I billed it – hyped it, sold it, even believed it – as the Year of the Novel, back in January, when I previewed the year ahead and was dazzled at the prospect of the heavyweight novelists who were about to publish in 2023. There was the return of Eleanor Catton. There was the return of Catherine Chidgey – already, with her second novel in two years, after The Axeman’s Carnival in 2022. And there were new novels from Fiona Farrell and Emily Perkins and Stephanie Johnson and Sue McCauley, and there was the eagerly awaited debut from Airana Ngarewa. It all came to pass and there were indeed many pages of wonderful literature – and yet the year, somehow, felt a bit…not as epic as anticipated. No one wrote the Great New Zealand Novel. No one created an out-and-out masterpiece. No one really stretched fiction to its outer limits or sent it on a journey deep inside the human heart or blew everyone’s minds. Everyone was…good.
Actually just about every reviewer had their minds blown by Birnam Wood and bowed at the big stomping feet of its pages – cults, special ops, a character based on Sean Plunket – in supplication. God knows why. It was very entertaining and smart, too, but it was all play, all wildly unlikely, and the die! die! die! ending was impossible to take seriously. Even as an ecothriller with intellectual pretensions, it was only ever genre fiction. It had a baddie. It had weapons. It had its limits. So, too, did the cool and precise Pet, by Catherine Chidgey, more wildly unlikely genre fiction (its baddie stole a pen!), with a similarly OTT climax.
You longed for real lives, possible situations. Commercially the year belonged to Airana Ngarewa and The Bone Tree, his runaway social realist bestseller about two runaways. A shame about the prose. It made you long for good writing. It was there in the novels of Carl Nixon and Fiona Farrell, but maybe there was too much of it; both novels were fixated with patterns (Nixon’s book was a novel told in 21 stories; Farrell modelled her book on Baccacio’s 14th Century classic The Decameron). And so then you longed for an adult story with adult themes, told powerfully and directly, with flair and wit, by a writer in full control of every sentence and wanting the reader to have a really good time. All of which describes Emily Perkins and her novel Lioness, hereby named in ReadingRoom as the best novel of 2023. Get thee to a bookstore at once.
Lioness by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury, $36.99)
Novel of the year. To be perfectly honest I felt this was going to be the case from the opening few pages – here is a writer at her confident best, fluent and funny, direct and engaging, wasting no time with a sex scene, a backstory, a hotel room, a real estate deal, talk of flagship stores and boutique lines, a life lived luxuriously: “There would be crab and silver and white linen.” And it just kept going at that same pace, skillfully and satirically, with lots more sex. She got under the skin of a certain kind of New Zealand (holiday homes, a trophy wife, spoiled trustfund brats) and peeled it back with malicious pleasure. From a review by New Zealand’s best fiction critic, Anna Knox: “What starts as gentle pawing at neocapitalism and failed feminism turns out to be a brutal disembowelment. Early on in the book, over Christmas in the family’s Marlborough Sounds holiday, narrator Therese’s adult stepson Rob, who works for the Greens, puts his foot through a rotten verandah board and gashes his shin. It’s a neat metaphor for the twin plots of the book – Therese’s identity crisis and what develops into a Serious Fraud Office investigation into her husband Trevor’s property-development business…Lioness wrestles with questions of authenticity and meaning, particularly for upper-middle-class women. Put your foot through the facade of your Chelsea Winter life, and what will you find?”
Pet by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38)
Very nearly the novel of the year. It was sometimes hard to take seriously – oh no, a schoolgirl has lost her favourite pen! – and the ending, like Birnam Wood, was lurid and melodramatic, but Chidgey was across everything (plot, characters, setting, tension, deeper meanings), and the crazy energy of a writer on fire flickered on every page. From a review by Philip Matthews: “The year is 1984 and the setting is suburbia – a school, the shops, home. Twelve-year-old Justine lives with her father, and both are still grieving (‘The day we buried my mother, Lorraine Downes was crowned Miss Universe’). The middle-aged Justine narrates the story 30 years later, when her father is in a dementia unit, and she has a 12-year-old daughter herself. A trick of the memory produces unexpected flashbacks to 1984. Could her father’s new nurse, Sonia, actually be the mysterious and seductive Mrs Price, a teacher who mesmerised Justine all those years ago, along with almost everyone else she encountered?… Beyond the obvious 80s-era signifiers – what’s on TV, name checks for the Smurfs and Cabbage Patch Dolls – Chidgey gets something deeper about the ambiguity of the times, the less clear sense of what was appropriate and what was inappropriate.”
The Bone Tree by Airana Ngarewa (Hachette, $37.99)
Certainly the most popular novel of the year – number one for nine weeks, an incredible performance for a complete nobody from nowhere – and also the most heartfelt. Only the technique let it down; the writing was too florid, too self-conscious. But the story was strong and the sense of New Zealandness was deeply felt. From a review by David Hill: “The Bone Tree is set within sight of Taranaki Maunga, where invasions and exiles still darken memory, farms are battlegrounds with the environment, and time, weather, land all lift into myth…Kauri and Black are pre-teen brothers (it seems), whose parents fit into that class labelled by one of our beloved political leaders as ‘bottom-feeders’. Except they don’t even feed any more. In a Gothic opening, Mum has already died agonisingly after a lazy medical misdiagnosis, and Dad follows soonish after, stiff and soiled in the living room. The two kids bury him under the eponymous tree. Their mother? Dad carried her body into the gorse that fills nearby paddocks; they didn’t dare ask what happened then.”
The Waters by Carl Nixon (Penguin Random House, $37)
At his best, Nixon is a master portraitist of South Island life; he was at his best in The Waters. From a review by Sally Blundell: “Nixon’s fifth novel drills down into the lives of the Waters family in the seaside suburb of New Brighton. It is a place of tension, tragedy and imminent violence; of sun and salt and a homegrown, kickabout beach culture. The book stretches four decades from 1979 to 2019, tracking the family from father Pat’s decision to sell the family farm in Governor’s Bay for a doomed property development project in New Brighton. Moving backwards and forwards across time, we see Mark, at 12 years and Davey, 9, moving into the double-bay villa next to the public reserve. It is dilapidated, dark, unloved, rats roll walnuts up and down inside the walls, their mother is ill, the neighbour is creepy….Through different voices –the narration moves seamlessly from first person to second to third – we learn of the violence, the racism and shattered dreams that blow across this landscape.”
The Deck by Fiona Farrell (Penguin Random House, $37)
Banks Peninsula gothic. From a review by Paddy Richardson: “The conventional and the non-conventional are assembled together. Phillippa and Tom are a long-married couple, not quite so easy with each other now that their busy and satisfying careers are over. Ani is still grieving for her husband, and i has an added burden; adopted from birth she has no knowledge of her heritage other than that her adoptive parents discovered her via a newspaper advertisement. Baz is a surfer and free spirit who pursues the waves, carrying his surfboard and worldly possessions in his disintegrating van. Pete, Ani’s gay brother. has at long last found the love of his life… Sumptuously written, impeccably paced and frankly terrifying.”
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38)
I figured the only sane way to treat the first Eleanor Catton novel since The Luminaries was to go mad, and devote four reviews to her thriller that read like Jack Reacher on a date with Greta Thunberg. The four reviews are here in case anyone feels like spending all summer reading them. “A great book,” wrote Rachael King. Miro Bilbrough wrote, “Ferocious and analytical.” David Eggleton wrote, “Catton is an extraordinarily concise writer, an almost epigrammatic writer; her writing instrument is a kind of scalpel, paring away layers and establishing distinctions neatly and sharply between characters as she probes their motivations and reveals their thoughts.” They all really liked Birnam Wood and so did I, sort of but not all that much. I wrote, “The new novel by Eleanor Catton is at once deep and meaningless. It’s a thriller where just about the most thrilling scene is a debate, hard to put down but easy to walk away from once it’s over, a fast read with a serious intellectual core – in green parlance, it’s a hybrid. Green thinking is the book’s engine: Birnam Wood tells of the battle between good and evil, with the forces of good wanting to save and sustain the planet, and the forces of evil wanting to exploit and plunder it….There’s a lot going on. It’s the work of a writer who is the smartest person in the room. Most every page crackles with thinking, with ideas, with knowledge. It’s all loaded onto a carriage of story which roars at top speed down the track. The pages fly by fast and take you towards a climax you will never guess that is at once totally shocking – Birnam Wood, a novel of contrasts – and completely insane.”
Dream Girl by Joy Holley (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35)
In a year of good collections of short stories – particularly Ruin by Emma Hislop, and How To Get Fired by Evana Belich – the most striking and original was Dream Girl, the debut by Wellington writer Joy Holley. There was a coolness and a wit to these stories of young urban layabouts that recalled the classic 1996 collection Not Her Real Name by Emily Perkins, but Holley’s voice was entirely her own – and in “The Heart Shaped Bed”, which I ran in ReadingRoom in June and may have been the best short story to appear all year, that voice was entirely, hilariously, unashamedly bratty.
Hiwa: Contemporary Māori Short Stories, edited by Paula Morris, with consulting editor Darryn Joseph (Auckland University Press, $45)
Penguin also published an anthology of Māori short fiction this year and it was everything Hiwa was not: thin, sloppily edited, just not very rigorous. It didn’t even bother with an Introduction. Paula Morris contributed an Introduction of about 4000 words to Hiwa and it was a tour de force, giving context and history to the genre. But the stars of the book, of course, were the authors, and Hiwa gathered together the good and the great (such as Patricia Grace, Witi Ihimaera, and Becky Manawatu) as well as the new and exciting (such as Shelley Burne-Field, Jack Remiel Cottrell, and Colleen Maria Lenihan). Anthology of the year, no contest.
Landed by Sue McCauley (Bateman Books, $37.99)
I had the pleasure of chairing an Auckland Writers Festival session this year featuring McCauley, and was struck by the way the audience plainly regarded the author of that classic 1982 love story Other Halves with awe. Her latest book is a sombre meditation on frail old age. From a review by Sue Reidy: “McCauley has created an empathetic portrait of a naïve and vulnerable older woman who struggles to reinvent herself after a tragedy leaves her bereft. This character-driven novel shows just how hard it can be to keep picking yourself up and dusting yourself off when traumatic and unexpected events just keep rolling in – mini-tsunamis that cumulatively diminish a person’s life….Now in her early 80s herself, McCauley explores the ageing process with a sensitive touch. She doesn’t pull her punches about what old age has in store for us all – the eventual relinquishment of those dearest to us.”
Kind by Stephanie Johnson (Vintage, Penguin Random House, $30)
I had the honour of launching the novel, and blathered, “We must regard the novels of Stephanie Johnson as set in the teeming imagination of Johnsonville. It’s all go all the time in Johnsonville; it’s a place of desire and regret, of children swept away by the strong currents of family life, of busybodies who are intent on making things better but who just make things worse.” All I ought to have said was that it was a funny and high-spirited romp, a novel set in lockdown that played at culture wars (she wrote, “The Pākehā was Mr Nasty and the Māori Mr Nice.”) From a review by Anna Knox: “Bad-arse Joleen McAnulty, the central character in Johnson’s riotously engaging novel, Kind, is not a woman to play by the rules. As a teen, she falsely accused her foster father of improper touching, to get back at him for not letting her go to a party and – though we never get details – wreaked havoc for years in the family home. By 2022, nearly 40 and writing to her foster sister and best childhood friend Kerry-Anne from prison, her defiance is reduced to forgetting the macrons on Māori vowels (otherwise present in the book) in her epistolary confessions, which, along with several other sideshow characters and storylines, detail the recent domino run of rule breaking that has landed her behind bars…Kind does a good job of illuminating how massive the class barrier has become, how it determines from the get-go where a person will wind up.”
This concludes our week-long series naming the best books of 2023. Monday: the best nonfiction. Tuesday: the best illustrated books. Wednesday: the best poetry.
