Books
Dry horrors
by Bruce Ansley
In dry Canterbury, water has become more precious than oil. Farmers who have won access to water certainly look as if they’ve struck it rich. Huge irrigators now roll across the plains, converting them into the nation’s, and possibly the world’s, least likely dairy farms. Once-magnificent rivers and streams are drying up or disappearing altogether. The region has reached peak water, and as is the way with scarce resources, skirmishing has broken out. Environment and recreation groups are fighting a one-sided battle against the powerful farming and business lobbies that control the water business with, Sam Mahon argues, the connivance of the gamekeepers, the ironically named Environment Canterbury, or ECan. He draws a melange of culprits he calls the water thieves.
Mahon tells the story of the political campaign that tried, unsuccessfully, to wrest power from the incumbents in the last local body election campaign. But that would be a dry tale by itself. Much more than that, The Water Thieves is Mahon’s story of his immersion in Canterbury, a paean for its rivers, mountains, lakes, plains, a sharp depiction of the good and worthy, a satire on the unworthy, the venal and the Canterbury pretentious.
Mahon is usually an artist and sculptor. Probably many writers wish that he’d stick to his crafts for he is one of those infuriating people who can skip across the spectrum with the ease of a triathlete. His first book, Year of the Horse, won a Montana award in 2003. He is angrier this time. His world is being stolen.
He flays his tormentors and incites rage in his readers: how dare they! The private-school cliques who regard the back country as their private domain, the local body politicians in the pockets of vested interests, the paid hacks, the Ngai Tahu wearing borrowed suits: Mahon excoriates them all. “They curse our children, these pale, wan men.”
I picked up this book with no great enthusiasm; its subject seemed as arid as Canterbury itself, and I thought I’d read enough about it for this lifetime. I didn’t put it down until it was finished. Mahon helped run a pointy political campaign; but the book hits where it really hurts.
THE WATER THIEVES, by Sam Mahon (Longacre, $34.99)
