Review: in a fishbone church

A while ago, I complained bitterly about how bleak New Zealand books were. Someone (Morgan) suggested that I try Catherine Chidgey as being somewhat less dour, so when I saw a book by her in the Uni bookshop I decided to give her a try out.

Well, to be honest, the book is still pretty dark. It's written in a style (that seems to be popular with the literati set) of structuring the narrative as a mosaic - there are continual filmic cuts between characters and timeframes without many cues to the reader to help them adjust to the changes. I posit that cinema cuts are easier to cope with in cinema because the visuals can get more information through quickly than the linear word-by-word info stream of a novel. On the other hand, my experience of in a fishbone church (and Baby No-Eyes, Patricia Grace and Below, Tim Corballis) is that of a very complete all-encompassing experience, so maybe one of the points of this style of writing is to approach the wider info-stream available to films. I still find the style very tiring to read, though. In all three of the books I've mentioned there's no real centre of mass to get to grips with, nor is there an ending that provides much closure, they just go on and on and then stop (1). I also find that I need to pay a lot of attention - small details that appear in passing in the beginning of the books are referred to with much more context near the end.

Of the three, they're all uncomfortable in terms of content. Baby No-Eyes is right up there as a counter-discursive, 'writing back' kind of book; Below seems to exist primarily in order to torture the reader; and in a fishbone church is more subtle, but still disquieting, I think because of the continued threat implied into domestic situations: hair combs that scrape bone, eating swans full of shotgun pellets, being nearly drowned in a bath, and so forth. I'm going to change my opinion that this darkness is somehow endemic to NZ writers, however, I think that it's more part of the desire to be perceived as a 'serious' and 'literary' writer. As an inveterate reader of science fiction and fantasy, I find I still like having a nice solid story to get into, rather than having to understand the psychology of the characters from every conceivable angle. Also, because these novels are all set in situations that are potentially real, there are few sources of external conflict so the authors need to provide internal psychological tension in order to have something worth writing about (2).

My overall verdict? Interesting, but I think I'm going to slope off back to genre fiction for a while.

(1) To adapt a quote from the movie Amadeus: "You don't even finish your songs with a bang so that the audience knows when to clap."
(2) The exception being Baby No-Eyes which includes a major land demonstration.