Lindsay Charman-Love: Top hat and Taiaha

By GILBERT WONG*

Lindsay Charman-Love lives up north and there can be little mistaking how where he resides informs what he writes about. These short stories have the quality of great yarns, the sort you might hear in a country pub. There are no lattes in sight and not a sniff of angst. The protagonists are mostly self-sufficient blokes, inclined to favour solitude and silence over an urban lifestyle and the chattering classes. Charman-Love crafts an undercurrent of the mystical, of a land where taniwha could still live.

Geography and the impact of nature are important characters in these stories. From a cyclone in Tahiti to a deluge in Outback Australia, the human characters are largely impotent actors adrift amid greater forces, while Charman-Love's tales of the Hokianga and rural life are told with a fine sense of whimsy that never patronises his subjects. This is a fine first collection of stories that shows that Charman-Love is a writer to watch.

Huia

$22.95

* Gilbert Wong is the Herald books editor.