Gordon McLauchlan ed.: The Littledene Club FInal

By MICHAEL LARSON

This is indeed an intriguing literary experiment. Littledene is actually a fictional town, created before World War II by Rewi Alley's brother-in-law, prose writer and sociologist Hugh Somerset.

Pen New Zealand and Tandem Press have used it as a basis for a series of short stories by well known New Zealand authors. Each was presented with the town and its characters and asked to write about the fictional Marist Old Boys and neighbouring Salisbury rugby teams having their annual cup final. The experiment is a success, with a few reservations.

Straitjackets is one of my favourite stories. An eccentric English teacher buys an old villa in the town to find it once belonged to an ex-All Black - the town hero - who turned murderer and fed his victims to the pigs.

She starts to communicate with him in prison and becomes famous in her own right because of their association. Amusing, clever, a touch sinister and vaguely surreal, it works well.

In another (amusingly entitled Rudie Bits), a loving family of brothers falls out when one of the brother's kids mistakenly sees a porn video at another brother's house, which leads to altogether more disturbing revelations. Fish Fingers, a story of old friends becoming lovers, is touching in its simplicity and contains some of the best language of the collection. There are some great descriptions of what it is like to be at the bottom of a scrum, but thankfully the authors use the outline as a vehicle to write about small-town New Zealand from a broader perspective. The game is often little more than a backdrop.

Relationships are key, and mostly dysfunctional. Women cheat, men lie. People get ground down by monotony, by a town where life revolves around the smelly Caledonian Hotel. While they may have small-town occupants with narrow ambitions, the stories show that falls from grace and human fallibility are universal failings.

The landscape plays a big part. The dry flatlands of the Canterbury Plains, the cold hard sky, the frost, the bitter air; these all infuse the narratives.

But by its very ambition, the book is doomed to be limited. Reading end to end one gets a bit tired of the same characters and similar scenic backdrops.

The other problem is that the brief limits the scenarios. The book is very white - because the occupants of the small town are mostly white - so it gives a great snapshot of a small town in New Zealand, but not necessarily small-town New Zealand in general. Normally a collection of stories would have broader reach.

However, as a dip in and out, it works superbly, as you'd expect with writers the calibre of Vincent O'Sullivan, Shonagh Koea, Graeme Lay, Barbara Else and Kevin Ireland all contributing. Herald writer Peter Calder features also, and makes his fictional debut to good effect.

As for who wrote what - my reluctance to match authors to stories is a result of following the spirit of the publisher's guidelines.

The Littledene Club Final is a follow-up to last year's Morrieson's Motel, for which a competition was run to guess who was the author of each story.

This proved too difficult, and the compromise this year is to list the authors at either end of the book, but not directly with each story.

Initially I thought this, like the project itself, smelt a little of literary snobbery. However, it is better not to know who wrote which story, so that the flavours unfold without prejudice. The authors have their unique style and individual take on the theme, but things are not so disparate that the collection can't work as a whole.

While this is eclectic, it is eclectic within certain parameters. Some readers may find that too stultifying.

I found the disparate voices, plots and quirky characters were enough to keep me reading. This is an important collection of New Zealand short-story writing - just do as the authors have had to and take it in context.

Tandem Press

$27.95

* Michael Larsen is an Auckland freelance writer.