New Stories
by Owen Marshall

Owen Marshall enters the rooms of his new book with little fuss. No preface, no acknowledgements, just a short endorsement from Fiona Kidman and an elegantly spare image from a painting by fellow southerner Grahame Sydney.

But the title alone, brief and to the point, will have readers heading down to their local bookshop or library. Since 1977, when the NZ Listener published his story ‘Descent from the Flugelhorn’, Marshall has delivered a masterclass in the art of the short story, leading us through a landscape of provincial New Zealand, the South Island high country or the backpacker’s OE that is both familiar and slightly strange as he precisely, incisively, tilts the floor of the story, leaving the reader wondering what the hell just happened.

Here again, in this new collection, Marshall anchors his stories in the small dreams and thwarted aspirations of the aimless young, the resigned middle-aged (and middle-class) and the lonesome elderly. The ordinary – as reassuring as a favourite jumper, as damning as an out-of-fashion corduroy jacket – is Marshall’s turf. Like the boglands of Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s forebears, this is where he digs.

Ryan Neckermann, head of catalogues and records in the excellent ‘Double Whammy’, is an ‘unremarkable, decent, rather boring guy’ whose wife finds him ‘a restriction to any flowering in life’. Their separation, we are told, wasn’t one of screaming and dish-smashing. Of course it wasn’t. There is little screaming in the 27 stories that make up this book. Rather, it was a ‘gradual and painful dissolution of once-close ties’. But – as in so many of these stories – there is an intensity, a tautness, that belies the slow jumper-comfort of familiarity. The narrator’s unexpected glimpse of Ryan, standing alone on the grassy berm outside his former home at dusk, exposes the unspoken maw of Ryan’s despair: ‘I felt my presence an intrusion, both physical and emotional, and back-tracked stealthily through the trees.’

In ‘Marjorie’s Mushroom’, Marjorie Ketle is an ‘ordinary person with an ordinary life, neither a conspicuous success nor an obvious failure’. A receptionist at a law firm, a widow whose daughter, Roseanne, has married a poultry farmer in Dubbo, New South Wales. Amongst the prosaic aspirations of his characters – the extended decks, the escallonia hedges, the Mediterranean cruises for retirees – a daughter in Dubbo is pitch perfect. With echoes of Gavin Bishop’s Mrs McGinty and the Bizarre Plant, a giant and increasingly weird fungus elevates Marjorie’s station in life, but her understanding that this is due to nothing but luck, Marshall suggests, ‘is proof that she had never been ordinary to begin with.’

And really, no one is. For Barry, in ‘The Enemy Without a Tail’, ordinariness – delivering sprocket sets to shops, a leaf blower to a widow in Waverton – is cover for a drug trafficking operation by the former army sniper with a past ‘he had no wish to revisit’. The story is menacing, gripping, tragic – yet rooted in a kind of broken humanity.

Don’t be too quick to judge, Marshall warns. Another Ryan, working part time at his uncle’s motel, encounters Olivia and her young son Archie finding temporary shelter after a marriage break-up. Ryan’s sympathy is shaken only when he glimpses – there are so many glimpses in this book – Olivia’s partner with tears on his face.

Such incidents tend to occur at times of transition in the lives of his characters, when people look up from their jobs, relationships, families or studies: adolescent Charlie Wiles whiling away an empty Saturday; film maker Toby, 34, ‘overworked and underwhelmed’ in a corporate advertising firm; meteorologist Michael, slowly dying in a small, four-bed ward where he, Wayne, Max and George ‘lay like caterpillars but with no hope of winged transformation’; Danny, on his own in Auckland, finding himself at a Christmas Eve beach party: ‘Sometimes it’s better to let life happen rather than try to impose yourself upon it.

In ‘The Ferris Wheel’, Wynne, passed over for an important senior management course, impulsively takes a ride on the huge playground ride. A technical problem leaves him trapped mid-air in a chair with Trevor, a former shearer with a busted back now living in a caravan and seeking daytime refuge in the local library: ‘My favourite possie is by the poetry stack.’ Wynne’s last sight of Trevor, in his op-shop jacket and mismatched trousers ‘going off purposefully into the world’ is both insubstantial and memorable in its poignancy.

As a tourist, Marshall would be aiming his camera not at the grand sights but at these small ruptures in the pattern of days.  A dog plummets out of a window; a woman in a blue dress arrives at a backcountry hut ‘like something in a Jane Campion film’. A stumble on schist rock, a ram raid at a corner dairy, the ‘whirlwind impulse’ of an alcoholic’s relapse or, less successfully, the opportunity to bunk a family reunion – in the best of these stories, Marshall shines a brief light into the neglected or ignored corners of life that alters the path of his characters.

In the riveting ‘Fortuna’s Whim’, the discovery of an old journal takes the narrator back to his OE, when he worked briefly as a deckhand on a luxury yacht. The story unfolds like a bar-side yarn, using a gentle pace and understated brevity – Roger Ettick was a ‘bit of a prick’ – to pull the reader into an attentiveness that is utterly immersive.

In ‘Touch and Go’, Laurie Philbin, Australian lecturer in nineteenth-century cartography (academics – both jaded and ambitious – frequent these pages) is asked to fill in at a conference in Palmerston North. He relishes the opportunity but, when he meets art curator Natalie, his priorities pivot, again briefly, again disappointingly: ‘He told himself that history is all about things that happened and that life is largely about things that didn’t.’

The precariousness of that story’s title ripples through many of these stories. In ‘Elspeth and Lloyd George’, Rhys is in Wales to honour his father’s forebears. Friendship and the possibility of romance flare above Cardigan Bay. Rhys is thrilled – the family history is suddenly not so pressing – but it is the possibility, more than the hoped-for outcome, that drives the story.

While wives in New Stories tend to be wise, practical and distracted, older male characters lean towards social and practical ineptitude. When Elspeth agrees to Rhys’ dinner invitation, his response – ‘You’ll wear a dress maybe?’ – feels creepy. When Ethan, a 57-year-old academic, chooses voluntary redundancy, his pride at learning where things are in the supermarket and what cycle to use on the washing machine is out of step for a man of his age.

But it is in these brief interruptions to the familiar path of family, job and study that Marshall, barely changing gear from the colloquial chatter and emotional reserve of his characters, exposes our deep capacity for friendship, empathy, resignation and hope. In the memorable ‘Jasper Coursey in Nice’, 24-year-old Jasper, newly arrived in the French city, befriends retired academic Gerald and his niece Lucy at a restaurant table. He agrees to look after Gerald while Lucy takes off for the day. Nothing much happens over the following hours, but by the end of the day Jasper has a new sense of possibility: ‘The sun shone as if the day would have no end, and Jasper sped cheerfully through the streets of Nice to reach the point of his departure. To travel on.’