John Cranna's Arena (1992)

John Cranna: Arena (1992)

The worst effects of malnutrition, he continued, were on the mind. 'I've known starving men who listened to their thoughts and believed they had invented a strange new language.' He tapped the point of the toothpick on his front teeth. 'They died convinced they were geniuses.'

- John Cranna, Arena (Auckland: Minerva New Zealand, 1992): 104.

Somewhere in the space between J. G. Ballard's The Drowned World (1962) and J. M. Coetzee's Booker-Prize-winning Life & Times of Michael K (1983) lies the zone of John Cranna's first (and, to date, only) novel, Arena.

Like them, it's dystopian; like them, disturbingly violent. Arena also shares with both books a kind of deadpan flatness of affect - though all three authors show a taste for occasional flights of poetic fancy.

J. G. Ballard: The Drowned World (1962)

J. G. Ballard's first novel is set in a drowned London of the future. The characters have the usual Ballardian preoccupations with inner space: with the working out of their personal obsessions rather than any more practical, world-altering activities.

Even the bizarre ceremony which serves as the culmination of whatever narrative arc the novel has proves strangely anticlimactic: Dr. Kerans survives his ordeal, and wanders off at the end of the novel in search of "the forgotten paradises of the reborn Sun."

It's hard, however, to forget the lush evocativeness of the picture Ballard paints - of a world ending not with a bang but a whimper. Who would have thought at the time that his fantasies would seem so timely and relevant so soon?

J. M. Coetzee: Life & Times of Michael K (1985)

Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K is more poignant. It is, in fact, a very difficult book to characterise even to those familiar with Coetzee's other novels. The solitary, arduous odyssey of the deformed, hare-lipped Michael K through the war-ravaged landscapes of a frighteningly real - albeit on an alternate historical time-track - South Africa, is simultaneously grotesque and inspiring.

Michael K's status as an unperson ("CM [coloured male] - 40 [his age] - NFA [no fixed address] - Unemployed") is established very clearly in context, and yet it's the actual nature of his quest that matters. The civil war ravaging the landscape is above (or below) his attention. His only approach to success in the book lies in the garden he makes in the provinces before returning to Cape Town.

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Brain-damaged by the nineties, openly neglected by authorities, their school buildings falling unhindered around their ears, the kids had all the helpless savagery of young animals left out in the cold too soon.

- Rosie Scott, Feral City (Port Melbourne, Victoria: William Heinemann Australia, 1992): 19.

In terms of a strictly New Zealand speculative fiction, the juxtaposition works somewhat differently. Somewhere between Rosie Scott's Feral City and Albert Wendt's Black Rainbow lies Arena (all three were published in the same year: 1992).

Rosie Scott: Raubstadt [Feral City] (1992)

Rosie Scott's vision of a near-future inner-city Auckland devastated by neo-liberal monetarism may seem a long way from John Cranna's magic-realist city, where "a yellow haze obscured the horizon from the slums of the south to the Guest suburbs in the north" [27], but they do have certain tropes and assumptions in common.

The gleaming teethed "guests" who appear to be in control of the body politic in Cranna's fable are not a long way from the equally sinister authorities in Scott's - or, for that matter, the elaborate Orwellian apparatus of Albert Wendt's.

Albert Wendt: Black Rainbow (1992)

"One day the history of our nation would become clearer to her. When the time was right I would try to explain a few things." [141]

Mary Paul's recent essay "Always Something There to Remind Me: On Growing Up Amid Neoliberal Reforms" Pantograph Punch: 19/8/19) might act as a timely reminder of the spirit of that particular age, for those fortunate enough not to have lived through it.

Hers is, by its nature, a very partial view: Auckland-centric (like the three novels mentioned above), and surprisingly male-dominated. 'Didn't you want to interview any women?' was one of the comments listed under the piece when it first appeared.

That isn't entirely fair, mind you. The last interview (of five) in the article is with the couple Richard Misilei and Mate Colvin, who both work as librarians in Ōtara. All the others, though: writer and performer Dominic Hoey (aka 'Tourettes'); 'Stephen' (not his real name); performance artist Mark Harvey; and AUT Communications Senor Lecturer Thomas Owen, are indeed men, and - it would have to be admitted - offer distinctively male perspectives on the period.

Mary Paul: Always Something There to Remind Me (2019)

Mary begins with a quote from Economist Tim Hazeldine, who describes the fallout from the 'reforms' of this era as “terrible”:

I cannot find any developed economy in modern times that has inflicted so much harm on itself. 104 major reforms pummel[ed] the body-economic. One manufacturing job in three was lost, and with those jobs basically went the blue-collar core that is crucial to the chances of less skilled workers being able to support their families in decency.

She does, however, preface this in more personal terms:

In the early 1990s I often woke at night worrying about how our children would manage in a newly competitive world. If they couldn’t strive to be the best, or at least buy into the idea of life as raw competition, how would they manage? It was not so much a feeling of pressure as one of loss. Would there be a place for them to flourish – one organised around human values and community, and not only around competition and consumerism?

The country had changed in 1984, when a newly elected Labour Government implemented free-market reforms with extreme rapidity, reforms that were extended in the early 1990s by the subsequent National Government. What was done was oddly extreme for a well-developed Western democracy and an elected Labour government, or any government. However giving precedence to business did fit with the crude empirical generalisations that were current at the time about society being founded on self-interest.

Is that what John Cranna's Arena is about, also? That sense of fear over eroding values? Certainly his (unnamed) protagonist lacks any conventional moral compass. He cuts off a man's ear-lobe and chains him to a tree in the garden as a simple act of discipline, and his somewhat tepid feelings of solidarity with the Aboriginal escapee from the livestock collected for the upcoming Arena Festival do not extend to any attempt to liberate him when recaptured for sacrifice.

His strongest identification turns out to be with the children of the next generation, but even this seems as much sensual as ideological:

The girl child's green, wide-set eyes met mine. Poised there was the question that had been put to me twice, the invitaion that had pursued me to the swamps and had haunted my dreams. And as the wind blew sand in flurries across the arena, and brought to that place the scent of end-of-summer orchards, I reached out to the small white hand of this dancer, my daughter, and told her, Yes. [174]

Bear in mind that this is the end of the same summer in which this particular child was born. A brief riffle back in the pages reveals the question - or, rather, statement - twice put to him: "We want you to be the narrator" [160].

But what exactly is it that he's meant to be narrating?

Migrant Workers' Children (2011)

... in a sense, everything that happened that summer was predictable, and with time it seemed to me that when the sequence of events happened as it did, it did so with an inevitability that left me certain that somehow I had known what was going to happen all along. [50]

There's a certain clunkiness to that sentence, and - it has to be admitted - to John Cranna's book as a whole. It's as if he's so determined to make each action deeply significant, that he neglects to explain it - even to himself. It reads like a sleepwalker's book.

Ballard's novels sounds now like an example of cli-fi written long before that term was born or thought of. Coetzee's, too, has a clear political dimension alongside the fabular narration. Scott and Wendt, too, have their targets (and genres) clearly in their sights.

What, then, of John Cranna? More than 25 years on, any deficiencies in clarity of intention seem - to me, at any rate - outweighed by the obscure feeling of hurt underlying his story. His protagonist (like the author?) has returned to home ground round to tell us his story once more in the faint hope that this time it may end up making some tenuous kind of sense.

His hopes - as always - are disappointed, but at least he's managed, this time, to gather around him a small knot of children who may offer some kind of hope, however fragile:

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

- W. B. Yeats, "Among School Children"

Or, to put it more directly, how can there be narrative closure where we ourselves deserve none?

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John Cranna

John Cranna
(b.1954)

Select Bibliography:

1. Visitors. Pacific Writers Series. Auckland: Heinemann Reed, 1989.


2. Arena. Auckland: Minerva, 1992.

Homepages & Online Information:


3. The Creative Hub


4. Wikipedia entry

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Poem for Hone

My friend Mary Paul went up north to attend Hone Tuwhare's tangi at his home marae in Kaikohe. Here's the poem she wrote about the occasion, and also about the long friendship he had with the Paul family, first with Blackwood and Janet, his first publishers, but then on into the next generation:

Poem for Hone

Your hikoi from te wai o pounamu
Was not planned

Your descent into Papatuanuku not counted on
But you must’ve known they would make their own decisions

You’ve written of it often enough and you know that
‘Cremation is not the Maori way’

Sometime about 1am on the night before the afternoon we got there
Moana your granddaughter gave you a piece of her mind

I don’t know exactly the words she said but it was tough

Coming back up here to this old place
Makes you available for comment

Coming back to this marae, not your own but your people are here
Brings your whanau back too

They are humble but resolute, shattered still by your personal land march away from them in 1965

The tangi is for the man not only the poet
Your son mihis to his mother
‘You may have been a poet but she is the poetry of love’

The next day when by chance I meet her and Rewi in the Kiwaka café
She asks why people think being addicted to alcohol is so amusing
We smile

Later the idea of self-medication surfaces
And I remember a rambling conversation with my friend Peter on this New Years Eve
The thing that is most us is the part we have no control over

Your psychiatrist said you had a fetish –
wanting always the earthiness of our succulent woman bodies

You knew you longed for your mother
Though you issued that Kaka Point challenge

See if I care – scatter me here
Singing cockles and mussels alive, alive, oh

We climb the hill as the sun breaks out from its grey veil
And you are lowered beside her – someone regrets it’s not beside your sister

From your new possie you look North over a valley and hillside of bright bush
Grown up from ti tree since Jean went there with your sister 30 years ago

Hinemoa shelters us from the heat under her green umbrella
and we speak of everyone leaving and of how your fame didn’t spread here

Some things have changed since 1945 1965 1975 but not so much

But no-one should feel ashamed

Likewise for my mother who used to joke of ends and ashes with you
And my sister
They both lie in the clinging earth

At Akaroa
At Makara

We, like your family, are not as fine as them
But they are you, we are them

This was bound to be whatever we did,
but in taking you, carrying you, holding you,
embracing each other, it comes to be seen to be

Kai ora e Hone

Mary Edmond-Paul
26th February 2008

Gothic Reviewer review'd

In one of the six “Supplemental” volumes to his infamous ten-volume translation of the Arabian Nights (1885-88), Richard Burton included a section called “The Reviewers Review’d,” in which he heaped scorn and contumely on various imprudent critics who’d thought to question his command of Arabic. It’s very amusing to read, though occasionally a little unedifying (in another part of the same volume he put in a long essay abusing Oxford’s Bodleian Library, who’d dared to deny him their copy of the famous Wortley-Montague ms. of the Nights – he’d had to employ someone to make primitive photocopies, or “sun pictures,” of it instead. If they had agreed to lend it to him, he crowed, he would have felt honour-bound to suppress some of the more explicit passages, but since he’d had to pay for the pages out of his own pocket, he’d felt at liberty to spell out every last unsavoury detail for the delectation of his readers!)

It’s an interesting idea, reviewing reviewers. The usual assumption is that one has to be pretty desperate to care that much about what other people say, but then critics (and sub-editors) do get away with an awful lot of tosh and misinformation because of their control of the means of production. If you write into the Listener, say, complaining about any misrepresentation of your work, your letter is bound to be followed by some bland, authoritative-sounding dismissal by the author of the original piece.

This week’s Listener contains a review of Gothic NZ: The Darker Side of Kiwi Culture (Otago University Press, 2006), a collection edited by my Massey colleagues Jennifer Lawn and Mary Paul together with Misha Kavka of Auckland University, to which I contributed a few poems under the title “Tiger Country.”

The review is by one Andrew Paul Wood. Sadly, the Listener no longer seems to include notes on its reviewers, but a brief consultation of the web reveals that he “lives and writes in Christchurch, New Zealand. He was born in Timaru in 1975. He is a BA(Hons) graduate of Otago University and PGDipMuStud (Massey). He is a writer, poet and art and culture critic.” [Southern Ocean Review 19 (2001] (& MA (merit) Canterbury 2003, as further research discloses).

That detail about “living and writing in Christchurch” one might have deduced from his complaint that Ian Lochhead is “curiously the only South Island voice” in the collection. What about Justin Paton? Or Jenny Lawn, herself an Otago graduate, for that matter? So what, anyway? Do we really have to descend to that kind of parish-pump niggling every time an anthology comes out? (I fear the answer to that last question is ‘yes,’ but I’d much rather it weren’t).

I guess, for the most part, I enjoyed Andrew Wood’s review. There are some awfully nice adjectives scattered about in it – the book (for the most part) he calls “enormous fun,” Martin Edmond’s essay on abandoned houses is “pure gold,” Stephen Turner and Scott Wilson on road-safety ads are “brilliant,” and Elizabeth Hale’s essay on Maurice Gee and Vincent Ward is a “revelatory tour-de-force.”

The poetry contributed to the volume by Olivia “Macassely” (sic. – for Macassey: that’s what I mean about sub-editors; the spelling error is quite likely not by Wood at all …) and myself is, however, described as “overwrought.”

Nice word that – it has a very satisfying air of the hysterical about it which I would certainly not disavow, though I can’t speak for Olivia. He goes on to say that it might have been nice to include Richard Reeve, which I would definitely concur with. Richard did edit the book for Otago University Press, though, so he might have perceived some conflict of interest if he’d been invited to contribute as well.

I guess where I part company with Wood is with his rather “sophomoric” generalizations about the history and antecedents of “the gothic sensibility.” It’s hardly news that Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and William Beckford were influential Gothic novelists. So were Maturin and Monk Lewis. What difference does it make to his argument that “the melodramatics of gothic were being mercilessly lampooned as early as Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey”?

Why does it “make sense to attribute gothic sensibilities to 19th-century New Zealand colonial society” but not to “the present day”? Wood follows this remark by a series of (alleged) “omissions” from the book:

Art is explored, but only contemporary, and unconvincingly (Saskia Leek and Yvonne Todd, no Ava Seymour), ignoring the great provincial traditions (Don Driver in Taranaki, Laurence Aberhart in Russell, everyone on Banks Peninsula). There’s little discussion of the “Man Alone” idea, no mention of the 1984 film Heart of the Stag, or that whole up-welling of gothic-themed culture in the 1980s brought about by Rogernomics and Ruthenasia. Jennifer Lawn tries to fill some of the many gaps through vigorous box-ticking in her breathless introduction.

“Everyone on Banks Peninsula,” eh? A bit of “vigorous box-ticking” going on there, I’d say. And fair enough, too. Of course the book isn’t complete. It never had any aspirations to be (as I understand it, at any rate). Wood is more on the money when he remarks: “The book reads like what it is: a collection of conference papers – personal enthusiasms in fancy dress to entertain peers, with dubious connections to a theme and a few reprints from elsewhere.”

Yep. And? Your problem is …? True, it certainly is “a mixed bag.” But then it did originate in a conference (organized by Mary and Jenny in 2002). Wood himself concedes that “Gothic NZ is worth it for the good bits,” though he goes on to complain that “all too often [it] is more camp than Gothic.” But hold on, didn’t you yourself mention Jane Austen’s “merciless lampooning” of “Gothic melodrama” in the early nineteenth-century? How can the genre-formerly-known-as-Gothic not include an element of camp almost two centuries later?

And, in any case, if there are so many omissions, how does it make sense to restrict “gothic sensibilities” to “19th-century New Zealand colonial society”? Wood himself seems to detect it everywhere but the kitchen sink in “the present day” (especially on Banks Peninsula). Heart of the Stag may escape extended discussion (though I notice it’s listed in the filmography at the back of the book), but Alison MacLean’s classic 1989 short film Kitchen Sink certainly doesn’t.

As far as the “overwrought” accusation goes, what about the idea of describing Ian Wedde’s piece as a “whirlwind potlatch of eclectic waifs and strays” during which he “congees and salamalecs to the circle with an afterword more gratuitously stuffed with cultural possessions on display than Te Papa”?

“Congees and salamecs” – great stuff! I like it. Very excessive … very Gothic, actually.

All in all, I think Wood does a pretty good job. He’s dismissive and patronizing in parts, and lays on the erudition a bit unconvincingly in his opening (don’t forget that some of us actually know something about Gothic art and writing, and have even – in some cases – read Horace Walpole and the rest of them), but if the basic purpose of a review is to write entertainingly about the book on display, then I’d give him a solid B+ / A-.

The mark would be higher if it weren’t for the internal contradictions in his piece (trying to restrict “the gothic sensibility” to the late eighteenth / early nineteenth century, and then going on to complain about all the contemporary examples which have been left out of the book – you really can’t have it both ways). I also find criticizing a book which began as a series of conference papers for sounding too much like a set of conference papers a little paradoxical.

I take his point, of course. The book is bitty but fun, is what he’s saying. He expresses it more eloquently, but it comes down to that.