Owen Marshall: Watch of Gryphons and Other Stories

Owen Marshall is one of New Zealand literature's supporting walls. His writing is unglamorous, solid, as far from postmodern chic as it is possible to get. He deploys words carefully, develops ideas thoughtfully, and it is possible to get quite a long way i

nto his new story collection before the realisation creeps over you that you are reading a book of lasting importance.

Marshall has won the Montana award as a novelist, but short stories form the core of his published works. This new collection ranges widely in subject matter, and equally widely in location. We visit the Sydney zoo and a small town in Italy; we meet a 13-year-old apprentice burglar and an old man slowly losing himself in dementia.

But the book's physical centre of gravity is the South Island, and its predominant concern is with the ways in which quiet, ordinary lives touch each other.

A student recovering from a breakdown goes to stay with his aunt and uncle on their North Otago farm. A recently bereaved man goes to meet his birth mother for the first time. A teacher on a professional development course strikes up an unexpected friendship with a Croatian immigrant. In these and a dozen other stories, Marshall opens out the complexities of unregarded inner lives.

These are for the most part sober stories, which bring us into a private world, let us spend a little time there, and then close us out again. Marshall paces the book with great care, though, not only arranging the stories so that minor similarities of theme or incidental detail flow from one story into the next, but also making sure that comic interludes break up the prevailing introspective mood and keep it from becoming oppressive. One of these comic pieces, the story Facing Jack Palance, uses the cliches of old Westerns to hilarious effect, and manages to say a great deal about New Zealand men in the process.

New Zealand men are, in fact, front and centre in Marshall's work. There are numerous well-observed women in these stories, but the viewpoint characters are nearly all men.

Like Maurice Gee, his generational peer, Marshall has devoted himself to exploring what New Zealand men are, how they think, and how they fit into the world.

If the book has a weakness, it shows in Marshall's occasional baffling tendency to end a story with a leaden one-line summation. Show, don't tell, is a cliche of writers' workshops for good reason, and Marshall sometimes gives in to the temptation to tell us things he's already shown us. This is the book's exception rather than its rule, I should emphasise. The stories more often end on hauntingly ambiguous notes, and several, including the devastatingly stark study of extreme old age Minding Lear, have last lines which all but sear the pages.

If you value good writing, this is a collection you really must read. Owen Marshall is at the peak of his powers. 

* Vintage, $27.95