The reading and writing ecosystem in NZ is broken – and I blame myself and other writers of my generation who have not fought for its patch, writes Lloyd Jones.

I was in Christchurch last week when a friend said excitedly, “I have to take you to the new city library. It is magnificent.”

Now that I have seen Tūranga, I agree. It is magnificent to look at and walk around in. It has open air terraces, a terrific café on the ground floor.

We took the lift up to the fourth floor to look at the wonderful sound recording studio and the sewing room – who would have thought? Well, why not. And we spent a few minutes admiring the 3D printer until it began to feel a bit silly. About now it occurred to me to ask after the books. Where were they?

Oh, the books.

Specifically, fiction.

We made our approach from the direction of the sewing room and the 3D printer. And there they were – herded into an area barely more generous than the space on the ground-floor allocated to teenagers and video games.

After a quick tour I returned to the librarian to ask: where are the New Zealand books?

Oh, she explained. They are there – marked specifically “NZ”, the way birds are banded for future sightings. There were more on the second floor, she said.

On the second floor the New Zealand books had turned into shy fauna barely surviving on retractable shelves that open and close like a bivalve. The New Zealand books live in perpetual darkness until someone like me comes along to work the wheel and retract the shelves and throw light on to the titles. And there they were – Bill Manhire, represented by one or two titles. A book by Vincent O’Sullivan. A book by Fleur Adcock. Did I catch a glimpse of CK Stead? Consider the 40 to 50 year output of those writers mentioned.

Virtually no one from my generation was represented.

A child wandering into the doors of Tūranga would need to leave the trail and work hard to find anything by a New Zealand writer. Such a child living in Christchurch might even wonder if New Zealand writers existed.

Readers will be aware that Wellington’s own magnificent city library – one that is not shy or ashamed to display books or to accept its responsibility as a custodian of written literature – has closed for the usual Wellington reason. It is an earthquake risk. Which in Wellington is akin to saying that life is a risk.

Yesterday morning I read in the Dominion Post that Mayor Andy Foster believes it is time to reconsider what a library may be. Why, he said, a library might even have a 3D printer!

Victoria University’s professor of library information and management studies, Anne Goulding , was whistled up to support this idea. She declared libraries were moving away from being storage places for books and a “transactional experience”. Libraries, she argued, were about “building relationships in the community”.

Really? There are dozens of organisations, endless sports clubs and social and cultural clubs that do exactly that – reach out to create a cohesiveness in our society.

A library is where people go to read. A library is where they may borrow a book. A library is one of the most honourable and civic institutions that a community can accommodate and offer to its young. It is not about cohesiveness. It is about the opposite in fact. It is where a self may prosper.

In a library the most important relationship is between one pair of eyes and words on the page. It is where the experience of another may be absorbed and made one’s own. A magical transaction. Almost as good as a 3D printer!

It is not a place for video games. Video games do not need a library. Books need a library. Readers need a library. Young people need a library in a “bricks and mortar” sense to tell them that books and reading matter. If they are to develop a mind that is imaginative, they will need to read. They will need parents and/or teachers to tell them that. Unfortunately, few teachers understand literature. Even if they recognise a book when they see one, they cannot confidently identify literature’s purpose.

Well, I know I am pissing in the wind. Shouting from the parapet as walls below crumble. There are any number of metaphors available to declare the reading and writing ecosystem in NZ is broken. It is not beyond repair, but it is broken.

How the hell have we gotten to this point?

I blame myself and other writers of my generation who have not fought for its patch. We have stood idly by as the school syllabus has shunted literature into the back room of yesteryear. We have shrugged at the loss of review pages from the major newspapers.

And now the reallocated purpose for libraries is all bad news for those of us who are writers. It is bad news for New Zealand publishers. It is bad news for the generations just being born and who believe their parents have carefully prepared and nurtured the environment for them to prosper.

On the same day Mayor Foster aired his thoughts on what a library might be, I am driving through the city when I hear a familiar voice speaking to Jesse Mulligan. It is Steve Braunias in obituary mode singing the praises of New Zealand Review of Books, which has just published its last issue after Creative New Zealand turned down its funding application.

NZ Books offered intelligent response to a book. It generated conversation. It helped us to believe that where we lived mattered, that minds were at work in a public space

At times NZ Books was too determinedly democratic. Reviews of All Black biographies, for example. A bit unnecessary especially when the space was already heavily contested. I would have preferred NZ Books to have been unapologetically elitist – to strut rather than cower.

It is not so long ago that I nearly fell off the stepladder I was standing on to paint a ceiling. I blame Jesse Mulligan. Jesse had invited a book reviewer on to his show to explain to listeners what a book review is. What a book review is, its purpose. On national radio!

And now the National Library is rolling out a national campaign to turn New Zealanders into readers. Good luck with that noble objective. What chances do they have of succeeding when all the support they might have counted on is reaching for its hat to pass out the door.

Books editor Catherine Woulfe on the much-anticipated first thriller by New Zealander and New York Times bestseller, Nalini Singh.

I finished A Madness of Sunshine five days ago. At first I was furious, then disappointed and deeply sad. It’s still eating me up more than any Christmas-release “compulsive thriller” should. 

The cultural moment no doubt has something to do with it. Grace Millane is dead, and Amber-Rose Rush is dead. So many women are dead. And while much of the reporting has been respectful and illuminating (if necessarily constrained by the courts) our appetite for the stories of these dead women has been gross. It’s an understandable fascination, but it feels slobbery and weird and wrong. 

Singh, already a superstar of paranormal romance, knows all about our appetites. 

In A Madness of Sunshine, by my count her 45th novel, women are killed because they look a certain way – “slim, dark-haired, dark-eyed, vibrant with life” – and because they dare to go walking alone. Action centres around the disappearance of a golden girl, “a beauty”, called Miriama. Gobble, gobble.

The setup could have been redeemed by, say, a cast that would pass the Olivia Benson sniff-test, or a victim with real depth, or a clever female protagonist saving the day – or saving herself, at least. 

Unfortunately we get none of those things. 

But let’s quickly detour a bit, to what’s by far the most successful aspect of the book: setting. We’re in a small fictional town on the West Coast of the South Island. There’s lots of reference to deep dark bush and relentless gossip, a wild sea. The community is refreshingly diverse and works together under pressure. 

Singh is very good at brushing past peripheral characters and dropping small, telling insights. She sketches in a child in two quick lines; a slightly-off mechanic takes a paragraph. Mrs Keith, Golden Cove stalwart, keeps her garden neat and watches the story play out from her rocking chair on the porch, “her girth overflowing the white wood of it and her face a pale moon surrounded by a halo of teased black”. 

The search and rescue scenes are particularly well-drawn, to the point it seems like Singh has maybe sat in on some real-life efforts. Everyone goes out properly prepared for the weather and the terrain. They communicate well; there are maps and grids and whiteboards. A chopper. Old-timers who chip in with hard-earned advice. 

In a typically pragmatic moment, Will, the cop running the show, says: 

“If I’ve given any of you an area you’re unfamiliar with, speak up now. It’s no good to Miriama if you’re stumbling around.” And two pairs of searchers do wind up swapping up tasks. 

That’s … kind of it for the positivity. 

I find myself having to write around some of the plot points that really pissed me off, so as to avoid spoilers. Let’s just say they involve “sinning” and violent, biblical punishment. 

In a wider sense there’s a problem with how women in this book are depicted. They stay with violent partners, they put their kids in danger, they’re betrayed, they shack up with creeps again and again. Their reasons for doing so, and of course they have good ones, are not properly explored. Instead, the women – seriously it’s nearly all of them – are almost always presented as if they’re simply unable to make smart choices. “That’s how pathetic I am,” one woman confesses. “That’s how much I love him.” 

To really bang it home, the cop, who plays the voice of reason in the book – and who should understand that abused women often have very good reasons for staying – never pushes past his own trite and insulting rationale. 

“Love could make people do stupid things,” Will muses, thinking about the domestic violence case that traumatised him. “Sometimes, that stupidity led to death. And to screams … that haunted him each time he closed his eyes. As long as he lived, he wouldn’t understand why a loving mother would pick up the phone and invite a monster to visit … So no, Will didn’t trust that Miriama had stayed smart.”

While the women of Golden Cove are inclined to be stupid, the men are inclined to be violent. 

But A Madness doesn’t talk about choices when it talks about the men, rather they’re overcome by an irresistible bitterness, an animal urge, a monstrous anger. There’s a pervading idea that men are helpless, or just about, in the face of primal instinct. It’s good if they’re strong enough to resist – but good luck with that. Will the cop has a history of beating people up when he’s mad. And here he is considering the missing woman: “Will was grateful he’d never felt a tug toward Miriama; she was too young, too shiny, too innocent.” 

Miriama is comprehensively fetishised. Every man in town is besotted with her, we’re told, “bees around a honeypot”. Her adoptive mother’s partner paws through her undie drawer; various other men are more subtle about it, and the women go on about her kindness and big dreams, but the lasting impression is of a bunch of dudes standing around slavering. Again and again we’re reminded that she is young – a girl who’s just become a woman, vom – slender, sunkissed, glowy, glowy, glowy. She has long hair. She brings people cake. Long legs. Honestly, on and on about the long legs. Moves like a dancer. The odd mention of her skill as a photographer, her perceptiveness, has no chance of countering the collective male gaze. Or the odious moral overtones. 

The protagonist, if that’s what you call a person who follows a man around while he tells her what to do, is female too. And another missed chance. She’s called Anahera. She’s come home to Golden Cove after the death of her husband and some other traumas she’ll reveal in due time. We keep getting told that she’s smart and proud of it – “Anahera did not want her headstone to read “Death by Stupidity”” –  but oh my god, wait til you get to the end, when she makes an absolutely implausibly stupid decision.

To be fair, maybe she just really wanted some space. In the opening scene her car breaks down on the drive from the airport and she decides to walk – Golden Cove is only 20 minutes away, and the whole murder thing hasn’t started up yet – and you’re like, okay cool, of course, do it. There’s something powerful about a woman just strolling back into her hometown. 

But nope, because here comes Will: “A man. Thirty-something, with a hardness to his jaw and grooves carved into his face, as if he’d seen things he couldn’t forget – and they hadn’t been good things.”

My fingers twitched for a red pen. 

Next paragraph: “She couldn’t see his eyes behind the opaque darkness of his sunglasses, but she imagined they’d be as hard as his jaw.”

Lose “the opaque”. Lose “darkness” and “of”. Lose the bit that prompts you to think about poking the damaged hot cop in the eyeball. Although he bloody deserves it.

I’m still thinking about A Madness all the time, and talking to people about it, and second-guessing my own reaction. But I’ve read the book twice now and I keep circling back to the same conclusion: that my anger is justified. That women and our stories and hurts deserve better. The closest I can get to describing the whole experience is that I feel like I’ve just been gaslit by a book. 

A Madness of Sunshine, by Nalini Singh (Hachette New Zealand, $34.99) is available at Unity Books.