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What a lovely book about choices and relationships and art and deep sea diving.  Quinn is an artist worried that her best creative days might have passed but unwilling to compromise her lifestyle.  And did she knowingly wreck Marcus’ marriage, or was that just the way things turned out?  Marcus, a vet who is starting to regret losing his daughter in the difficult break-up, is second guessing his own actions and motives – once while out running he was jabbed by a spikey branch ‘and thought, bizarrely, that he had been attacked by a swordsman’  – he becomes so obsessed he is missing what is right in front of him.  And Callum is an itinerant saturation diver – happiest beneath the ocean in the dark – but getting to an age where that is not a viable career and realising he is lonely.

The novel counts down – but is that to the next exhibition, the birth of a child or the breakup of a relationship?  The episodes unfold framed by the natural world, but a world that is not alien: a rock pool “could vary in size from a handkerchief to a beach towel.  Today it was the size of a pillow”.  There is a lovely recurring image of the swaying kelp forest off the coast where the novel is set, but nature is being abused; the characters are constantly picking up rubbish from the beach.  And at one point Callum is upset by seeing a shag caught in fishing line in a rock crevice.

The characters are ageing – Callum looking at the end of his career, Quinn faced with the increasing protocol of mounting exhibitions – her latest requiring an OSH strategy, and Marcus aware that his young daughter is now a young woman.  It is an achievement that you believe in Quinn and Marcus’ relationship despite only witnessing its low point.

The novel is a subtle exploration of the relationship between art and life – Quinn can’t ‘explain’ her art, just as she doesn’t understand how Marcus perceives it.  Callum wants people to actually experience what he loves about being underwater – and is amazed when Quinn captures it in a piece without that experience.  The unfolding of the theme of Quinn’s exhibition is brilliant – as the way we imagine the works alters depending on what Quinn is going through.  Reach is altogether a satisfying novel.

I so wanted to like this book!  McNaughton’s debut novel New Hokkaido is set in a counterfactual New Zealand where there was no bombing of Pearl Harbour, the US did not enter the Second World War, and the Japanese invaded and colonised New Zealand and then formed the Red Sun Alliance with the USSR, which after its victory over Germany had colonised most of Europe.  The book is set forty-five years after the occupation – in 1987, and the Red Sun Alliance stands in opposition to ‘free’ countries such as England, Australia and the United States.  The main character is Chris Ipswitch, an English teacher at the Wellington Language Academy.  This is a job of privilege, as any Kiwis lucky enough to have jobs under the oppressive regime are more usually employed as manual labourers.  Chris’ position is probably due to the fame of his ex-Sumo wrestler brother, professional name “Night Train”.  But Night Train has fallen into disgrace by marrying Japanese Chiyo, and even worse having a mixed race child, Sarah.  Chris becomes embroiled in helping his brother whose situation goes from bad to worse, and who ends up accused of murder.  In a parallel story Chris’ rugby team mates join a Free New Zealand movement bid for freedom by high jacking the Lyttleton Ferry and heading out for Australia.  On his quest Chris receives encouraging messages from his hero Johnny Lennon, who came to New Zealand on a Compassion ship during the English famine of 1946, and became a revolutionary musician before dying in police custody in 1972.  And he is also accompanied by the mysterious Hitomi Kurosawa, one of Chris’ students who is a ‘Settler’; a Japanese sent to New Zealand as punishment for some sort of crime in Japan. It is all great fun and an opportunity to explore colonisation and national identity.  McNaughton at times cleverly describes a New Zealand culture which has unwittingly absorbed some Japanese elements, and has nice details like the Irish (who remained neutral in the war) playing a New Zealand produce trade facilitation role between the Japanese and the English.  But on the whole the caricatures of the Japanese and New Zealand culture are so coarse that the novel doesn’t really go beyond the original conceit, it is possible that McNaughton is trying to say that gumboot wearing rugby players and ladies a plate Sheilas are as much a ‘nostalgic’ stereotype as samurai and geisha, but if so that wasn’t developed.  The murder mystery Chris sets out to solve is unsatisfactorily concluded and the high jacking sequence not really integrated into the story.  It is a pity New Hokkaido was such a good idea but a missed opportunity.

“There is a form of idleness that is not relaxation, but the expression of malaise, a disenchantment with life.”  Sheff has become disenchanted with his newspaper job and resigns with vague plans of travelling overseas.  His father is dying of cancer and his sister persuades Sheff to travel with her to the family home in Central Otago to visit their father before he dies.  We find out there is a gentle but searing tragedy in Sheff’s recent past that has caused the breakup of his marriage.  Sheff is numb but angry, and prone to endless pathetic mishaps.  His trip ‘home’ becomes an observation on family relationships, on coming to terms with grief and on the situating of a person in his own life when that life has taken an unexpected and baffling turn.  In an extraordinarily gentle way we learn of Sheff’s tragedy, his childhood and of the independent lives of his parents, as Sheff finally realises they are their own people and not just adjuncts to his own life.  There are the quite stilted even formal conversations between Sheff and his sister, and the increasingly casual exchanges between him and one of the rural vets, an old school friend of his sisters’ and bridge mate of his mother’s, to whom he is attracted.  In a way it is a novel about growing up, about learning that you don’t always get what you want and that living a good life is only partly being able to chart your own course, it is also being open to what you are presented with.  None of Sheff’s tragedies are unique or ‘momentous’, not like those of a stranger he has a chance conversation with at one point, whose son is bipolar, or the young man at a supermarket afflicted with chronic vomiting.  But Sheff’s story makes you realise that all loss, no matter how commonly experienced, does have a uniqueness that is deserving of total observation and respect.  Carnival Sky is a beautiful book.

What an absolutely stunning book.  Dawn Chorus, like Ching’s previous Aesop’s Kiwi Fables (2012), re-imagines Aesop’s moral tales with New Zealand animals as the protagonists.  Dawn Chorus frames the fables with a tale about Aesop himself, in which he posthumously travels to New Zealand in the company of a returning albatross.  The book is divided into parts: telling the story of the great anticipation of Aesop’s arrival at Aotearoa, his journey, the preparation for his welcome ceremony, the welcome concert, and the fables themselves.  As would be expected, yet still astounding, it the richness and beauty of the illustrations.  Most of the text is hand-written and the entire book is a work of art.  New Zealanders can relish the beauty of the native wildlife, and mourn those species we have lost.  Superb.

“… when you return to where you belong you find that you belong there no longer”, Landscape With Solitary Figure is the beautiful but quite ominous reminiscence of Ellis Leigh, a woman who has isolated herself in a cottage a short walk from the sea.  The narrative is both first and third person, but both from Ellis’ point of view – and we wonder occasionally how reliable that point of view is.  Ellis has a son in London, she once had a husband but he died relatively young; she wishes she had more photographs of him, she also has had a terrifying experience amongst a group of people in the place she returned to after having moved away for ten years after the death of her husband – a place she spent most of her time the second time around trying to leave.  Even the descriptions of her present place of seclusion are of somewhere that has turned out not at all how she had envisioned.  She has divested herself of friends the way she has sold off her belongings, she goes to lengths to mislead her son that all is going well, and although she tells us she feels safe you know she never will.  She was already falling ill and seemingly too insecure to resist when falling in with a crowd – and a man – who she feared, we read that even when her son was small she felt isolated and marginalised.  Her best memories are those far away on a brief trip to Paris, and she is happy her son has managed to ‘get away’.  The moving from first to third person and the detailed and repetitive descriptions of incidents and places add to the reader’s recognition of Ellis’ mildly neurotic outlook.  Landscape With Solitary Figure is beautifully produced, illustrated with flowers from the overgrown garden that is Ellis’ hiding place, and is a fine rendering of a fragile and damaged life.