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Aljce is excited to be starting a new job at The Therapy Hub, a wrap-around private counselling service, where she will be able to build up the practical counselling hours she needs to complete her qualifications. But instead of the gratifying job she has envisaged, she falls down a surreal rabbit hole of incompetence, institutional absurdity, and ruthless bullying.

The reader gets hints that Aljce at some point has benefitted from counselling herself, hence her career aspirations. She is fluent in psychological diagnoses and self-affirmation. And this is one of the aspects that makes Aljce in Therapy Land such a good read – Aljce is far from the innocent victim of a toxic workplace. She is complex, self-absorbed, brilliant, and arrogant – at one point pointing out to a friend that boring people mate to create even more boring people, mind you she was stoned at the time.

Aljce spends a lot of time experiencing life “stoned and synaesthesiac”, she associates things with colours, and she has body dysmorphia. The novel is written tightly via her peculiar point of view. She has two daughters, Pleasance and Liddell, a reference to the original Alice, who are around six years old. But we mostly hear of the girls remotely, and when we do read of Aljce interacting with them, it is of her enjoying the kids’ star-projecting night light, or playing with their glow sticks.

The reader meets wonderful characters along with the cast of The Therapy Hub: Aljce’s friend Strauss, whose stoner conversations with Aljce are some of the book’s highlights. And there is the inventive “Mad Neighbour” – Aljce can’t decide if he is mad, or a genius, or a “mad genius”. There is also Lewis, a man who Aljce has connected with via an online dating app. He plays a large part early on in the novel, and he is an author – helping to frame the story as a piece of meta-fiction. Aljce decides she wants to write a book too, talking about her future readers: “I want them to wonder whether my characters are real, or whether they’re just figments of the main character’s imagination.”

The reader often wonders how reliable a narrator Aljce is – I was a bit suspicious about the daughters till they appeared, and of Lewis. After all, all Aljce wants is someone who thinks she is special, and she is always saying that we create our own reality: “I may even be making myself up, I guess.” But then there is the brutal reality of The Therapy Hub, an exaggerated version of many workplaces. It is a workplace Aljce wants to leave, but with Pleasance and Liddell to support (their father is long gone), she needs the money, and she knows if she does leave she won’t get a good reference: She “wasn’t going to be judged on merit, but on the opinion of someone who it was impossible to please”.

Aljce in Therapy Land could be quite triggering if you have encountered workplace bullying. The Hub’s founder and manager is Jillq. Jillq is passive-aggressive, under-qualified, threatened by others, and supported by an entourage of sycophants. Her behaviour is extreme – played out in a building that “was like a rabbit warren”, with real rabbits on the grounds and golf balls (not croquet balls) rolling around the corridors. All the clocks are set to different times. There is no logic to the rules, or to the filing system, and those who are bullied eventually start to fade away like the Cheshire Cat, starting with their hair.

Underneath all of this Wonderland-unreality are descriptions of recognisable bad management behaviour. Jillq is threatened by any staff member who might reveal her incompetence – Aljce has a degree so is fair game. Aljce finds she is always contravening unknown rules, rules sometimes made up post the ‘infringement’. She also finds she is on a three-month trial not in a permanent position. Jillq, or one of her off-siders, are always there keeping an eye on Aljce.

The other staff members, to maintain their positions in Jillq’s favour, are at best not willing to support Aljce, and at worst willing to actively undermine her. Aljce is astounded that “community champions against bullying and violence could be so determined to ignore it when it was under their noses.” Aljce refuses to become a sycophant, but does try to fit in. She doesn’t however agree to change the way she dresses – which reads like serial cosplay. This aspect of Aljce doesn’t fit with her counselling theory of trying to be a blank but caring slate – but then Aljce doesn’t get to meet with clients.

We only read about clients who have been been appallingly let down by The Hub, and we learn that Jillq is collecting funding for non-existent clients: “Ahhh, the beauty of government contracts and being able to fudge those numbers.” And, again familiar, the work of The Hub has become bizarrely introverted: “A great deal of fuss was made when [clients] were present,  but a great deal of moaning was done about them afterwards, about how they’d interrupted the real work.” The Hub is coasting on “unrushed fake work”.

Aljce is fascinated with quantum physics and there is much in the book about the subjectivity of experience, and the complications of the Internet – at one stage the royals and the Kardashians are used as examples of fabricated public lives – but the message is we all fabricate our lives, “We’re all insecure.” And Aljce and others in the book find solace in weed: “It’s like being so close that you might be knocking on the door of the answer, and the answer’s just on the other side.”

The writing of Aljce in Therapy Land is compelling and disturbing: “She felt as if she was underwater with turbulent schools of dark fish; one shoal going that way, another shoal going this way, another smacking right into her. How was she supposed to know what they were going to do next?” It is also disorienting – the Alice in Wonderland references, the stoner experiences, and Tawhai using capitals instead of italics for emphasis, which I had to learn not to read as corporate acronyms.

The tension in the book is from Aljce knowing that you create your own reality and yet being puzzled as to how frustrated she is with her own. She learns everything is temporary, friends move on, circumstances change. But she also finds agency. She decides that evolution leads to a person either being empathic, or calculating and science-oriented, both types necessary – but it also throws up aberrations such as Jillq and her clan – people with no empathy who were “also essentially stupid” – people who need to be dealt with. The book has a good arc, and in keeping with the Wonderland theme the end takes us nicely back to the beginning …  

“I look through all the photos and they’re all really bad – poorly framed, bad lighting, someone about to fall over – like all our family photos are.” Greta & Valdin is about the extended Vladisavljevic family, and, as depicted in their family photo album, the family members are chaotic and haphazard – but they are also totally enthralling. The central focus is on Greta and Valdin, siblings and flatmates – Betty, their mother, is Māori from Aotea / Great Barrier Island, Linsh, their father, is Russian from Moldova when it was a Soviet republic. Valdin and Greta are striking, insecure, and staunch – and both are looking for love.

Valdin has OCD, is accident prone, and he didn’t speak for much of his childhood. He was a physicist for 7 years, until he had a breakdown over the ending of his relationship with Xabi, his uncle’s husband’s brother – or maybe his relationship foundered when he had a breakdown over not wanting to work as a physicist anymore. He is now the frontman for a TV show, and getting a name for his outspoken ad-libbing. He still loves Xabi.

Greta is tutoring at Auckland University, where Valdin worked in the physics lab, and where Linsh is a professor. She relishes the idiosyncrasies of language and custom and is multi-lingual. She is finishing her literature Masters, and is floundering in the romantic doldrums. She hazards online dating, and then thinks she might have met the love of her life in Ell, a woman she first became aware of when a friend at a party described a woman she has just walked in on in the loo as “your type”.

Greta and Valdin learn of aspects of their family history and heritage at the same time as the reader, and also pick up on the present goings on amongst family members. They know how lucky they are to be part of their family, they know that despite how lonely and desperate they get, there will always be someone they can eventually talk to. The Vladisavljevics are liberal, flawed, and kind. “Being gay used to be fun. And illegal and dangerous. Now it’s just about being romantic and sad.” But the siblings are not naïve – they know that elsewhere – in their family history and in their present relationships – homophobia tears families apart.

The siblings are both tall and attractive, so Greta is assumed to be bi-, as being attractive means attractive to men, Valdin is just assumed to be gay – they recognise sexism. And they are well aware of how racist Aotearoa can be. Homophobia, sexism, racism – none of these social issues are pushed in the novel, they are just there as realities; Betty calmly saying “He didn’t have the fear that I had that someone would take my baby away because of my race”. Betty and Linsh’s relationships with their children are extremely gratifying. Through the novel, all of the family members are growing and changing and finding out things about one another – and introducing more fascinating people into the fold.

There is a handy list of characters at the beginning of the book, that I made use of quite frequently – it reads like the cast of characters in a Russian novel. Names are full of the history of place, and the Vladisavljevic family have friends and relatives who travel freely around the world. “Almost every place I go in the world is nicer than I expect. Stupid Western media.” The only characters whose names are constantly forgotten, are the Anglo ones: “… there’s no way I’m going to remember Kieren.” Despite their eclectic family, both Greta and Valdin express a strong identity with Aotearoa – Greta grumbling about unnecessary American perspectives on New Zealand life and literature; Valdin using his TV show to point out what he sees as inappropriate and ignorant land use.

There is a lovely generosity about the book, identity is a broad capture. Valdin is taken aback before boarding a plane to Queenstown when his crew ask him if he wants to lead them in a karakia, he does know that Russians sit down before leaving on a trip. Linsh forgets that, being of Jewish heritage, he shouldn’t be eating bacon. Greta is worried that Te Reo might be the one language she can’t pick up with ease. The Vladisavljevics are imperfect but centred. they are open and honest about their mistakes. Casper the elder brother on raising his children: “… we love them, and we don’t let them go hungry, so it’s fine.”

Greta & Valdin is written in the first person, alternating between Valdin and Greta, with a few other characters chiming in at the end. It is well-plotted and has a solid and funny sense of place. It has a pleasant dramatic arc, and a tidy ending. But honestly I could have happily read the novel if it were just the characters sitting around talking – they are that fascinating. “It’s like when my dad tells a story that relies on the listener understanding the concept of local informants, or when my mum tells a story and you really have to hold seafood in a high regard to get it”, Reilly has presented us with a complex and oddly intertwining array of characters who are all unknown but who all feel familiar. And we get a hint of their future directions too, with members of the next generation making appearances. A sequel would be very welcome, I would love to eavesdrop on the first meeting of Freya and Ernesto – read this wonderful book to find out who they are!

The aftermath of abuse – of alcohol, from the hands of men. The aftermath lasts decades, lasts a lifetime, is slow, is boring. It changes lives, it changes life. It never ends, it colours everything – you must stay vigilant. It is the life of Greta, of Peggy, of Margaret … just some of the women. All who are living in the aftermath recognise one another; they all cope in different ways. They support each other, keep each other out of danger, tell each other they are lucky to still be fighting, help each other try to make sense of their lives.

But their lives don’t make sense anymore. I can’t say how all the women are connected – their lives are the result of trauma when things fall apart, of the occasional moments of feeling safe, when things fall back together. 1994, 2006, 2018 – Greta, Peggy, Margaret, they age, survive, tell each other it is worth it: “She’d thought she was living a life – she’d tried to tell herself that – but really it was nothing.”

The important thing for the women is routine: going to AA meetings, learning to take care of themselves – to cook, to clean, to keep busy. Greta and Peggy get volunteer work in an op shop, they get work in a call-centre. Working from home is ideal for Margaret, moderating Internet sites, doing some programming. A Tamagotchi appears and provides some anxious company.  

The women have a flair for IT work, but their lives and their backgrounds mean they have problems with getting jobs, with getting social welfare, with getting credit cards from banks. They are always on the outside, always trying to fit in – learning language and responses that will make the least impression. When they are young, they are heartbreakingly naïve. You feel sorry for them but don’t want to leave their presence.

As they age, they manage better, go to a different city. But evenness has its downsides; when things come together, the clarity makes them lonely, bone-achingly lonely. They have Diane, their long-term AA support person, who always manages to calm them down. But their social circle is very small, the possibility of returning to alcohol is a constant. Over time there is just Heidi and Dell, and Heidi goes to extreme lengths to look different, not look like a woman living in the aftermath, “They hugged each other and Heidi poked her finger gently into Margaret’s forehead. ‘Don’t let them live rent-free in your head’.”

Nothing to see is hypnotic, it gestures to so many things. It is about anyone who is living a marginalised life, whose group is seen as homogenous, who are not seen as individuals. It is about lives defined by alcohol or abuse, those who are non-binary and don’t fit the social norm, those ‘on the spectrum’ who find life online more calming than life-in-person … And it is about a person’s relationship with themselves during the long post-trauma journey.

The novel is a tense read, even though the lives it describes are predictable. The women must constantly be on guard against alcohol, against any man who walks behind them in the dark. Their lives are boring but exhausting – and their IT skills puts them in a distant virtual, manipulative, and dangerous universe. The transitions in the women’s lives are brilliantly written – both mundane and spectacular.

Despite the sombre themes and sad lives, there are moments of beauty in the book. Greta and Peggy talking small delights in the world. Their enjoying playing world-building games together. Their wondering if they are living in a simulation – it would explain so much: “The simulation was flawless, but the narrative was full of causal fallacies and cliché.” And wondering, if it is a simulation, who are the non-player characters?

Nothing to see is sad, engaging, original, and has some of the most compelling characters I have every read. Superb!

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!