A.L. Kennedy and John Fowles (editors): New Writing 9

Vintage $27.95

Review: Jenny Jones*

Faced with a 500-page collection of fiction, essays and poetry by 58 different authors chosen by unlikely bedfellows A.L. Kennedy and John Fowles, I had an attack of pre-reading nerves.

Would repeated disappointment meet my diligent efforts to engage with 70 new pieces materialising as if from nowhere?

Fortunately, the answer was no. Some readers might wish for more work of an experimental nature, but this selection from established and new writers is full of fine pleasures, as suited to bedtime as any other.

Nearly all the stories engage the reader quickly. In unpretentious but vivid prose they establish the scene and get on with the plot.

They require enough contribution from the reader to make you alert and keep your mind ticking after you've finished.

Interspersed with the fiction are 12 poems and seven essays, which include some of the most absorbing pieces.

The first, Glenn Patterson's Just Like Him, reflects on his father's small acts of courage and love in troubled Belfast.

Being Translated, or the Virgin Mary's Hair, by Lawrence Norfolk, puts translation in a new, or rather, old light, comparable with the dismemberment of saints for the sake of circulation.

The tried-and-trues: Rose Tremain, Anita Desai, Louis de Bernieres (poetry), William Boyd, Richard Holmes, and Paul Bailey do not disappoint, while among the newer writers I particularly enjoyed Rosie Jackson's A Christmas Letter, David McVey's Diamond Ella, Adrian Mathews' The Garden of Nails, and an extract from Michael Heyns' first novel, The Children's Day.

Of course, no anthology would be complete without some pretension. Toby Litt's biographical details, "1968. UK. ISBNs: 0749386274, 0099268396, 0241140692," signal the tone even before we read his soliloquy on judicial executions.

As Kennedy points out, "locations range across most points of possibility ... world views may be painstaking, playful, sober-sided, paranoid or vigorously demented."

As to subject matter, death and sex figure prominently, but the entire lexicon of human emotion is covered.

* Jenny Jones is an Auckland writer.