Love as a Stranger
\nby Owen Marshall
\nVintage
\nISBN 978-1-77553-857-8
\nRRP. $ 38.00. 289 pp.<\/p>\n
The Antipodeans
\nby Greg McGee
\nUpstart Press
\nISBN 978-1-927262-03-0
\nRRP: $ 38.00. 352 pp.<\/p>\n
Murray Bramwell<\/p>\n
In his captivating new novel, Love as a Stranger<\/em>, Owen Marshall immediately greets the reader with portents. The epigraph quotes the 17th<\/sup> century dramatist and poet, Pedro Calderon de la Barca : \u201cWhen love is not madness, it is not love.\u201d And the opening sentence in the opening chapter, set in the present, but located in a 19th<\/sup> century Auckland cemetery, establishes with a limpid calm, a story that is both pleasingly, disarmingly familiar and subtly marbled with a sinister unease:<\/p>\n \u201cPeople in love have a longing to tell others how they met, even if the circumstances are banal, or best suppressed. It\u2019s an expression of their wonder, and gratitude for having found each other. Sarah and Hartley met in the old Symonds Street cemetery, though neither had any links with any of the residents there. Summer- and the shade of the large trees was inviting, despite the dereliction of the place and the long disordered grass encroaching on the sloping paths.\u201d (p.13)<\/p>\n The focus for their conversation is a tombstone \u2013 marking the grave of Emily Mary Keeling. The inscription reads : \u201cThe beloved daughter of George and Emily Keeling of Arch Hill who was shot on her way to the Primitive Methodist Church Bible Class Alexandra Street April 12 1886, aged 17 years.\u201d Later, both Sarah and Hartley google the details of the murder to discover that she was killed by her young suitor when she spurned his offer of marriage rather than go against her father\u2019s wishes. Hartley comments on the case \u2013 \u201cIt was huge news in the papers. It is said up to ten thousand people watched the funeral procession, or were at the graveside. That must have been a good proportion of Auckland then. A scriptwriter could hardly come up with a more heart-rending tragedy, and it was all about love, of course. The murderer was besotted with her Love as a Stranger<\/em> is a novel about late middle age, of living and partly living (in T.S. Eliot\u2019s phrase) and of the unsettling sense that there must be more to life, even as it is running out. Sarah is from Hamilton, staying in Auckland with Robert, her husband, a retired dentist undergoing chemo for invasive prostate cancer. Hartley is a widower, whose wife Madeleine dropped dead at 55, leaving him a house in Titirangi and a legacy of loneliness that runs from his emotionally impoverished childhood on a Southland farm to a drab professional life as a conveyancing solicitor.<\/p>\n Mortality casts a long shadow on all of the characters as they struggle with the grief of lost vitality and the regrets of missed and wasted opportunities. Each of them is wordlessly pleading \u2013 \u201cLove me. I am dying.\u201d But Marshall is not one for histrionics. His novel deftly captures the low-key pleasures and manners of affluent retirement. The emerging courtship between Sarah and Hartley is conducted in quiet cafes, art exhibitions and afternoon music recitals. Like all Aucklanders of a certain age they muse about the value of their real estate, potter on the internet and maintain cordial, but oddly dislocated, connection with their time-poor adult children.<\/p>\n Marshall\u2019s slow burning narrative fuse describes a covert affair between a dutiful, devoted but free-spirited woman and a lonely, urbane widower. It focuses on Sarah\u2019s misgivings, her guilty duplicity, her longing for intimacy. It is potentially Barbara Cartland territory, or Mills and Boon, but Owen Marshall makes it twang with tension and quiet desperation.<\/p>\n Love as a Stranger<\/em> is a splendidly managed social portrait, shrewdly observed and gently described. It is also an excellent unfurling thriller as we are forced to witness an unraveling that will have uncertain and fearful consequences. Simple domestic situations develop Hitchcockian menace when we can no longer be secure in the romantic conventions that the novel invokes, only to subvert them in excruciating and unrelenting ways.<\/p>\n We can\u2019t say we weren\u2019t warned \u2013 if it is not madness, it is not love. But even as Owen Marshall quickens the blood with his unfolding story, the novel brings a more enduring sense of tragedy and asks serious and poignant questions about how we conduct ourselves when we only have one life to live.<\/p>\n Greg McGee\u2019s The Antipodeans<\/em> is as rambunctious and epic as Owen Marshall\u2019s novel is understated and deliberately confined. McGee has created a large canvas and events take place in the turbulent wheels of 20th<\/sup> century history. Opening his narrative in Venice in 2014, McGee charts the lives of three generations \u2013 both New Zealand and Italian – and moves in zig-zag fashion from the present to the 1930s, to the exploits of Kiwi troops in Italy during World War II and the political upheavals in Italian cities in the mid 1970s.<\/p>\n Clare Kostidis is accompanying her father, Bruce Spence, on a visit to Venice in 2014. She is escaping humiliating divorce litigation in Auckland. Bruce, gravely ill with leukaemia, is returning to Venice to be honoured by a local rugby team in which he was a player coach in 1976. He also has, as his startled daughter observes, other, deeper motives for his return. In a speech to the rugby club members he says:<\/p>\n \u201c \u2018I have lived in a far-off land and never came back for nearly forty years, for reasons which some of you will understand, but my time here has remained with me always , in my cuore\u2019 \u2013 he thumped his heart \u2013 \u2018and in indelible memories which have accompanied me every day of my life since I lived among you.\u2019 In many ways Greg McGee\u2019s novel is about Antipodean masculinity. Like Hartley\u2019s backstory in Love as a Stranger<\/em>, there is an inter-generational dearth of That certainly describes two of the novel\u2019s central characters – New Zealand Expeditionary Force soldiers, Joe Lamont and Harry Spence, who are captured as POWs in Italy in 1943. When they escape they are sheltered by courageous townspeople and resistance fighters in Treviso near Venice and further east in Monfalcone and Gemona near the Slovenian border. Brought together by chance, Joe and Harry are close mates in harrowing adversity. Harry displays almost superhuman resourcefulness and courage, a Kiwi hero \u2013 the Good Keen Man at war. But as Joe observes to his chagrin, and McGee astutely reveals, Harry\u2019s skills as a saboteur and assassin reveal an underlying psychopathy that is as criminal as the atrocities he is avenging.<\/p>\n The wartime sections of The Antipodeans<\/em> are powerfully evoked. Using a range of documentary sources and even incorporating actual historical figures such as Arch Scott, McGee creates a vivid portrait of the Italian resistance focused on the two families the Bonazzons and the Zanardis. The bravery and stoicism of these families, in the face of deadly reprisal from the occupying Germans, is memorably depicted and it is the heart of the novel.<\/p>\n From these events all manner of subsequent narrative twists and turns are revealed in McGee\u2019s saga. The frequent time shifts in the novel are at times contorted, but in order to manage the almost Sophoclean coincidences and revelations the author must sometimes measure out his explanatory detail with an eyedropper. It undoubtedly ensures that some very big rabbits come out of some very big hats but the novel\u2019s strength – and ultimate appeal – is not in McGee\u2019s theatrical legerdemain.<\/p>\n The Antipodeans<\/em> reminds us of a theme that is frequently noted in New Zealand literature and sociological commentary : which is that geographical isolation and cultural privation creates a yearning for the world elsewhere. It was a 20th<\/sup> century preoccupation but is no less true today. For New Zealanders, to go abroad is an essential completion \u2013 it is not just OE, it is experience itself.<\/p>\n It was undoubtedly true for the generation of men who went overseas during World War II. That for many it proved a life-scarring experience is undeniable \u2013 and, in The Antipodeans,<\/em> it is Harry Spence who returns displaced and hollow. But Joe Lamont\u2019s story is the jubilant converse – a fantasy almost, of restoration by cultural transfusion. For 2014\u2019s Clare Spence, ripped off in marriage, and in business, by Nicholas, her husband and Auckland real estate partner, the encounter with Renzo, the gallant physics professor, is also restorative \u2013 although McGee\u2019s depiction of her is too hastily satiric and superficial to sit convincingly alongside his other characters.<\/p>\n This novel is a valentine to Italy \u2013 both past and present. Bruce Spence\u2019s typewritten journal entries from 1976, somewhat awkwardly interpolated into the narrative, reveal a fatherless young man rescued and enriched by the paternal warmth of his Italian rugby hosts. His daughter is astonished when she sees her father weep for happiness, and we are told of another Bruce – the New Zealand Bruce – early in the novel :<\/p>\n \u201cHe was rational man – no one had ever described him as emotional, unless coupled with the word \u2018stunted\u2019 \u2026\u201d (p.18)<\/p>\n McGee notes in his acknowledgements that he drew heavily on his own rugby experiences for the 1970s sections and refers to \u201cmy own village, Casale Sul Sile \u201cas a source for location detail. This is not to suggest that Bruce Spence is an autobiographical depiction, but rather that the author has invested his novel with an affection and attention to historical and linguistic detail that is both tribute and celebration.<\/p>\n Greg McGee has said that this novel was thirty years in the making. Then, it was worth the effort and the wait. Even if at times unresolved, lopsided and clunky in its structure, The Antipodeans<\/em> is rich in detail and narrative ambition. It is brim with gusto and cuore<\/em> and lifts an honest lid on some secret men\u2019s business.<\/p>\n \u201cLove and War\u201d New Zealand Books, Volume 26, Number 2, Issue 114, Winter, 2016, p.14.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Love as a Stranger by Owen Marshall Vintage ISBN 978-1-77553-857-8 RRP. $ 38.00. 289 pp. The Antipodeans by Greg McGee Upstart Press ISBN 978-1-927262-03-0 RRP: $ 38.00. 352 pp. Murray Bramwell In his captivating new novel, Love as a Stranger, Owen Marshall immediately greets the reader with portents. The epigraph quotes the 17th century dramatist and poet, Pedro Calderon de la Barca : \u201cWhen love is not madness, it is not love.\u201d And the opening sentence in the opening chapter, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,5,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-36","category-archive","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2705"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2705\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2706,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2705\/revisions\/2706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nAnd after shooting her he ran off and killed himself on a street corner\u2026\u2019Love me. I am dying.\u2019 Those were her last words.\u201d (p.17)<\/p>\n
\nChrist, (Clare) thought, as Renzo translated, Who is this man? Where\u2019s he been hiding?\u201d (p.43)<\/p>\n
\nfeeling: the emotionally impoverished sons of distant, cold, frequently cruel fathers growing up on bleak, meagrely productive South Island farms, or sent to borstal-like boarding schools in their early teens.<\/p>\n