Death the base camp

Press, 11 August 1979, Page 17

Death the base camp

Landfall 129. Caxton Press. March, 1979. 96 pp. $2.50. (Reviewed by Diane Prout)

This edition of “Landfall” contains several pieces on the myths and realities of death, “that final stage of growth” which, according to Peter Smart in his editorial “From Funeral Parlour to Tangi”, at present occupies the minds of writers the world over as “an important base camp for literary mountaineering.” Heather Roberts offers a piece entitled “Two Cultural Attitudes To Death" in which she examines Witi Ihimaera’s first novel “Tangi” and Janet Frames ninth novel “Daughter Buffalo” in the light of Maori and European values. “A Roman Farewell” by John Sligo, an expatriate New Zealander, is a morbid view of decadent, modern Roman society. His characters are emotionally and morally bankrupt, atrophied by their varied and sometimes perverted sexual practices. The messy suicide of one of their number is a catharsis. “Everyone was cleaned by the tragedy, quietly establishing once more their identities under the impact of the suicide.” Edith Campion contributes a sensitive and compassionate piece called “The Hunted Hare” which throws into relief some of our

entrenched attitudes to the eccentric in our own society, and the tidy-minded bureaucratic methods we use to tuck such misfits away where they will not disturb our collective conscience. In contrast, Graeme Lay writes a witty short story entitled “Over- Exposure”, which, without revealing the explosively funny punch-line, “exposes” the archaic attidues to sexual education in some quarters of our education system.

Still on the theme of death, Greg Gatenby offers a poem, "The Bank Teller”, which describes the personal shock a quiet revelation by a young bank teller gives him in the course of a normal business transaction. Closely related are several short poems on the ancient themes of Time and Mutability. It is interesting to note that the two or three poems about Maoris are all written by pakehas. No Maori authors are directly represented in this edition. Richard Corballis of Canterbury University provides an excellent scholarly and detailed criticism of Witi Ihimaera’s novels and short stories. He generally commends this writer’s “considerable powers of organisation” and ranks him with lan Cross and Maurice Shadbolt in his ability to reach popular audiences by “skilled versatility and not shoddy compromise.”