New Zealand: The Quiet Spectacular, by Laurence Fearnley

New Zealand books are easy for me to obtain, and there's plenty of choice. I had gradually become aware of Laurence Fearnley as a writer I had yet to dip into, which seemed rather a lack, given that she has been writing novels, some of them award winning, for around twenty years. So I put my name on the hold list for her latest, "The Quiet Spectacular" at the library, and eventually it came round to my turn (the hold list being surprisingly long).

The book is set in the south of New Zealand, in an unnamed area clearly based on Dunedin, and on a rural dormitory town and wetlands slightly to the south of the city. Christchurch, where I live, also gets a mention as the childhood home of one of the main characters, and residence of her parents. I find when the setting is familiar, the reading experience is changed by the inevitable mental fact checking that goes on. I didn't find anything to quibble with (and the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 inevitably got a small mention).

The book centres around three women. Loretta is a school librarian with two grown children, a soon to be teenaged son, a husband and an ex. She appears to be suffering some sort of mild mid-life crisis, and has embarked on a project to catalogue adventurous women in a book (imaginary or real) called "The Dangerous Book for Menopausal Women". Chance is a teenage girl whose goat farming father and brothers are interested only in go karts, while her mother is literary but cold and mentally cruel to her. Riva is an older women, who has given up a successful business making women's outdoor clothing in the United States, and returned to New Zealand where she is restoring and protecting a wetland reserve. Riva is mourning the death of her sister Irene, but has promised Irene that on the fourth anniversary of her death, she will do something spectacular to celebrate, and will then stop mourning her and get on with life.

These three women separately discover the wetlands, and a hut that Riva and Irene had built there, and eventually meet up. I found the variety of female characters interesting. Men are peripheral here. But though Riva says of men that she can "take them or leave them", it is not an anti-male book (the author, by the way, is a woman despite her male-sounding name). Chance's father, for instance, seems to be a good hearted person, in the glimpses we see of him, while her mother Trudy is not at all sympathetically drawn.

The book was interesting enough that I felt I would like to explore Fearnley's earlier work - in particular, "The Hut Builder" which won the fiction section of the 2011 New Zealand Post Book Awards.

On the Road

The South Island of New Zealand is spectacular. It is very popular with tourists who often travel in hired vehicles. Lately, however, there have been a number of serious, sometimes fatal, accidents involving foreign drivers, which has prompted a good deal of controversy about how easy it is to drive here on an international drivers licence, and whether it should be allowed.

I wonder how many of those who think it should be a lot more difficult have ever travelled overseas and hired a rental vehicle on their own travels.

The problem is, though, that New Zealand roads are not always what our visitors are used to. The first of these photos is a narrow side road up Mt John near Lake Tekapo, which leads nowhere but the observatory up there (which is nevertheless, an increasingly popular tourist spot). The second photo, however, is a State Highway. It is the route through the Haast Pass from the south end of the West Coast of the South Island, through the mountains to Wanaka and Queenstown, an extremely popular tourist area. It can be a very dangerous road in bad weather. Even in good weather, good driving habits are essential. It is very easy for those used to driving on the right hand side of the road to cross the centre line, and meet oncoming traffic with little warning round a blind bend.

On the particular trip when I took this photo, we met a Canadian couple at Lake Wanaka, who declared that New Zealand was the "twisty road capital of the world". They might well be right! Twisty, narrow, sometimes dangerous but very beautiful.

For more road themed photos visit Carmi here.

Truth in Poetry

The other day I was checking out the Poetry Daily site and I came across an opening line that brought me up short:

Discovered in a New Zealand school's basement: a colony of garter snakes

It set me to musing on truth in poetry. I recalled a favourite poem by New Zealand poet Lauris Edmond, The condition. In it, she tells of standing on a bridge with a friend, watching trout, when he tells her that if they go upstream, they suffocate. I heard that this is not in fact true, but when he was told so, she refused to change the poem, because her very dear friend had told her so, and he must be right.

Well, In this case I can't see how the poem can be changed without destroying the poem. And besides, since she refers in the poem to what her friend says, there is no actual untruth in the poem - it is true that that is what she was told. It didn't really spoil my enjoyment of the poem to find that trout can, in fact, safely swim upstream.

But back to the Poetry Daily poem, Ourobouros. What is it that stopped me at the first line? Simply that there are no snakes in New Zealand. No native snakes, and no introduced snakes. Not in the wild, not in zoos, not in pet stores, not brought in for movies. They simply aren't allowed. So there is no way that anyone ever discovered a single garter snake in a New Zealand school's basement, let alone a colony. (Come to think of it, most schools that I know of don't even have basements).

The strange thing is that it seems totally spurious to set the poem in New Zealand. Substitute "New England" for "New Zealand" and the poem seems to work fine, though New England residents may tell me otherwise. I can just imagine that the poet may have heard this anecdote somewhere, and misheard "New Zealand" for "New England" so that's what she wrote when she developed her poem. It is probably a fine poem, but it lost all credibility with me as soon as I read the first line. I don't believe all poems have to be factual, but I do think that there are times when a little fact-checking is necessary.

I'd be interested to hear other opinions: do errors of fact matter in a poem or not?