Series best at yesteryear charm

Reviewed by ROBIN ARTHUR

The new batch of essays in this Lloyd Jones-edited series continues to appeal with a yesteryear charm. These essays - particularly two which are memoirs - reprise the style of Alastair Cooke's American reports, or the many essays George Orwell wrote to pay the rent between novels. They are about lives lived and reflected on.


Bill Manhire: Under the Influence

Leading poet Bill Manhire uncaps his family history, and his father's life, to reflect on how much of our nation's history is preserved in alcohol.

Manhire's first job as a teenager was working, after hours, in his father's hotel, filling jugs with a high-pressure hose at a time when pubs were "giant plumbing systems".

After the war, Manhire's father ran pubs in Southland and Otago in the heyday of standing-only bars and six o'clock closing. A foray into the rural fencing business failed, during a farming boom, because "the new-fangled concrete posts needed to be manufactured by someone other than a man who employed two others to do the work while he went off to the pub or the races".

But Manhire challenges his own recollections. His childhood memories are "short of sequence and narrative" but cluttered with "moments". He wonders if his memory of his father drinking away his livelihood on the wrong side of the bar is "for my own convenience" when others remember the elder Manhire as "someone of charm and capacity".


David Burton: Biography of a Local Palate

Food writer David Burton serves up a view of post-war life with a different flavour.

He traces the influences on his family table from colonial "settler food" to American marines and post-war European emigres.

Burton's anecdotal morsels suggest the appetites of many in 50s and 60s New Zealand were more adventurous than might be imagined.

His father returned from the war to build the catering business which introduced guests at all the important social occasions in 1950s Nelson to imported delights such as escargots and truffles.

Wartime experiences in Egypt had kindled an interest in working with food and his son still treasures menus his father collected from Cairo restaurants.

Burton snr catered for the post-war "smokos" at the Nelson RSA. When the club's traditional menu of pig trotters and savs was replaced with hors d'oeuvres, "the platters were swept clean".

The tale continues through the coffee-houses of the 60s, health-food scene and "smart-casual" restaurants of the 70s, into the culinary renaissance of the past 20 years which David Burton has chronicled as a restaurant critic.


Simon Morris: On Writing Hit Songs

By contrast, Simon Morris' potted history of rock and pop music is not as fresh. This respected musician deftly namechecks performers in the "soundtrack of our lives", from Split Enz to Flying Nun, Mark Williams, Nesian Mystik and the Datsuns. But his take on which lyrics work, and why, lacks the heart to be a hit essay.

It is taking the risk to tell their own stories that makes the work of his fellow essayists more satisfying. Earlier essays in this series, such as those by Margaret Mahy and John Saker, delving deep into their own lives, were similarly engaging and remain worth seeking out.

Four Winds Press, $14.99