Frontier of Dreams

As I grappled with Frontier of Dreams, the book of the forthcoming television series on the history of New Zealand, I couldn't help thinking of car design. No matter how racy the lines, how thrusting the engine or fetching the colour, the car designer's ultimate objective is the comfort and efficiency of the driver.

To analogise further: just as Le Corbusier said a house is a machine for living in, a book should be a machine for reading.

So why is the reader the last person so many book designers have in mind, and especially those who conceived this tome.

Let me say here that the main text of Frontier of Dreams (Hodder Moa, designed in-house) is generally fact-rich, attractively written and thus accessible, providing a fairly complete, balanced and reliable story of the nation. The layout, with exuberant use of colour, is attractive - at a glance. In some cases it genuinely enhances understanding of the text. So why quibble?

Well, it weighs 2kg, costs $80, has a body-type that is far too small, especially given the width of the columns, and the captions are in an even smaller, spindly sans serif type, almost invisibly red on white.

All of which means that the only way to read this as a story and give the text the attention it deserves is to sit at a table or desk and focus fixedly on it for hours at a time, with reading glasses on unless you're 20/20.

Don't even think about reading it sitting in a comfortable chair, or in bed. I have a number of books that weigh as much as this and carry small type but they are reference works, to be pulled from the shelves and examined for a short time and then put back.

They are not designed for sustained reading as story books should be.

Millions of dollars of public money have gone into the making of the television series, which had a troubled conception and a gestation period that lasted a year longer than planned. Let's hope it is worth the wait.

The series was presumably made to attract a big audience, so one would have expected a book that would be a guide and a factual back-up with wide accessibility.

The 13 chapters of the book cover the same period as each of the 13 television episodes, and they bear matching names.

Had TVNZ and the publishers focused on readers' needs they would have come up with a book, rather than a monument designed to grace coffee-tables or show off bookshelves.

The print run of the tome is 17,000. Even if a sustained television promotion, accompanied by heavy discounting, manages to get most of these sold, I'll bet all my shirts not one in 500 people reads it through as a story.

Eight historians have written the book: Gavin McLean, David Young, Claudia Orange, Ian McGibbon, Neill Atkinson, Bronwyn Dalley, David Green and Jock Phillips. It was edited by McLean and Dalley. Young apart, they are all Wellington bureaucratic historians, mostly associated with the Ministry for Culture and Heritage. But any frisson of anxiety about that is dismissed by the lively style of the first chapter. This relief, though, comes only after the hard labour of reading a 3000-word introduction that is self-congratulatory and over-hyped in a very television way.

My hopes sank when I read the first sentence: "History is the new black." It took me time and a check with a younger relative to decide this means history is fashionable. We think.

But that's the end of the bad news. The rest of the text is fine. The writing is relaxed and accessible, apart from some aberrant leaps into the absurdly colloquial, such as: Maori had been getting on his wick lately; the defunct Haasts eagle is a ripper of a raptor; and some employers were just ratbags. But I guess this is better than the opposite - uptight scholarly writing.

The text remains readable throughout and doesn't just hit the highpoints as more discursive histories so often do, but moves through each of the historical periods with an even gait.

For example, so many histories jump from World War I to the Depression of the 1930s with barely a nod to the exciting but less traumatic 1920s, during which the consumerism that pervades our modern life was born.

Neill Atkinson in the chapter The Rise and Fall of Happy Homes recalls that electric light brightened the night-time streets and began to power appliances as well as industrial machinery. Electricity consumption grew 22 per cent a year.

Although the decade was economically on a rollercoaster, Atkinson reminds us that women's dresses daringly climbed up as far as the knees; that the suburbs expanded with quarter-acres skirting cities and provincial towns, linked to downtowns by tramcars; that reticulated water and sewerage systems meant the death of the dunny when the lavatory came inside.

And imagine the social impact of radio, cinema and gramophones, expanding minds, connecting them directly to energies outside the family circle for the first time.

With so many writers involved, an unevenness of tone is inevitable and is sometimes a distraction. Some go deeply into the time they are discussing, and others wade more shallowly. Dalley, for example, writes jauntily about The Golden Weather (1949-1965) and hits us with facts and figures that interested and sometimes surprised me, but she never gets into the mood of the time.

Which raises the issue of whether history as a story is best told on television as well as in print by one informed, articulate person. The introduction to Frontier of Dreams mentions American television historian Ken Burns, whose Civil War series was a compelling, essentially personal account of a time that left scars on American society still visible today; and Simon Schama, who recounted his A History of Britain for television audiences.

In their very different ways these men - supported, of course, by research teams - drew a thread through the stories of their countries in an informed but essentially personal way.

They backed their shows with books that were also their own versions. I believe history is best told this way - by knowledgeable tale-tellers; raconteurs who can take you with them. And it is best written this way, too. However, although this book has its inconsistencies as a result of the number of people involved, if readers take each chapter as an author's take on each period, they will get a great deal from it.

Sad that so few of them will bother because what should be the simple act of reading has been made such a burden.