents to his person, from nosebleeds to getting smacked with a cricket ball.  The other sense of physicality comes from Sheff’s father, Warwick, who is dying from cancer, whose physical presence is diminishing daily.  The other physical presences in the novel are the stones that Warwick polishes.  Bowls of rose quartz, jasper and obsidian, to name a few, littered the house until Warwick’s wife insisted that he keep a bowl of his favourite stones in his sickroom.  Warwick likes the stones because they start out as something ordinary but can be polished up to gradually reveal the colour, the inner beauty of the stone.  When the light hits the bowl, Warwick says it looks like a carnival sky.  The saying, and title of the novel, seems to combine the beauty of the landscape with the revelation of an inner emotional life.

            

The only niggles I had were that Sheff seemed a bit older than 44 at the beginning of the novel, but as the story continued he seemed to act his age, and I warmed up to him, and felt for him.  Also, I thought it was a bit odd that he didn’t seem to have a cellphone to use to get help when his car broke down.  These are very minor niggles and were soon forgotten once Sheff revealed himself more.   Carnival Sky is a book that examines middle-age, and the potential for transformation.  I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and its gentle unravelling of Sheff’s emotional life, his attempts to reconnect with his family, and to make new meaningful connections in middle age.  

The Families by Vincent O’Sullivan (VUP 2014)

Vincent O’Sullivan is one of New Zealand’s most esteemed writers that I haven’t read enough of.  I do vividly remember reading O’Sullivan’s Shuriken for School Cert English.  It’s a play about a prisoner of war camp in Featherston which held 50 Japanese soldiers during the Second World War.  Whenever Featherston is mentioned I think of the play and its portrayal of the culture clash between the New Zealand and Japanese soldiers.  O’Sullivan is also the current Poet Laureate, a novelist and academic.  The Families is a collection of short stories.

As the title of the collection suggests, The Families examines the relationships between husbands and wives, siblings, parents and their children, and couples who have no children, and examinations of long term friendships.  While the majority of family relationships examined in the collection are upper middle-class families, there are a few stories with working class people.  What most of the stories have in common is an emotional restraint, the characters inability to discuss feelings frankly, or to have feelings of intimacy in their relationships.  The past is also a preoccupation for the characters.

Another commonality between the stories is the examination of language, finding the rights words, and how some words don’t sound right, or sound worse, than their literal intent.  Memories from war also litter the collection through the characters interest and/or participation in international conflicts.  There are also, and it may be crass for me to mention it, a lot of men clutching women’s breasts and/or making reference to breasts.  Every mention is in keeping with the stories, and I don’t mean to insinuate that the references are vulgar, just that there were frequent mentions of men clutching breasts, and in some instances the manner of clutching are similar i.e. a man standing behind a woman and reaching over her shoulder.

Wellington is also the scene for the majority of the stories.  One of the aspects I enjoy about reading stories from my place in the world is that I can see the characters travelling along the roads that I travel on too.  While the physical location of the stories was familiar, the preoccupations with aging, death and long term relationships wasn’t really something I could intimately relate to, however “On Another Note”, the title story of the collection, and “Luce”, have characters that are at a similar stage of life that I am.

I’ve been reading a lot of Alice Munro’s short stories at the moment – trying to see how she extends the form – and admiring how her stories feel like novels in their complexity of human interactions.  O’Sullivan’s collection is in a similar vein.  Like Munro, the effects of the war litter O’Sullivan’s stories, as does the importance of place, and both writers have confident and distinctive voices, and use language seamlessly.  The gentle pace of both writers narratives belie the emotional impact of the stories, some of which are longer than 5000 words.

I do wonder whether “The Families” was the best story to represent the collection.  To me, the lasting impression I get, is of older couples coming to terms with their lives and relationships, rather than the parent-child dynamic.  However, on flicking through the collection, I can’t see another story that would encapsulate the collection…perhaps “Holding On” because of the connotations of the title.  I also don’t really like the cover – it’s too stark for the subtlety of emotion displayed within the covers.  However, this is a short story collection I can see myself returning to, and re-reading.

Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings by Tina Makereti (Vintage 2014)

In my last post about Farr’s novel, I mentioned that I had a few issues with the framing of her narrative, however in Makereti’s novel the framing device works to show the resonances of the past on the present.  A spirit, a kehua, tells his story of living on Rēhoku (Chatham Islands) and when Ngāto Tama and Ngāti Mutunga invaded his home in 1835.  The Waitangi Tribunal report, which Makereti has included at the start of her novel, states that Moriori:

“were willing to have newcomers amongst them.  Later, the insurgents attacked.  Moriori offered no resistance.  A peaceful people, with plentiful food and no competitors, Moriori had outlawed warfare centuries before, after parting from mainland Māori and settling on Rekohu.”

After the conflict, the kehua is left in-between, not yet dead but not living either.  In this liminal space the kehua is able to reach through to his descendants, and feel their confusion about the past and how it is affecting their present lives.

The kehua keeps an eye on Iraia.  Iraia lives as a slave with the Irihāpeti whanau in Queen Charlotte Sound, as his mother did when she was taken from the Chatham Islands to New Zealand.  Iraia is a similar age to Mere, and her father, Tu Irihāpeti allows them to play together despite their different social status.  However, as the children get older and become teenagers, their attraction develops into more than friendship.  This is problematic because Iraia is not considered suitable marriage material by Tu.  The narrative follows Iraia and Mere and the choices they make about their relationship in the late 1800s.

The kehua also keeps an eye on Lula and her twin brother Bigsy (William).  Lula and Bigsy’s mother, Tui, is Māori and their father is Pakeha.  Lula was born naturally, and physically appears Pakeha, Bigsy “is cut out” of his mother, and physically looks Māori.  When they are babies they feel whole together, however as they age their differences, their appearances (and who they appear to be), slowly pull them apart.  

The children are bought up in a Pakeha household and have very little knowledge of Tui’s family.  However, when Tui dies, the kids learn that she left instructions for her tangi to be held at her marae in Picton. Although Lula and Bigsy are puzzled because Tui never talked about her whanau, and only took the kids to Picton when they were babies, they respect Tui’s wishes.  It is at the marae that fragments of Tui’s and her whanau’s history and connection to the Chatham Islands comes to light.  

I haven’t come across another New Zealand novel that deals with the history of Moriori and Māori.  Lula researches the invasion from both Moriori and Māori sides using text books and oral accounts, and she also compares the invasion of the Chatham Islands to the European invasion of New Zealand.  While relating invasion and colonial histories is an incredibly fraught task, Lula’s three perspectives (Moriori, Māori and Pakeha) enable her to speak with sensitivity, while also giving hope that the past can be bought to light and talked about.

Makereti’s novel shows the elements of historical fiction that I enjoy.  It illustrates the past but it also shows how the past directly affects people now.  A lot of historical fiction just relates the past, the past becomes a foreign country that we visit and then just leave, but the most rewarding historical fiction, I think, shows us the past and then shows us how complicated an individual’s or group’s  relationship to the past can be, and how it is shaping their consciousness now. Makereti’s novel shows what people choose to remember and what they want to forget, it shows how individual subjectivities are challenged as they question who they are and where they belong, what to accept, what they leave behind, and where home is.

The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt by Tracy Farr (Freemantle Press, 2013)

Tracy Farr grew up in Australia and has lived in New Zealand since 1996, which I think qualifies her for inclusion on a New Zealand book blog.  Farr’s novel is infused with reflections on both countries.  The main character, Lena, or Dame Helena if we’re being official, reflects on her life, and the cities she has lived in: Perth, Sydney, Dunedin and Singapore, to name a few.   As Lena moves from city to city, country to country, we learn of Lena’s love of music which starts with humming into a comb wrapped with tissue paper, to the cello, to learning the instrument in which she makes a name for herself - the Theremin.  The electrical instrument signifies modernity, and that Lena is a thoroughly modern woman.

 

The novel doesn’t have a plot as such, rather it re-tells episodes from Lena’s life as she reflects on her experiences.  At the beginning of the narrative a documentary film maker asks Lena to share her stories.  While Lena has encountered some fame for her musical abilities throughout her life, she is now a pensioner whose fame is now a memory, memories that the filmmaker is keen to capture.  Interspersed between the scenes set in the present, are reflections and memories of the past.  Initially, I thought that Lena’s reflections are the stories she is telling to the filmmaker because the memories are ‘told’ more than they are ‘described.’  By ‘told’ I mean more ‘tell’ than description.  I got this impression because the sentence length in most of the narrative is long, which, to me, indicates speech, a lingering story, spliced with commas, and semi-colons.  But, Lena’s reflections aren’t told to the filmmaker; instead they end up being episodes that she has written about herself.  This made me question the point of having the framing device of the filmmaker if it isn’t the filmmaker that Lena is telling her life story to.

 

However, the intrusion of the filmmaker into Lena’s life initiates her reflections, and it also brings up a conversation about memory, about truth and invention.  Mo, the filmmaker, asks Lena to try to tell her story in a new way, to make the old stories feel new by not relating them in the same way she always has.  Instead, Mo wants Lena to improvise, to make it fresh in order to acknowledge both invention and reality in memory.  Lena says that she will try, but I got a greater sense that Lena was choosing what to reveal rather than inventing elements of story.  Throughout the novel there are pieces of information that Lena is keeping to herself, which for the reader is a little frustrating but it also shows that you can only ever know something about someone if they choose to reveal it.  To emphasise the metafictional qualities of the text, Mo also says that the final film will reveal as much about her as it will Lena.  In filming Lena, Mo is also revealing herself.

 

While the predominant theme is memory, sexuality is also dwelt on in the novel.  Lena has several love affairs with men and women, but the most significant relationship is with Beatrix, an artist and ‘new woman’ of the 1920s.  Farr uses the analogy of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which is being built when Lena arrives in the city, to show the increasing physical and emotional closeness of the women.  The two ends of the bridge don’t connect when Lena and Beatrix first meet, but they do eventually, and the pair, along with the rest of the city, walks across it.  This joining signifies their physically relationship, I think, but it certainly isn’t a point that is lingered on, which is strange given that Lena is 18 at the time and there hasn’t been a hint of any other sexual activity.  I would’ve thought it would be a big deal, in more ways than one, that could have been lingered on a little more explicitly.  Not doing so relates to Lena’s keeping some things to herself but I just don’t think keeping everything to herself works in a novel.

While I do have a few reservations about the framing device in the novel, the book also offers a perspective on Lena’s life lived through two World Wars and extending through to the 1990s.  We learn about the personal challenges in Lena’s life however, societal conformities about sexuality and gender roles are held at a distance.  A strength in the novel is Farr’s descriptions and obvious love of the ocean, and the scenes with musical instruments were delightful.  Farr’s novel has been long listed for the 2014 Miles Franklin literary award.

Lamplighter by Kerry Donovan Brown (VUP 2014)

Lamplighter made me think of Lloyd Jones and his philosophy about narrative.  In this interview (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_CTZrEt81U) Jones says that he enjoys elements in fiction where divergent points meet up, for instance when oral and written traditions make their way into a story.  Jones isn’t interested in plots (although one usually emerges) but in a persuasive narrative voice that communicates playfulness and intense concentration.  Jones also notes how people who are sealed off from the world look to the horizon where possibility and ‘otherness’ exist.  All of these elements are in Donovan Brown’s novel.

The prose in Lightlighter is at times poetic, especially when Donovan Brown is describing the wetland area where the novel is set.  The story is told in third person narration focalised through Candle.  His Grandfather is the current Lamplighter, a role that Candle is set to inherit, and his apprenticeship involves following his Grandfather as he lights the lamps every evening.  While a great deal of the descriptive prose is poetic, at other times, the writing slips into fable, especially when the Lamplighter is recalling stories of the creatures that exist beyond the lamplight.  There are also references to pā sites and battles on the land.  The novel is full of stories about place that are recalled through oral storytelling.  The divergent elements of storytelling – oral and written – meet and play with each other in Brown’s novel, and show the palimpsest of stories that mingle together in a single place.

I found Brown’s narrative voice intoxicating and lulling, like any good fable, but the story is also bound to the realities of life in a coastal settlement.  It’s the meeting of the divergent elements of fable and realism that I really enjoyed, and the combination made the story feel timeless.  While there are indications that the novel is set recently, the inclusion of a video game for example, it also feels like the action could be happening at any point in the last couple of centuries.  The community’s relationship to modernity is playful while also having the intense concentration that Jones speaks of because the sense of timelessness shows the unchanging attitude of some members of the community.

However, the community of Porbeagle is on the brink of change because the lamplighter’s role is being disestablished, which means that Candle’s apprenticeship is nearing the end.  The role of the Lamplighter is to light a perimeter against the dark “and the wildernesses beyond.”  This boundary between light and dark is like the ocean’s horizon to Jones.  In the wilderness lies other ways of being, it’s where ‘otherness’ exists.  The lighting of the boundary against the dark is an allegory for sexuality. Throughout the narrative Candle negotiates the community’s attitude towards his sexuality.  The mix of fable and realism in relation to sexuality is very clever.  A novel that discusses homosexuality in realist terms has perhaps become too familiar, and canny readers are aware of the themes and the feelings of characters who are coming to terms with their sexuality in a community that is perhaps disapproving.  Brown makes a familiar story new by mixing elements of realism and fable in discussions about sexuality.

About halfway through the novel when I had sobered up from the intoxication of the language I wondered where the novel was going, but a plot does come into play and all the stories of the Lamplighter and mythology come together.  The characters in the novel are fully formed and entirely convincing, but the most impressive feature in Brown’s writing is his descriptions (and evident love) of the coastal environment. While I didn’t always know the critters and plants that Brown was describing, the layering of detail added to magical qualities of place.

Monday 10 March

Session: Unravelling the National Grid
Poet, novelist and screenwriter Anne Kennedy on illicit love, passion and embroidery

Anne Kennedy writes across many forms which illustrates her creative philosophy of making every project depart from the known.  Usually an idea for a piece of work suggests a form but on occasion, such as her poetry collection Sing Song, Kennedy changes her mind.  Initially she thought Sing Song would be an article that she could publish in the Women’s Weekly so that she could reach a large audience but when she started writing the article her aims for the project didn’t fit within the confines of an article, so she changed to poetry.  Poetry allowed her space for experimentation which a poetry audience is receptive to, and to a certain extent, expects.  Alongside her philosophy of ‘departing from the known’ determining the form of her project, the expectations of the audience are also a factor.

Kennedy believes that we are all intrinsically artistic but the rigours of life and schooling drum it out of us.  Also, the notion of having to produce something, to be published, or displayed, in order to justify your artistic endeavours also puts people off creating.  A creative act actively fights this shut down, and through writing Kennedy tests artistic boundaries.  She believes that it is beneficial for artists to be immersed in other art forms, aside from the one they’re working in, when they are working on a project.

Kennedy studied music at university and receive a liberal and creative education based in theory, science and essay writing skills which have served her well over her creative career.  This is such an important point to make at a time when the Government continues to cut funding for the Humanities.  Professor Grant Guilford from Victoria University reiterates Kennedy’s point in an opinion piece in today’s Dominion in reaction to the recently released Government’s Tertiary Education Strategy:
“The humanities and social sciences are not just about the joy of living – reason enough to treasure these subjects. They are also pivotal in the development of a progressive, inclusive and internationally connected society. The arts, languages and literature, and other humanities subjects, play a central role in the celebration and critical reinterpretation of our national identity and our place in the world.” 

 

Click on the link for the full article http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/comment/columnists/9811702/Humanities-on-path-to-identity#

 

The magic that happens on the page keeps Kennedy enthusiastic about writing and even when the magic isn’t so apparent, she keeps chugging away until it does.  Writing certainly has a work aspect in that some days she doesn’t feel like it, but she usually writes through any road blocks she’s experiencing.  When she begins a project she isn’t sure how it will end but she plans as she goes, makes notes and usually sticks to a three act structure in most of her work.  Character development is the hardest thing, and she gets to know her characters as she writes, and even more after publication. 

Gogo, the main character in Kennedy’s novel The Last Days of National Costume (2013) is “on the westward slope of middle class status.”  Gogo is from a settler family who has struggled to create a comfortable level of middle class existence but once achieved she has started to slide into the “agony of plenty” as Kennedy defines it.  This is in contrast to Shane, a recent immigrant from Belfast who takes a ripped Irish dancing costume to Gogo to mend, who is struggling to make ends meet.  The novel is concerned with what happens to people once the struggle is over – what keeps us going.

So why an Irish national costume?  Kennedy believes that there aren’t enough Irish settler stories in New Zealand literature and points out the important difference between English and Irish settlers.  While the English could, and often did go back ‘home’, the Irish couldn’t because of the continuation of the Troubles.  The Irish immigration was complete; it was a new beginning in a new country because there was no going back.  Kennedy also wants to show the perspective of a diaspora, the rugged variety rather than the green of St Patrick’s Day celebrations.

Auckland is prominent in the novel and this is because Kennedy enjoys writing about place and wants to put Auckland on the literary landscape as much as Fifth Avenue in New York is; we all know what Fifth Avenue is like through literature even though we haven’t physically travelled there.  The story takes place over the five weeks of the Auckland blackout in 1998.  The period of the blackout worked as a plot device so the action could take place over five weeks, and also the blackout delays Gogo mending the dress because she needs the light.  1998 was also a period of innocence; it was prior to 9/11 and what Kennedy considers a more hopeful time.  It was also before the Good Friday Agreement was signed in May 1998.  Before that agreement was signed there was still a sense that anything could happen in Northern Ireland.

The novel is also about the power of storytelling.  Shane’s story takes Gogo out of her middle class malaise, her interior world, and transforms her as well as Shane.  It is also about the contestation of land.

The session was thoroughly engaging and made more special when Anne was awarded the Nigel Cox Unity Books Prize by Fergus Barrowman at the end.

Session: 2014 New Zealand Book Council Lecture
Man Booker Prize-winning author Eleanor Catton will discuss the role of change in fiction.

While waiting to get into the theatre we were told by the Festival staff to bunch up, to stand three abreast, and move closer to the wall.  People waited patiently, tickets in hands, we blocked access to the men’s loos (sheepish looking men widened their eyes and said excuse me to get through), and people were eating vanilla chocolate topped ice-creams or drinking red wine while checking their phones.  Then the doors opened and everyone poured in.  I had heard someone say that they were expecting 500 people, I’m not sure whether that number is accurate but the theatre was packed to hear Catton’s lecture entitled “Paradox and Change in Fiction.”

Catton used the analogy of physics to show the time and space elements in narrative.  We can only move in one direction – forward - in life, and when reading a book (we start at page one and move towards the end), and we occupy the present time in which we’re reading it.  However, time and space are elastic, there are times in life when time seems to drag and at other moments it seems to speed up, and while we occupy a space, we only see what we notice in that space, not the entirety of things in that space.  These aspects of time and space can be exaggerated in narrative.

In the fundamentals of physics no change is instantaneous.  No one goes from being bad to being inherently good in an instant, with no effort expended; we can’t get something for nothing.  In a narrative, a character that changes instantly with no effort is an example of bad writing because change without time passing is meaningless.  As readers, and people, we want to see how a person has changed and why, we want to be able to defend that change and to say why it happened.  Change in narrative needs to be meaningful and rewarding, and is a fundamental property of fiction alongside plot.

Catton noted that a lot of literary fiction lacks plot, indeed, that there seems to be a contemporary bias against it.  Catton cited Harold Bloom’s analysis of Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies and his belief that the character is more important than the plot.  Catton entirely disagrees.  In a Shakespeare comedy an impossible situation becomes possible.  Catton broke the plot progression into five points: an impossible situation is presented, an impartial aid arrives which usually involves some mischief, there is miscommunication, a revision of the impossible situation, and then a marriage.  Throughout this progression, spells and potions may be used in order for characters to gain insight and self-awareness, and it is only through this self-awareness that the impossible, in the case of a lot of Shakespeare’s comedies the impossible is love, is made possible.

In Shakespeare’s tragedies the five point plot progression is reversed.  In a tragedy, the situation that is first presented, the desire for permanent change, does seem achievable but it is thwarted.  Ambitions are never realised and everyone dies at the end.  In a tragedy what the characters feel to be true, and what is true, is never reconciled.  And how we define our truth depends on our lived experiences which form the basis of our definitions e.g. how we define love is based on our experiences of being loved and loving.  In a tragedy there is also a lack of self-awareness in the characters, which is the complete opposite to the comedies.  Catton referred to the differences in the plots of the comedies and tragedies as a plotted paradox.

While literary fiction has a contemporary bias against plot, it also holds ingenuity and action in low esteem, and there are no heroes.  Catton noted that some writers lay claim to insight possessively, and perhaps are reluctant to acknowledge things that they couldn’t have done themselves.  Genre fiction and children’s literature are not easier forms, and Catton notes that we should all be suspicions of a genre that names itself ‘literary fiction’ and to generally be suspicious of all genre labels.  She noted that if Jane Austen’s works were categorised along modern genre forms she would be a romance writer because of her happy endings.

What I take from this, as a writer, is to pay a great deal more attention to plot, to analyse the plots in the narratives I read to see how they are working – or whether or not they actually exist - and to read more widely across genres.  Everyone was captivated by Catton’s talk.  Afterwards, I heard someone mention that they thought Catton’s talk was academic but I’m not so sure.  In many ways I think she was encouraging people to read widely and not just read literary fiction that is studied in tertiary education, and I think in relating her ideas about plot to Shakespeare she was referring to a body of literature that while we may not know intimately, most people in the audience would know something about.  In many ways I think Catton was trying to expand our notions of what literature is, and what texts we define as literature, and who is defining them as such, and I think that is a task that the New Zealand writing community should take on board and is an entirely appropriate message for the New Zealand Book Council’s lecture.

There was time for a few questions at the end of the session.  In response to one, Catton said that literature should enlarge our lives, that it is spiritual and feeds us, and doesn’t repeat what we already live and know. 

Session: 2014 Janet Frame Memorial Lecture
Celebrated author and illustrator Gavin Bishop delivers a literary “state of the nation.”

Bishop remembers going to see a Disney production of Pinocchio at the Picture Palace when he was four years old.  In particular, he vividly remembers seeing the open mouth of a whale that swallowed Pinocchio in the film.  It is a touchstone image for Bishop, an image that had a powerful impact on his psyche.

Going to the picture palace was a ritual.  He would take the bus into town, and walk to the theatre and queue outside and then push on the brass door into the lobby and make his way to the ticket box to buy a nine penny seat in the front row.  As a kid he bounced up and down on the seat, and some kids ran up and down the rows.  The pictures in the films were simple but unforgettable; they enabled him to enter into a magical world.  In that world he learnt the language of cinema, the shadows and the visuals of storytelling.  Opening a picture book is a lot like going to the pictures.  The cover suggests the coming attraction, there is the smell of the book, the feelings of expectations, the opening credits on the title page, and then the story takes-off.

 

The visuals of storytelling were also apparent when he first saw a play.  The sets were the same size and there were no long shots or cropped images, and the perspective of the audience member depended on where they sat at a consistent distance.  A lot of the elements of theatre are apparent in Bishop’s early images.

 

Creating a picture book is a lot like story boarding for a film.  Text is included alongside images but the words and images don’t say the same things.  The images may carry sub-plots which are not included in the text.  A perfect writer/illustrator relationship, according to Bishop, is when both elements are done separately so that the illustrator can show their way of seeing the story rather than have the writer impose their visual perspective.

Bishop reflected on the commercial pressures of publishers.  There are seldom hardback covers for picture books, instead the books produced are lean and mean, and the stories have been reduced and simplified for busy parents.  Quality books that are challenging seem to be in short supply.  Bishop reflected that very few New Zealand picture books were published during the 1940s-60s and while there were more in the 1970s, it wasn’t until Eve Sutton’s My Cat Lives in Boxes in the 1980s that publishing in New Zealand became more confident.

Recently there has been a trend towards nationalistic icons in picture books such as black singlets and rugby balls which Bishop finds boring.  Instead, he attempts to reflect his own world but when he does it is problematic for publication in America.  However, when he writes for the American market, the New Zealand readers found his stories lacking in depth.

The other challenges that writers and illustrators face in New Zealand are the conditions surrounding the Public Lending Rights which excludes work under 48 pages (picture books are typically around 32 pages), and having to compete with writers of other forms for Creative New Zealand funding is extremely difficult.  Writers of picture books are not often included in big awards or residencies.  However, there are also supporters of Children’s Literature such as LIANZA, tertiary institutes that offer training in illustration, Storylines, Te Tai Tamariki, the New Zealand Book Council, and the New Zealand Society of Authors which offers mentorship and professional services which Bishop has used on several occasions.  Bishop did suggest that there should be a Children’s Literature Laureate to help promote children’s literature and literacy in New Zealand, as Australia has successfully done, which seemed popular with the audience.

The session was entertaining and highlighted the positive and negative aspects for those writing and illustrating children’s literature.