Books
Mokau gothic
by Paula Morris
OYSTERCATCHER, by Greg Billington (Reed, $29.95); THE CASE OF THE MISSING KITCHEN, by Barbara Else (Random House, $26.95); A MAN OF THE PEOPLE, by David Geary (Victoria University Press, $29.95); DELICIOUS, by Nicky Pellegrino (Black Swan, $26.95).
Greg Billington’s Oystercatcher seems, at first glance, like conventional murder-mystery fare. Tom Mahler, an American mourning the death of his son, moves to the moody Mokau coast and becomes entangled in interpersonal rivalries and interracial resentments.
A naive outsider, Mahler becomes a figure of suspicion himself, implicated in a murder. After Mahler disappears at sea, his estranged wife and the local police piece the clues together, relying on diary entries and a mysterious note written in blood (what else?) at the crime scene.
But the novel is not really about solving a crime: it’s about reconciling a community – hence the foreign protagonist, needed to justify all the gee-whiz commentary on race relations. Tom, however, is as convincing a Yank as Dick Van Dyke was a plausible Cockney chimney sweep. (Note: visiting Americans don’t say “arse”, “bung,” “motorbike” or “seventeen stone” and Chicago isn’t in the Great Plains.)
With its ripped-from-the-headlines feel, Oystercatcher attempts to address a number of contemporary social issues and convey their complex genesis, but the prose plods and the characters read like types; by the novel’s end, it seems as if Billington has just rounded up the usual suspects.
In The Case of the Missing Kitchen, Barbara Else opts for a different sort of crime story, an exuberant black comedy centred on Suzie Emmett, a dizzy mother-of-two with a life complicated by her stuck-up sisters, smug brothers-in-law and trio of bossy ex-lovers.
The novel is a frantic and convoluted murder mystery, in which our heroine gets parking tickets and misspelt notes, discovers dead bodies and a mysterious birth certificate, and loses her children and kitchen cupboards, all in the course of one surreal, action-packed week.
Often hilarious, sometimes confusing and occasionally ridiculous, The Case of the Missing Kitchen is written with a breezy charm and confidence, and might be funnier still if the men weren’t burdened with foolish names such as Brick and Caine.
Suzie is determined to solve the puzzle herself in an annoying, haphazard way (she’d “drive a saint to murder”, shouts a long-suffering ex), but that’s part of the fun – and part of the genre Else is spoofing. And you can’t help rooting for a heroine who staple-guns her unconscious detective boyfriend to a pallet and decides that any man “who imagined my kids would like Hawaiian pizza … is a man I did not want to trust”.
In Man of the People, a collection of connected short stories by playwright David Geary, Wellington is not the place Else calls “one of the world’s great small cities”, and violence is something people do to themselves, out of despair or boredom. The title story explores the world of a gay politician who roams the streets of the capital in disguise (although he’s not a cross-dresser, whatever the book jacket thinks), in search of sex and kindred spirits. But although everyone may know each other (“If you stay in Wellington long enough,” we’re warned, “you end up f---ing yourself”), all Geary’s characters find it hard to connect.
He writes with great verve, humour and attitude, evoking a bleak, blokey world peopled with drunk drivers, a suicidal DJ, bitter women and delusional farmers, creating attention-grabbing voices, compelling situations and funny one-liners. But Geary’s fragmented storytelling style makes for a disjointed read, and each story seems to rely on the next to prop itself up.
There’s too much not-witty-enough padding, especially interminable pages of dialogue that make some stories feel like out-takes from a play, and languid ruminations on pop culture – intended, it seems, to demonstrate how knowing and world-weary the characters are, how naturalist and “now” their tales. One story, “Foxglove”, has enough plot for a novel and, like the otherwise good “Duty Free”, unravels from menacing to farcical.
Ultimately, the collection’s links become a join-the-dot distraction and the real-time conversations drive the reader into a quest for subtext (leading contenders: homo-eroticism and nihilism). As one of Geary’s characters says about test cricket, in “the boring bits you get the subtleties of the game”. But short stories shouldn’t have boring bits, especially when the author has such a strong and individual voice.
In Nicky Pellegrino’s Delicious, feisty Maria Domenica flees her traditional Italian village for a placid English seaside town and her daughter, celebrity chef Chiara, returns to Italy to uncover her mother’s past. Luckily, after Chiara loses her mother, finds her father and escapes the clutches of creepy cousin Paolo, she has the sense to avoid crime-ridden Wellington, retreating instead to a sensible investment in the clean, green Wairarapa.
Delicious is a sunny girl-power saga about female self-determination with a sprinkling of sex and an excess of adverbs (everyone in the novel croons soothingly, spits bitterly and drinks determinedly). And, despite her title, Pellegrino runs a distant second to Barbara Else when it comes to describing mouth-watering meals: she tends to list ingredients rather than evoke the tastes of Italian cooking, and comparing Mt Ruapehu with “some giant frosted pudding” is her most ambitious simile.
Pellegrino has written a pacy, undemanding beach read published off-season, and readers who don’t mind cardboard male characters and a promising plot that collapses too soon will find something to enjoy. Like the other books reviewed here, it’s an acquired taste.
Paula Morris is the author of Queen of Beauty, which recently won best first book of fiction at the Montana awards. She lives in Iowa City.
