The Lobster's Tale by Chris Price and Bruce Foster (Massey University Press, $45)
This book, combining texts by Chris Price and images by Bruce Foster, is the third in the kōrero series from Massey University Press edited by Lloyd Jones. The series "invites new and exciting collaborations for two different kinds ofartistic intelligence to work away at a shared topic".
The Lobster's Tale press release uses the term "conversation" in preference to "collaboration" and, in addition, notes that "below the waterline of text and images, a modest voice can be overheard whispering". This refers to the italic ribbon of text — Price's "material adapted from" the American naturalist William Beebe — that begins on the bottom of the first page.
Price's body text is in conversation with this, and with Foster's tonally complex images that comment in diverse ways on the instability or vulnerability of the "natural world" — for example, a tree's spiny branches enveloped in windblown plastic sheeting.
The "lobster's tale" (or tall story) is told with narrative and documentary details incorporating and interweaving astonishing natural and cultural histories, including the diverse lexica in which the lobster's many names and descriptions are listed. On one page, Price gathers (by my count) 50 names for the lobster, not including our familiar "crayfish", a term most often associated with freshwater, claw-less varieties. In Foster's black-and-white cover image, a person walking across wet sand towards the sea leaves behind a footprint trail that resembles a lobster tail.
As well as natural historians, the book cites poets, novelists, artists, philosophers and critics, all fascinated by the tale of the lobster, and tale-tellers themselves in diverse ways — including the 19th century French poet Gérard de Nerval, who famously walked his pet lobster Thibault in the streets of Paris.
There are a number of guides in the underworld Price negotiates, and the thread associated with Jonathan Franzen is one of the most adroitly sympathetic. In 2012, Franzen travelled to the island of Alejandro Selkirk, off the Chilean coast, to recover from the effects of "a soul-leaching book tour and to deal with the loss of his friend, David Foster Wallace".
The Lobster's Tale.
He travels there aboard a lobster boat and arrives among a "dozen or so lobsterman shacks" from which he hikes to one of the island's highest points. Price notes that the lobsters of the region are Jasus frontalis and silentes, like their New Zealand relatives, and that in Selkirk's day "they were three feet long". She also records that Franzen took some of Wallace's ashes with him to the island, known to the locals as Isla Más Afuera, or The Island Further Away. He scattered the ashes into the wind there, and Price suggests that this "is as close to the Romantic sublime as Wallace will get, vanishing into infinity on Earth."
In its understated way, this "tale" of the lobster — or of where the quest for it might end up — is typical of Price's engrossing and distinctive interweaving of anecdote, of histories both natural and cultural; and of a fabulous cast of characters gathered together around the edges or shorelines of Foster's visual field, all under the lobster's 180-degree field of x-ray scanner vision.
- Reviewed by Ian Wedde
Ian Wedde is a poet, fiction writer, critic and art curator, and the recipient of well over 30 major awards, including New Zealand Poet Laureate. A longer version of this review will appear on www.anzliterature.com.
