KEY POINTS:
I always want to pick fights with books labelled "Best". Arguing with the marketing department is a waste of energy, and no short story anthology has ever flown off the shelves on the strength of the title "A couple of stories I really liked and some others that were good enough to fill the rest of the book". But still: whose idea of "best" are we talking about? Who agrees with them? Do you mean "best ever", or just the best you could find that particular week?
Anthologies are odd creatures. Each one has its own personality, linked more or less strongly to the personality of the editor, depending on the degree of choice they had in putting it together. This year's Best New Zealand Fiction volume is the first to be overseen by Owen Marshall, after three from Fiona Kidman and another from Fiona Farrell. The fact that it has an earthy, Four Square feel to it is a promising sign, suggesting that the great Southern Man of New Zealand short fiction had room to exercise his own taste, rather than having to cobble it together from a paucity of good material.
And certainly it's a solid book. It takes nothing away from the rest of the stories to say that the head and shoulders stand-out is Charlotte Grimshaw's mischievously titled Opportunity (sequel to the title story of her book of the same name). This devastating study of a policeman accused - falsely? - of rape would stand out in any collection. Its topicality is a strength only because it's such a powerful piece of writing to begin with; rather than depending on recent headlines for its bite, it complicates and recomplicates our perception of its protagonist, feeding subtlety and complexity back into our national conversation on a painful and difficult subject.
There are no terrible stories in the remainder of the book. This will sound like damning with the very faintest of praise, but in fact it's a hard thing to achieve in a 20-story anthology, especially in a small market; a bedrock level of basic competence, above which the better stories can rise, is one of the things you want to be assured of in a book like this.
And there are lots of those better stories. Carl Nixon's My Beautiful Balloon is a quiet, hauntingly beautiful piece about a man coming to terms with a misjudgment that cost someone else his life. Eleanor Catton's Necropolis somehow fuses bone-dry humour with gothic unease, to nail the peculiar boredom of low-level retail work. Craig Cliff's Copies is the best kind of concept-driven writing, elaborating a simple idea into an intricate study of grief and family identity. There's strong work from David Hill, Peter Wells, Alice Tawhai, Fiona Kidman, and many others. For anyone interested in New Zealand writing, this is a book worth picking up.
The Best New Zealand Fiction Volume 5
Edited by Owen Marshall (Vintage $34.99)
* David Larsen is an Auckland reviewer.
