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Bluffworld is a funny, horrifying, thought-provoking read, set in academia in an alternate Christchurch. If you have ever experienced the liberation of information-free decision-making, wait till you read about the helium float of meaning-free discourse! Thomas Flannery, our narrator, sits on the toilet writing his personal bildungsroman Bluffworld – although there’s not much personal development to report. We follow him through his career and along the way we learn the difference between bluffing, bullshit, and horseshit.

The English faculty of the College of Arts, where Flannery works, is the epitome of colonial snobbery and sloth. The hierarchy threads through the faculty, continues offshore, and peaks at the “fantasised Oxbridge life”. When the university builds a new campus, the faculty academics are delighted to stay in their “diminutive mock-Gothic” Oxford, they are a “strange combination of gentlemen’s club and sheltered workshop”. Flannery exists among, and by, bluffing and skiving, and the disparaging of indigenous writing and knowledge – a vilified faculty member dares to champion “Pacific writing”.

The faculty is predominantly male – and puerile ones at that; the book is smeared with scatalogical references and off-colour humour. A colleague says of Flannery’s trick of lecturing on the classics using only the first chapters, paragraphs, or, in the case of Moby Dick the first three words, that he had “turned ejaculatio praecox into a mode of literary criticism”. It’s not surprising it was written on the toilet, many key scenes occur in the loo, and the end of life for the books is … well read Bluffworld. 

It need hardly be said that the blokes are a misogynistic lot. When Flannery makes a serious misstep in judgement, he is puzzled why the women of the faculty are as angry as the boys – “I hadn’t had a relationship with any of them, had I – ?” It is only at a distance we read of a woman aggrieved, a woman despairing, and in one case, Sally, a woman having a successful career and relationship post-Flannery.

Appropriately, Bluffworld is full of plagiarisms, the cover is à la Discworld, the section headings are all stolen. It has copious footnotes, by a second narrator, which are disparaging, pointing out examples of plagiarism and bad grammar (our man has problems with direct and indirect pronouns). They explain references and words to the reader – often fussily and unnecessarily: ‘Meccano’, the card game ‘Snap’. They mark non-English works as those to “Ignore”.

The writing is reminiscent of other styles as well, the English faculty has the quirkiness of the academia of Robertson Davies, and as the book progresses, and things get more bizarre, we end up in a Soviet era style satire, with the university buildings shapeshifting while inhabited, and committees and subcommittees being formed with the members having no idea what their mission is. With the dissolution of the faculty, the staff pose in academic gowns for tourists, take guided tours, sell baked potatoes from a cart, and lecture standing on a box outside Cathedral Mall. Flannery helps a colleague, Bevan, in his bookshop, selling books from the faculty library – their stock gradually becoming overwhelming and giving them rashes and coughs. 

Somehow Flannery has absorbed enough knowledge to bluff a few book sales, “like Post-it notes that had stuck to me as I passed” – after all he did unwittingly absorb some Hungarian while having an affair with Lára, the Hungarian wife of a colleague. But basically, Flannery’s career is a steal. He also lives in other people’s houses, and he feels himself turning into various of his colleagues. He looks in the mirror and sees “not Everyman but Anyone”, he catches his reflection in a dark window and looks “Like a narrator, like a writer. So Jeremy Irons”.

There is a good deal of mistaken identity throughout Bluffworld, one possible reason for Flannery’s success is that it isn’t really him who is meant to advance. The reader starts to wonder if some of the characters even exist – is Flannery’s fellow student Manatine real? He is and he isn’t there a lot of the time. His association with drugs adds to the confusion, and his name suggests the manatees who confused sailors when they were seen to resemble mermaids. Manatine “made sense, as long as he was speaking. When he stopped, he made no sense at all.”

“Has anyone ever said anything original?” Amidst the fun is the message about knowledge being a cumulative process; building on previous thought, adding to it and re-shaping it in a new environment. Enriching ideas with indigenous knowledge, with new experiences. Plagiarism is theft, and when what is being plagiarised is European writing and you are in a far-flung colony of ‘home’, the theft unmoors the works from their meaning and context. People will start believing in anything once communication stops gesturing to the “Lacanian Real” – once it becomes untethered from an underlying reality.

Flannery is the villain of the piece and also the victim. There is a parallel drawn between the academic split with relevance and the followers of the Heaven’s Gate cult, who committed suicide so they could be taken up into a spaceship that was travelling behind the Hale-Bopp comet. Flannery becomes seduced with the “vision going forward” “scholar-managers” nonsense of Super-Iggo, the Vice-Chancellor brought in to corporatise the university. Listening to Super-Iggo’s stoner-type verbiage gives Flannery a hard on, the jargon enters the sex talk between him and Sally. But it isn’t Super-Iggo who actually does the reorganising, it is a small drab man with food stains on his tie who does the dirty work. 

Bluffworld is laugh-out-loud funny, but despite its ridiculousness and its cynicism, it has a serious theme. Sally ends up fronting a show for Viscera Entertainment, and in one relentless grilling of a former colleague of Flannery’s, she explains the demise of the humanities is due to bad communication, because “no one reads the stuff, no one practises what it preaches anymore”. She points to the National Library’s culling of over 500,000 of its humanities holdings. The suggestion is that we are losing links to our literary heritage by failing to carry that heritage into the present time and place, a move which would have enabled the people of Bluffworld to adapt in a wise, not meaningless, way – to not end up with a university totally comprised of administrators.   

“It’s our heritage.” Flannery witnesses books going to be pulped, there is a moving honour roll of titles soon to be gone: Pacific, European, American – Art, Poetry, Philosophy, Literature. Once written knowledge is devalued, all that is written becomes suspect. Flannery knows he is guilty, knows what a loser he is; when Sally is interviewed on U.S. TV about a book she has written, he knows it will be about him, and knows how awfully he will be depicted, because he knows how awful he has been. When he hears there will be no more in-person lectures at the university, he mourns the loss of the intimacy of student/teacher relationship – something he never bothered nurturing.

We leave Bluffworld with Flannery ready to take off in the helium bubble of administration, untethered, but far from free. As I say, Bluffworld is a funny, horrifying, thought-provoking read – and possibly set in a not so alternative reality!  

Kurangaituku graces us with the story of Hatupatu and the bird-woman from the female perspective. It tells of the coming into being, and fading from existence, of the universe, the natural world, and the individual. It asks why we learn about the death of Maui and not the violation of Hinenuitepō; why we are taught history from the male point of view. It demonstrates the power and destruction of language and shows how ‘love and creation’ are just ‘revenge and destruction’ seen from another perspective. It is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read.

Kurangaituku emerges from the void of Te Kore into the dark of Te Pō. With the cleaving of the sky from the earth, there is light, and she exists among the birds of Aotearoa, the birds whose consciousness sang her into existence. With the Taupō eruption, she is entombed. She emerges after millennia to find another type of creature has arrived in the forest – the Song Makers – the Māori. “I had admired the birds who had adapted to their niche in nature, but the Song Makers could adapt the world to suit their needs.”

Lurking near the edges of human society, Kurangaituku learns to weave and to carve, not recognising the rules of male and female. She experiences language, and although “… it is an act of love to learn a language, an act of becoming”, she is re-formed by those from whom she learns her language. As the birds sang Kurangaituku into existence, so too the language of humans starts to agonisingly transform her into the pain-wracked female form. Her transformation is both physical and literary – her claws that are ideal for weaving are told as claws for attacking; she is portrayed as a warning.

The Song Makers don’t grasp “that all creatures that dwell in the forest do not just live there, but they make up the forest”. Kurangaituku’s eating of the brains of birds to understand their experiences is seen as monstrous, whereas hunting and eating birds for food is seen as necessary. The collective existence of the forest is riven into those with power and those without, those with standing and those without, the concept of Mōkai, slavery, emerges. The relationship between Kurangaituku and Hatupatu is complex, loving, abusive … “He named me Kurangaituku. And I was undone.”

Kurangaituku proceeds as in a love story, but she is an innocent, unused to lying and deceit: “How could anyone treat a person that way, with so little regard? If I had been a person that would have made him monstrous.” She recognises Hatupatu as a thief and a murderer, he inflicts on her the most horrific death – but she struggles with desertion. “If only our relationship has been hunter and mōkai.” She exists in the love of their meeting in the forest – “But that is an illusion, a game we all play – the idea that any of us can truly understand what it is like to be another … Just as this story was never really mine. It can only ever exist in the space between us.”

There are many times in the telling of her story when a sphere, a rock, an eye, expands to encompass everything and then contracts to be an individual. The geography of the land is a part of Kurangaituku, as it is with the patupaiarehe, those beings akin to the corporeal and ambiguous Sidhe of Scotland and Ireland and not to ethereal butterfly-like creatures called fairies. There are many types of creatures, all part of a whole. But as Kurangaituku is entombed, so too is Hatupatu, there are many times in the telling where there is a searching for cracks in rocks, many times a searching for entrances to new realms. And in those realms we discover new creatures, and experience the loss of others.

“Perhaps if I wasn’t so inquisitive, if I didn’t have a need to accumulate knowledge” – in another wave of exploration Kurangaituku forges into the afterlife to seek an explanation for her experiences from Hatupatu. In this ouroboros of a novel this is both before and after her time in the forest. We travel through the geography of Māori cosmology, and through the geography of the female body. Kurangaituku is a stranger in a strange land – there are none like her to welcome her to the underworld – but there is beautiful Hinenuitepō, who re-shapes her in human form, and with whom she sits in the waters of the womb.

When Kurangaituku reverses her journey time has passed again, colonisers have arrived in Aotearoa. They have made a monster of Hinenuiotepō, and her children no longer go to her after death: “I could have wept for her then. Not because she had lost her power, but because she believed she had, that she no longer had any control of her narrative.” This novel is all about the real power of words, how they create, how they destroy. We talk ourselves into being through our stories. The author addresses the reader as a lover – a creature feeding on the stories the author has presented.

“Would Te Kore have evolved into Te Pō without the potential for more?” There is the urge to keep moving, but within the swirling events there are moments of quieter research and reflection. There is the examination of the woven panels and the carvings of the whare, the consideration of creation stories and the placing of characters. But the story can’t not be told, “… life doesn’t seem to respect dramatic pauses.” In passing there are the cries: “If only, if only, if only.”

The physical book Kurangaituku is beautiful. It is printed tête-bêche, and the central tellings of Hatupatu and the bird-woman interweave as they pass each other from opposite directions. In whichever order you read the book the story works, and whichever way you read the events the story changes. The proof of Hereaka’s words is in the readers’ hands: words are power, Gods are immortal until men stop telling their stories.

As Hilary Mantel did for Thomas Cromwell, Hereaka has given the opportunity for redemption to a usually reviled character. Like Ursula Le Guin with her The wife’s story, Hereaka has shown us the depths of our preconceptions. But Kurangaituku is so much more than objective observation. As I read, I was reminded of the whakatauki: E koekoe te tūī, e ketekete te kākā, e kūkū te kererū. There are many voices, many points of view. And the tragedy at the heart of the novel is the silencing of the voices of the birds, of the women, of the colonised: “It is a privilege to be heard – and not one many are allowed.”

“I had come all this way following Hatupatu, hoping for a chance to balance our story. To avenge my own death by his hands, to satisfy utu. And now I was left here on my knees with a mouth full of dirt.” I don’t have the words to express how good this book is – read it!

Charlie Lowry was fifteen-years-old in the late seventies – full of dreams and fantasies, and concerns about her peeling toenail varnish. She wanted boys to notice her, and they sometimes did, but for her fascination with words – she was always one for the funny pun – they didn’t see her potential for glamorous romance. One night at a party, a boy did notice her – and she thought she had achieved her dream. But instead, she found herself in a situation that could only be resolved by a quick trip to Sydney, or by her ‘going up North for a while’.

Many years later Charlie is living in Wellington with her grandson, Tommy. She has given up on her wish to study and apply her flair for linguistics, due to experiencing bouts of vocal disfunction. She teaches five-year-olds at a local school. The realisation that Tommy has formed a relationship with a fellow maths student at university, and the unexpected return of her son, Jim, leads Charlie to reassess her life. She considers what information she has shared with her son and grandson, and whether it is time to reveal more. And also whether it is time to be honest with herself about her traumatic past.

If all this sounds a bit heavy going, it isn’t – Loop tracks is honest, compassionate, and compellingly written. It look at generational relationships. It considers what power the State has to interfere in an individual’s life decisions – whether those be decisions a woman makes about her body, or about the agency of some to choose to end their own lives. It considers what right males have to put young girls into situations they have no ability to manage – we see the power to do so developing in the five-year-old bullies in Charlie’s class. And Loop tracks eventually confronts the State’s power to curtail freedoms to protect citizens from a deadly virus, and the obligation of individuals to comply. It highlights the decisions, sometimes immediate, spontaneous, and unconsidered, that send lives on paths that might otherwise have been avoided or missed.

In one section of the book, Charlie goes back to accompany her younger self as her mother takes her to the doctor, her mother suspecting Charlie is pregnant, Charlie thinking that is ridiculous. The reader confronts the absolute naivety of the young Charlie, how impossible for her to relevantly answer her father’s plea: “What were you thinking, Charlie?” Charlie finds herself on a flight bound for Sydney, there being few options for safe abortion in Aotearoa in 1978. Her parents have fallen into debt to fund the trip – her mother leaves the airport jealous of her daughter’s chance of an overseas flight. The reason Charlie makes her decision to leave the plane on the tarmac is pathetic, as in full of pathos – and it is a decision with life-long consequences.

Jim is a monster in many ways, he is a drug peddlar, a manipulator, he carries memories of the bodies of dead young women. Jim is a reason for Charlie to regret her decision to get off the plane. Jim’s son Tommy – abandoned by Jim as a child – is a reason for her to celebrate that same decision. Tommy is beautiful and a wonder to Charlie. He is a mathematician and “… she’s a words girl. Numbers are not her thing.” Tommy is socially awkward and has no filter to his emotions: “he’s so literal, people find that difficult”. He has sudden bouts of fury: “Rage, reflection, remorse. That’s the order, the only way he can process the hard stuff.” Charlie feels she must protect Tommy until someone else can take over. Despite the sacrifices she has made for him, she knows Tommy has no empathy for her – he is brutally judgemental.

Jenna is Tommy’s friend. Her sister, Suzie, plays Loop Track music. Tommy is entranced by the building repetition of Suzie’s music the way he was, and still is, absorbed by Charlie’s old Spirograph machine. Suzie, who we never meet, also knows Jim – and Jim’s dark shadow grows over Charlie’s family. Charlie’s friend and workmate, Adele, is a moderating element – pointing out to Charlie that she is prone to spying on Tommy and Jenna; that she is still trying to control Tommy’s decisions; that she seems not to be acknowledging the reality of what happened to her in 1978.

The arrival of the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown and the Euthanasia Referendum of the same year, pulls the novel into tight focus. Tommy tracks the outbreak, and becomes engrossed in arguments about his responsibilities to protect life at both ends of the life cycle. And his logical un-empathic approach is a challenge to Charlie and her beliefs. The isolation of lockdown (she is both with and apart from Tommy) allows Charlie to become aware that she is lonely, she longs for “the hot rush of human touch”. Lockdown provides yet another set of opportunities for Charlie, and decisions that will either fulfil or deny those opportunities.

Loop tracks is a brutal book in many ways, but it glows with humanity. It suggests the importance of being honest about memory, about beliefs. It emphasises being kind to yourself, but also the importance of thinking beyond yourself when considering the decisions you make and the paths you choose. A very powerful Aotearoa read.                

If you love books about secret societies,  The holy blood and the holy grail–type conspiracies, ancient treasure hunts, von Däniken–adjacent human origin stories, New Age science and history, and grand unified theories of, well, everything … Two truths is the book for you. A woman and her three daughters set out on different quests to find the ‘truth’, all for different reasons, and possibly searching for different truths. They discover a power that could be the salvation or the end of humanity.

Renee had an experience with a strange (but literarily familiar) man as a teenager that changed the course of her life. She dissented from that course eventually, but had to pay a price, and in doing so fulfilled the prediction of the man: that she would have three daughters. Scott, Renee’s husband, has prepared the eldest daughter, Brett, for a life as part of The Order, an elite exclusive cabal. Sara is a social-media-addicted teenager, slightly goth, naturally dismissive and rebellious. And Hadley, the youngest daughter, floats through life with her head full of bible verses and dreams

Sara bumps into Penny, the daughter of a colleague of her father’s, at the colleague’s funeral. Penny, with whom Sara becomes slightly besotted, warns Sara that their fathers had discovered something that had put them in great danger: her father had been murdered and Sara’s father was next. Dismissing the claims, Sara explains that she is being bundled off to New Zealand: “Do they speak English there?” All but Brett, who is estranged from her family, go to the far-off country.

It is in Aotearoa that Scott dies, but not before realising he has been cultivating the wrong daughter. Sara becomes intent on revenging Scott’s death. Hadley, who is brought back from death at the accident that kills her father, loses her ability to speak and her will to live. Renee takes the girls back to their home in Cincinnati, where Sara searches out Penny. Sara and Penny start on a quest to find out about the deaths of their fathers. Hadley meets up with a mysterious man and eventually “She had found the Truth, and in doing so, had lost her religion”. Renee gets involved with Jonas, a beautiful young basketball player. And Brett becomes more and more embroiled in the machinations of The Order: “Silly game or not, she had no other option but to play it.”

To say anything else about who, or what, everyone is; or, how the quests of the four women come together, would be to spoil the plot. It covers so many familiar tropes it is fascinating to read how they are all woven together. There is the power-hungry triumvirate of The Order, the Catholic Church and the “money launderers” – AKA big business tycoons and their political henchmen. The seemingly inevitable development of hierarchies: of beings, of classes, of blood. The spiritual quests of individuals who fall by the way, as they fail to see that their goal is right before their eyes the whole time. The dangers of actions that are taken “for the greater good” …

Chapters are told from the point of view of different characters, which gives the narrative great texture. From the outset you are in a strange but oddly familiar world – Hadley being accompanied by a ghost and an angel, Renee acting on her attraction to Jonas – who is reminiscent of the biblical Nephilim. The use of biblical texts to prove the ancient use of nuclear technology, and the genetic manipulation of humans. Saint Germain still wandering the streets of Paris. And there are the more sinister themes: older men coaching teenaged girls. The head of the secret society using sex to manipulate his followers: “The only answer is to submit.” The casual suggestion of eugenics.

The mistake the two fathers made was in intending to enlighten the uninitiated masses by informing them of what they had discovered. We learn there are those who are living lives that have lasted for millennia. Those who have lived through many lives – some who remember them, some who can be encouraged to remember them, and those who will always be ignorant. These latter are the Masses. There are parties who think “The Masses pose a threat”, and there are parties who think the Masses are our only hope: “This is the world I love, the world I see every day and that most people walk by without noticing. If you do not love what the world is in its simplest form, you will not be able to save it.”

There is whimsy to some of the writing: “The countertop was bright orange and the curtains were yellow and pulled back with a piece of lace. On the wall was a black clock shaped like a cat, with eyes that rolled back and forth with each tick.” However, the themes are dark: the attraction of suicide – Ernest, Renee’s initial awakener in this life, commits suicide; Hadley must be constantly encouraged to focus on life, not death. And insanity is always hovering, as a place to hide – Renee “how easy to blame delusion.”

The two truths of the title refer to an empirical truth and a transcendental truth – and the confusion as to which is the more powerful, the more dangerous. The paradox flows through the text – one of the ‘higher level’ beings is always cooking, gardening, or making things from wood. Humans are cast as both the playthings of the gods, and those some gods love so much they can’t desert them. The story works its way towards a great reunion as the climax – and there is a challenge – which way will be chosen? Power and exclusion, or the realisation of connectedness and opportunity for all?  

I read this book as COP26 is being held in Glasgow. Once again, the world’s leaders are discussing how to address the ecological and climatic disasters the ‘money launderers’ have wrought. It would be good to think when asked the question posed in The two truths – “And do you know what each of us will choose?”, they would choose the better path. Yet as Renee observes of herself and Jonas, they have become aware of so much “Yet we stroll on an autumn evening as if nothing is different”. An interesting, entertaining, and enjoyable read.

Crazy love is about addiction, art, love with no boundaries, and the burden of mental illness. It is sad, beautiful, frustrating, and tantalising. It is about survival and despair and mundanity. It is about Vicky Miller and the destructive love of her life, Billy Cooper. It is semi-autobiographical and totally charming and totally worrying at the same time. It is extraordinarily honest, and a perfect example of how messy life can be.

Vicky had a far-from-ideal upbringing: “Weird to have such a disappointing mother be disappointed in me”. She has a microsecond stint in the army, where she learns to make a tight bed, but doesn’t find Richard Gere (it is the 1980s). A post-abortion infection means she returns to her hometown, Napier. After some dead-end jobs, she washes up in Art Deco ‘Dire Straits’ – a living complex full of the unemployed, partially employed, and dodgily employed, all with no families to fall back on.

Crazy love evokes the 1980s with song lyrics interspersed in the narrative and descriptions of the unique fashions of the time. It is an interesting time in Aotearoa’s political history, but Vicky is only mildly interested in politics – she is too disenfranchised to take much notice. She does write to Robert Muldoon to voice her frustration at only having enough money for one pie a day – she gets a response: $1 for one extra pie. It is a funny/not funny moment but also prefigures the struggles Vicky will have later, with a bureaucracy that, in aiming to help all, struggles to help each. Like many women in a society where social support reinforces female financial dependence on partners, Vicky must put up with a ‘loser-boyfriend’ to survive.

The reply to her letter to Muldoon heralds the unconnected arrival of Billy – and her life is never the same again. Billy is beautiful, “…this punk, he had my attention”. He is a punk, but in a stylish way. He is a high-flyer with big plans. Billy is unpredictable, unreliable, a bit of a grifter, with mercurial moods. He is enticing, and Vicky and Billy get married. Vicky knows that Billy’s successes are mostly mirages. However, initially they do find financial success as a married couple. They have a lovely big house, plenty of money, and two children. They both have the continual need for affirmation, but their financial stability satisfies that.

The reader looks back on this time of success obliquely. Vicky enjoys writing poetry. She raises her children and helps Billy with his business. “Billy and I had big plans over the years. Some succeeded, some didn’t.” Then it all crumbles. Fortunately, the children have left home. Vicky and Billy move to a house with Dawn Raid hideouts under the floorboards and in the roof cavity. Vicky finally admits that the exciting rhythms of Billy’s life: “He’s my yoyo man”, are due to serious mental illness. Vicky is small. She knows she is vulnerable. Due to the many dangerous situations she has been in, she has learned the art of running away. She doesn’t run from Billy.

We pick up the current narrative with Billy living like a wild man outside in the garden, with Vicky inhabiting the house. She finds official help is hard if not impossible to find. She finds out who her friends are – almost all women – the men are afraid of Billy. Billy’s behaviour is manipulative, passive-aggressive, and often pathetic. It makes you wonder if all abusive partners have a serious mental illness! “We are the beautiful-bold. Strong as long as we are together. Billy and I. Only, he has been such an arse lately.” Vicky has always known Billy has viewed her as a wife to look after him while he flourishes. At one point she proves to herself she could kill Billy if she wanted.

Vicky starts writing a novel, it is a long process – she is working on Purgatory, a novel I still think about often even though I read it seven years ago. She is functioning well, while she lies for Billy and complies with his illegal flurries. He is overweight, smelly, yet still strangely attractive. She decides if he commits suicide, so will she. Her children are ciphers for the way she sees herself and Billy. The son is ‘eat-and-run-son’, always leaving and far away yet emotionally closer to her than to Billy. The daughter is ‘surly-girl’, always judging and blaming Vicky. “What if I was to blame for stopping Billy from being the wondrous Billy he used to be?”

“He forgets he’s not the young punk who took on a carload of young dicks sassing him at the burger bar in Napier.” When Vicky decides she is damaging Billy more by covering for him that by asking authorities for help, she provokes a response that illustrates the lack of help for those with mental illness – a ‘riot squad’ arrives. Despite Billy almost avoiding it through his charm, he ends up in an acute mental health unit. They communicate via haiku-like missives. Vicky is alone, grieving for the baby she lost before joining the army, for her beloved dog, for the cat she left behind in ‘Dire Straits.’ She wonders if splitting from Billy would be the best thing for him.

Move to the present: Billy is still Vicky’s “Strange man. Strange, strange man.” He is a conspiracy theorist, but he is taking his medication. During Covid (“a hoax to disguise the fact that there are intergalactic space travellers on earth for negotiations …”), they panic buy wine and tealight candles, not toilet rolls. They have survived, and will continue to survive, as they have the most astounding unconditional love. The reader is left puzzled yet comforted, and at the same time very uneasy, “the perimeter is never secure, really, is it?” A powerful piece of Aotearoa fiction/not fiction.