EXCERPT

The Best New Zealand Fiction:2
The [only] significant theme to emerge was that of events taking place not just here, but ‘over there’, somewhere else, as if New Zealanders no longer look inward, but rather see themselves as part of an international literary community. I was, for instance, blown away by Eirlys Hunter’s story Frozen which might loosely be termed science fiction, although I would describe it more as a fable for people abandoned by political will (of which the world has too many glaring examples right now). The story is set in Novaya Zemlya, real arctic islands at the opposite end of the world from New Zealand – as she describes it, a shadowy inversion of us. Chris Else sends dispatches from ‘Ventiak’ an imagined Pacific Island which is home to the dissolute Kit Wallace, as richly realized a character as ever strolled through our colonial past and, perhaps in spirit still roams the outposts, looking for his prey.

Norman Bilbrough, Karyn Hay, Kevin Ireland, Fiona Farrell and Gregory O’Brien all write in an overseas context. The first three stories are set in London, Bilbrough writing with sweet funniness about a would-be writer abroad, Hay in a voice that is dazzlingly profane and energetic, about a night gone wrong for an alcoholic at a literary party, and Ireland of a young man getting into deep water when he takes up with a surprising friend.