One last post for NZ book Month

Owen Marshall's "The Divided World'.

I hitched around the South Island in the summer of 1994-95, on a tramping trip, with this in the backpack.

It seemed appropriate.

NZ book month -18 and 19 - Barry Gustafson on Muldoon and Holyoake

I am going to shamelessly cram a couple of extra books in today because I am so far behind the pledge to do a book a day.

As well as the earlier post, here are two offerings from New Zealand's best political biographer.

Barry Gustafson has done a great deal to correct the tendency, very noticable when I began taking an interest in NZ politics as a teenager, for most academics to concentrate on writing about left-wing politicians.

He is also thorough and fair. I am something of a political biography junkie, and I think 'His Way' - the biography of Sir Robert Muldoon - is the best local political bio I have read.

I do think Gustafson is a little too gentle on Muldoon. But that is a matter of interpretation. One soon learns, in reading about politics, to skirt past a writer's own interpretation and concentrate on the raw information being presented.

And there is plenty of that in 'His Way'. The stories of the internal machinations of National's caucus, from the mid-to-late 1960s, though to Muldoon's demise in 1984, include a lot of previously unavailable information.

The only other quibble - and this probably reflects my own pre-occupations - is Gustafson does not put quite as much emphasis on economic issues as I would like.

Muldoon came and spoke at an Auckland University Political Studies class, of which I was a member, in 1989 and was asked what his biggest mistake was.

He said he thought his biggest error was not realising the economic downturn New Zealand found ourselves in from the late 1960s was a major economic shift. They assumed it was simply another cyclical downturn, and reacted accordingly - i.e. with Keynsian pump-priming.

Gustafson - who, from memory, co-ordinated that university course - was in the middle of interviewing Muldoon at the time and similar comments are included.

There is an overlap with the Holyoake book. Muldoon was very much Holyoake's apprentice and the period 1966-75 was, in different ways, a vital part of both men's lives.

The most intriguing earlier part of the Holyoake book is the demonstration of how distrusted Holyoake was by National's more business-oriented wing. There was a concerted bid to get dump Holyoake when National was in opposition between 1957-60, a move driven by Auckland business. The book shows National's business wing was never very happy with Holyoake.

Again, it is intriguing how Labour's internal politics was much written about from the 1950s through to the present day, but National's were completely unrecorded, until these books.

In their different ways, they show a very different New Zealand to the one we live in now.

Holyoake was notoriously heavy-footed when he got behind the wheel of a car and collected a number of speeding tickets. There is an incident where the then Transport Minsiter, Peter Gordon, marched into Holyoake's office with a wad of tickets, ripped them up in front of Holyoake and told him to ease up on the accelerator pedal.

No PM today would get away with that without it being made public.

Then again, Holyoake was incredibly stingy when it came to spending on his own or his ministers' comforts. He refused to commission what became the Beehive, and the curtains in his office were literally rotting because he refused to have them replaced.

There is also a nice comment about Holyoake's greatest hardship when he became governor-general - the long lunches. Since growing up on a farm he'd taken the attitude that lunch took seven minutes, maximum, to eat, before getting back to work. He'd taken the same approach as PM, apparently.

For anyone with an interest in New Zealand politics, these books are essential reading. And Gustafson deserves a knighthood, in my opinion, for his work.

NZ Book month -17 - 'The Shag Incident' by Stephanie Johnson

McGee's memoir (see last post) mentions an infamous incident which occurred at Auckland University in 1984: playwright and lecturer Mervyn Thompson was abducted, assaulted and tied to a tree by a group of anonymous militant feminists. Allegations - never proved - of sexual harassment and rape were made.

Stephanie Johnson - who apparently was one of Thompson's pupils at the time, and always maintained his innocence - bases this mystery novel around the same incident. In the fictionalisation, Howard Shag, a former All Black and bestselling author, suffers a similar assault. He, though, refuses to talk and becomes a recluse.

The story begins years later and unravels what happened, and why, and the tale is (of course) nowhere near as straightforward as it first seemed.

McGee's own comment on Johnson's book was "I thought it was a terrible injustice to ex-All Blacks everywhere that the central character, even in middle age, could be over-powered by 6 women."

I am not so sure. I depends on the ex-All Black, and on the women. I first attended Auckland University in 1985, not long after the Thompson incident. One of the abductors, who held a prominent position on the Student Union, also used to serve as a bouncer on the door of Shadows on Wimmins Only Night (Mondays).

Six of her would have no trouble handling, say, a Terry Wright or an Allan Hewson.

The book itself is an enjoyable read, and Johnson rightly picked up a couple of awards for it.

NZ book month -15 and 16: two from 'Hard to Find Books' in Onehunga

A very busy trip to Auckland, but I managed a couple of hours out at Onehunga's 'Hard to Find' Books.

It is huge now, and there are a few other branches. If it isn't the country's best second hand book store, it is in the top five. I remember when it was in a basement behind the main street, a chaotic shambles of a place with, for no adequately explained reason, a large disused printing press in the middle of the room. Popped in there a few times in 1987 after visiting my grandfather, who was in Greenlane, dying of cancer. It helped take my mind off things.

Anyway, this visit reaped two very different books from different authors. 'Tall Tales, Some True', from playwright and former very-nearly-an-All Black Greg McGee; and 'Memories of Muldoon' from property investor, commentator, and very-nearly-a-politician Bob Jones.

McGee is most famous for writing 'Foreskin's Lament', a play which probably seems dated to younger people now but in retrospect it captured a New Zealand torn between an almost unconscious nostalgia for the certainties of an earlier time, and the growing recognition that the economic and social ground was shifting uncontrollably and irrevocably under our feet.

It's weakness - to my mind - is that, like so many New Zealand plays, it had to have an angsty rant at the end. New Zealand plays are full of 'Angsty Rants' and they all seem very adolescent to me. Too many playwrights saw John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger", or its various derivatives, too often.

At least the Angsty Rant at the end of 'Foreskin' has some quite clever wit.

McGee himself trialled for the All Blacks and was very nearly picked for the 1972-73 tour to the United Kingdom and France, but narrowly missed out. McGee had had a number of previous run-ins, on and off the pitch, with 'Grizz' Wyllie, who he often marked (they were both loose forwards) and given Wyllie was one of the leaders on that tour, McGee seems almost relieved not to have made it.

"I didn't have the physical or psychological avoirdupois to be an All Black", he concludes, in a line which made me laugh out loud. One can only imagine the reaction of Wyllie or someone else of his ilk to a word like 'avoirdupois'.

(No, I'd never heard it, either. I had to look it up).

McGee covers his later writing assignments, including the controversial - and, now, topical again, 'Verdict on Erebus' television series. He does his OE playing rugby in Italy, gets caught up on the edges of Bert Potter's decidedly dodgy Centrepoint commune, which tries to state a takeover of a voluntary group he is doing legal work for (Centrepoint did this, or tried to do this, to a number of similar organisations in Auckland in the late 1980s)

But the book itself, while it covers the development of a very good rugby player who wanted to be a writer, also records McGee's developing - perhaps a little late developing - maturity.

There is a lovely bit, when he links up Mary, who was to become his wife. Mary already had a couple of children and McGee tells the story of his suddenly having to grow up if he was going to keep this relationship well.

"In my rapid movement from pot plants=0 to little boys = 2, I didn't always, or often, cover myself with glory. But in time, I came to see that Mary's way was the only way, that if adults aren't capable of acting like adults, the children don't get a childhood."

I have added the italics. I think its a great piece of wisdom.

Bob Jones' book was written to correct what he saw as the unfair demonisation of Sir Robert Muldoon.

I'm inclined to pay Jones' views considerable respect, and not only because he writes well. He was a friend of Muldoon's who nevertheless helped bring Muldoon down, publicly breaking with Muldoon in 1983 and setting up the New Zealand Party which pulled votes away from National in 1984.

Jones' breach with Muldoon was over principle rather than a personal matter, although the battle got very personal indeed.

They had great similarities: two boys from the wrong side of the tracks, very bright mavericks with no social advantages who got amongst the country's social and educational elite and, in their different ways, caused mayhem.

Both had a contempt for people who owed their position to where they were born and what school they went to. And good on them for that.

There are some good yarns in here although I suspect some have been glossed over.

One story which is not here, but which I heard Jones tell at a Press Gallery function a couple of years ago when the smokers decamped to Parliament's front steps, was about him and Muldoon arguing into the night over the government's economic direction.

They had apparently been going at it, hammer and tongs, for hours. Muldoon eventually ebbed - one suspects after giving they bottle a fair bashing - and pauses, looks Jones in the eye and says,

"Do you know what really worries me? What if you're right? At least you will argue with me. None of these other bastards will do that."

Personally I refuse to don rose-tinted glasses for Muldoon. I don't think he was the demon some have portrayed him as, and I don't think he caused the economic crisis which engulfed New Zealand from the mid-1970s.

But the way he chose to deal with that crisis made matters worse. And the bullying side of the man - and he was a bully, no question - is not something I can applaud.

NZ book month - no. 14 - "Slinky Malinki" by Lynley Dodd

This collection of four Slinky Malinki stories has become something of a - now rather battered - icon in our house.

My daughter has autism (relatively mild) and global developmental delay. She is six and, until fairly recently, her spoken language has been that of an 18-month/2 year old.

Earlier this year this became the compulsory bedtime book. All four stories.

And after a bit, she started saying the words herself. She has now committed some of them to memory and recites them to her toys. I went past her bedroom the other day and she had Dorothy the Dinosaur and a couple of other dollies she has been given lined up on the bed and I could hear, somewhat haltingly, the words

Slinky Malinki jumped high off the floor

He swung on a handle and opened the door

So this book will, I think, always have a special place in my heart.

Beyond that, Lynley Dodd is brilliant. It is actually very difficult indeed to write stories which can be easily read, even for adults: writing them in rhyming form, for small children, even more so.

A lot of children's books fail miserably at this. Dodd is head and shoulders above most of them.

Dead Parrots and the like...

Ele @ Home Paddock has noted the Monty Pythons are to receive a lifetime BAFTA award.

For an alternative, irreverent take on one aspect of the Python's career, this isn't bad....

NZ book month -12 and 13 -two Maurice Gee Novels

His best, I feel - and no, neither of them is 'Plumb'. Much as I loved 'Plumb' when I first read it - it was a book I sat up until 1am reading, when I first bought it at the Auckland Uni bookshop - these two are better, I feel.

Both 'Going West' and 'Ellie and the Shadowman' have a great sense of place and time. These are always Gee's strengths but in these two he excels himself.

Here he is on the Wellington winds:

You bend into a southerly and fight back,. Its an honest ind, the true Wellington wind. The northerly comes behind your back and punches you. It pushes you this way and that and puts a knee in your groin.

One reviewer at the time observed that Wellington and Auckland are almost additional characters in 'Going West'. Gee captures the cities superbly - he does something similar in 'Ellie', only with Wellington (again) and Nelson.