ReadingRoom literary editor Steve Braunias selects the year's 10 best works of fiction
For a while earlier this year I was toying with a story along the lines of a headline that would read, "Men: the comeback." Women own New Zealand fiction; they are the best, the most daring, the sharpest observers of the imagined life; Catton, Grimshaw, Knox, Perkins, Chidgey, Kidman, Manawatu, Hereaka …You have to go back to 2016 for a male winner of best novel at the national book awards (Stephen Daisley – whatever happened to that guy?) and before that, 2007 (Lloyd Jones). But 2022 witnessed something like a male renaissance, a cometh the year, cometh the man sort of thing. And so for a while there I was convinced that no one would write a better work of fiction than the urban satire Down from Upland by Murdoch Stephens. Next thing you know Dominic Hoey comes out with his terse crime novel Poor People With Money and I thought that was maybe its equal. Then I thought the downright hilarious satire The Last Letter of Godfrey Cheathem by Luke Elworthy was even better, and no one would top that. But then along came the old maestro, that veteran going strong since the 1980s, the pride of the south (Canterbury), the one and only Owen Marshall. I hereby declare his latest collection of short stories Return to Harikoa Bay as the best work of New Zealand fiction in 2022.
A note on the short story. It's definitely staged a comeback these past few years and the series every Saturday at ReadingRoom has just happened to blunder along at the right time. Two collections make this year's top 10: Beats of the Pa'u by Maria Samuela, and Kōhine by Colleen Maria Lenihan. I hope they at least make it onto the Ockham fiction longlist next year. I fully expect the award will be won by Catherine Chidgey for The Axemen's Carnival. Women own New Zealand fiction, and rightly so; but at the ReadingRoom awards for 2022, it's leased out to Oamaru man Owen Marshall. It's such a damned good book. So, too, are the other titles on this list. Get thee to a bookstore.
Return to Harikoa Bay by Owen Marshall (Penguin Random House, $37)
Marshall-land is not New Zealand. His stories are seldom urban and his characters are seldom Māori. So what? He writes fiction, not social commentary mindful of diversity and representation; and his fiction of frailty and families are so closely observed that the stories always feel right up close to real and actual life. He slips into the spaces where we say one thing and do another, where what we hope or fear people think of us is something very different from who we actually are. ReadingRoom published one of the stories, "Koru Club", about a judge looking back on a life he could have led. A copy of Return to Harikoa Bay is a perfect gift at Christmas: the characters will follow you around all summer.
The Axeman's Carnival by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35)
A novel told by a magpie. I know, I know, that was enough to make me think I'd head for the hills, too, but it works, and suspends your disbelief. Chidgey is such a good, clever writer who always thoroughly immerses herself in her work. From a review by Rachael King: "Like all gothic, mythic, tragic stories, it hurtles towards an inevitable crescendo, a cleansing catastrophe…The Axeman’s Carnival is remarkable, brilliant, a classic in the making… All hail, Chidgey."
Winter Time by Laurence Fearnley (Penguin Random House, $36)
Laurence Fearnley quietly, expertly goes about her literary career, outside of the chatter and the Twittersphere, preferring to go deep inside the lives of her characters, and, just as deeply, her settings. A gay man returns to the South Island town of his childhood and has to deal with rumour, gossip, small-town dislike. From a review by Owen Marshall: "Her evocation of the snow country is convincing and compelling, drawn from personal experience. Fearnley has talked of her upbringing in a family of trampers and campers in this country, a love of bird watching and natural vegetation… Winter Time is meaningful and challenging, with much unresolved. It's a brave story, and well told."
Small Deaths by Rijula Das (Amazon Crossing)
Dazzling. Much of New Zealand fiction is narrow, and concentrated on small events, small lives; Wellington writer Das has the ambition and the wit to writ large, in this amazing novel set in Calcutta's red-light district. A sex worker is murdered. A client investigates. From a review by Anna Knox: "A plot-driven, page-turning narrative which centres the lives of the vulnerable…The Calcutta of this novel is endlessly busy and chaotic, a densely populated space where everyone’s lives interconnect… In her fictionalised account of the lives of sex workers in Small Deaths, she imagines their complex individual realities."
Down from Upland by Murdoch Stephens (Lawrence & Gibson, $30)
Very nearly the novel of the year. It came out just as the news broke of the abrupt red carding of TV presenter Kamahl Santamaria; even without that example, Down from Upland was a topical novel, with its funny take on sexual harassment. A Wellington civil servant in an open marriage is the subject of a complaint from a co-worker. From my review: "It's a satire of the Wellington civil service – its anxieties, its directives, its sexual tensions – and Stephens handles it with great skill, including a long, excruciating scene where the main character blunders his way towards a complaint of sexual harassment. It takes place in a downtown bar. Stephens offers the reader a seat at their table. We hear the older male, younger female encounter at close range – his insistence on talking about sex, her silence and discomfit. It’s so awful to witness and also so compelling to read."
Poor People With Money by Dominic Hoey (Penguin Random House, $37)
Also very nearly the novel of the year and you would have to think it's definitely the best New Zealand novel ever written by a dyslexic. Hoey likes to boast that he's too street for the bourgeois practice of fine literary technique but actually he has a very fine eye, and crafts a neat narrative arc in this noir crime novel about an Auckland barworker who sells drugs over the internet but then has to get out of town when bad guys demand their cut. The action switches to the Far North. Both settings are expertly rendered; in Auckland, characters ride the 66 bus through crowded suburbs, and have too much space and too much time up north. Fast story, satisfying violence, funny.
The Last Letter of Godfrey Cheathem by Luke Elworthy (The Wairau Diversion, $35)
The novel of the year. An author writes letters to his sister from jail. Throughout, I kept thinking, "This is patently world-class. It's brilliant and assured." I also kept thinking, "How the hell is it that something this good is self-published?" I do not know the answer to that one but any publisher – a Knopf, a Granta, a Bloomsbury; note the international names, because like I say this is world class – would be thrilled to put their name on The Last Letter of Godfrey Cheathem. It's a satire on literature, specifically New Zealand literature, and it's very decent of University of Auckland scholar Brian Boyd to allow the parody on his name – the scholarly character Brian Bode is cast as a wonderfully vain and annoying dimwit. The two main requirements for satire is that it ought to be funny and realistic. I was forever LOLing at The Last Letter of Godfrey Cheathem and totally believed in the story. A 100 percent delight, and 100 percent recommended as a summer read.
Beats of the Pa'u by Maria Samuela (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30)
Proof of the quality of this collection of stories: "Plaza de Torres", about a Cook Islander at a bullfight in Spain. Porirua is the less exotic setting for many of these stories of the Polynesian experience. From a review by David Eggleton: "Her subtly interwoven assemblage of nine stories vividly evokes the dreams, desires, fears and achievements of young migrants from the Cook Islands…By turns sardonic, mordant, hilarious and poignant, big on humour as well as tragedy…She writes with such nice perception of a time and place that she makes her version of Wellington's suburban domesticity representative of a whole society caught up in a state of transition towards a flurry of possible futures."
Kōhine by Colleen Maria Lenihan (Huia, $25)
Proof of the quality of this collection of stories: "Mama", set inside a Tokyo hostess club. I devoted a week at ReadingRoom to Lenihan's debut book; it deserves the attention, and a place on the Ockham list, for the power and grace of its 23 stories, many involving Maia, a hot Māori woman who suffers a terrible loss but never, ever suffers fools gladly. From a review by Anna Rankin: "The stories depicting Maia in her role at the Gentlemen’s Clubs of Tokyo are compelling; the thick soup of the city in summer, the glow of dusk over the sex and souvenir stores snaking the alleys, the red velvet clubs, the mirrored walls refracting tiny shards of light cast by spinning discoballs… Kōhine is a stunning taonga by a remarkably accomplished author who has given us a work that further places Te Ao Māori firmly at the forefront of literature in this country."
Kāwai by Monty Soutar (David Bateman, $39.99)
"Why did I include kaitangata in the novel?", the author asked in a story backgrounding why he wrote about cannibalism in his historical novel. His answer: "Because it was what it was." And so he went about describing the killing and eating of people in Māori society in 18th Century, pre-European New Zealand with respect for accurate detail, no matter how graphic. Kāwai was surely the biggest selling novel of 2022. It's held the number one spot on the Nielsen chart for three months. The writing is quite poor – his editors really ought to dissuade him from having characters "postulate", "snarl", "fire back", "tease", "growl", "grin", and even "chortle" in the next, second novel in his trilogy – but the story is well told, more oral than literary. ReadingRoom devoted all week to the best books of the year. Monday: the best nonfiction. Tuesday: the best illustrated books. Wednesday: the best poetry. Today's fiction list concludes the series.
