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Vic Books Pipitea (Image: Tina Tiller)
Vic Books Pipitea (Image: Tina Tiller)

BooksJune 15, 2022

Vic Books and the crumbling of an ecosystem

Vic Books Pipitea (Image: Tina Tiller)
Vic Books Pipitea (Image: Tina Tiller)

Last week Wellington’s Vic Books announced it will shut the doors of its beloved central city Pipitea store on the 31st of July. Its cafe has already been forced to close. Sarah Laing writes.

After I separated, I could no longer afford to be a freelance writer/illustrator, so I got a job in the Wellington public sector. I joined the tribe of lanyard wearers, some strung with plain ribbons, some rainbow, some with Kia kaha te reo Māori emblazoned on theirs. On bad days they felt like the tags shot into cattle ears. I worked on the Terrace and sometimes saw Andrew Little striding down the street with his KeepCup, and Adrian Orr sitting in the window of the Colonial Cafe. I never saw Jacinda Ardern despite being a few hundred metres from parliament – she must’ve used the secret tunnel. I spent too much time in meetings talking about BAU and stakeholder engagement, big rocks and key messaging. I struggled with having to sit at my desk in a large open plan office for seven-and-a-half hours a day after years of relative freedom. I learnt to interrupt the tedium with flat white excursions (the in-house plunger coffee tasted terrible) and walks to the rose gardens to eat my bánh mì before the sauce breached the bag. On Wednesdays, I’d pass the cenotaph, admiring Joe Sheehan’s line of pounamu buttons jutting out of the pavement to remind us that this was once a pā site, and cross the road to get to the vegetable market and Shelly Bay bread stall. 

Before loading up with vegetables, I might pop into Vic Books. It is dangerous to enter a bookshop – I can rarely visit one without buying something – but I would tell myself I was just keeping abreast with new fiction, or that it was research, and that it was my moral duty to support local book businesses. The bookshop was a beautiful, architecturally designed space – light and airy, with huge louvre-style windows that looked out upon the law school (the largest wooden building in the southern hemisphere) and the bus depot, across to the 100-year-old pōhutukawa trees that surround the Beehive. It had elegant light fittings and midnight blue paint detailing. The counter-front was a herringbone design, made from wood salvaged from the bookshelves of Parsons Books and Music, another iconic Wellington shop. It had closed before Pipitea Vic Books opened, and once in an interview, Igor Stravinsky called it “the most beautiful bookshop in the world”. In the north-facing windows, there was an open bookshelf filled with desirable objects – watering cans and witty mugs and bags – that I sometimes bought as gifts. The booksellers, Karen and Lisa, knew my name. In their eyes, I was still a writer. They were invested in the books I selected, telling me which ones they had liked or reviewed on the radio. Although I always ended up choosing something different, I would take one that they recommended. Because once you’ve crossed the threshold, there is never just one book. 

(Photo: Supplied)

For a while, you only needed to buy two books before you were eligible for a free coffee. The bookshop and the cafe flowed into each other, the children’s and cook books providing a natural segue. Looming at grand scale above the main seating area of the cafe was Colin McCahon’s ochre, black and white I AM canvas, putting other cafe art to shame. I usually chose to sit in the window.

I first noticed the protest on the 8th of February, driving my daughter to a Scouts event. Camper vans were parked along the yellow lines of Bowen Street, and my daughter yelled “Go get vaccinated!” through her open window. I quickly wound the window back up. They were still there when I biked into work the next day, their tents blistering the parliament green. In the subsequent days the city felt increasingly dangerous, chaotic. I hadn’t appreciated the quiet order my fellow lanyard wearers kept. “You’re sheep! Sheep! Take off your fucking masks”, a long-haired, barefoot man yelled at us as we waited in line at the bus stop. “I just want some cream in a can” yelled another woman, lurching about the Lambton Quay supermarket in a long purple frock, unmasked and also barefoot. I pinched my N-95 tighter around my nose. All around parliament the campers colonised, their cars parked illegally up Molesworth, Bowen, Bunny and Stout Streets, crammed with bedding and chilly bins and sound systems. Their children ranged free. One evening I biked past them playing on the steps up to the Beehive, chalking messages on the concrete, the sun Jesus-raying through their hair. It almost seemed bucolic. There was talk of Nazis amongst them, and of campers emptying their buckets of excrement into the harbour. “I just want my city back,” my workmate said. “They’re ferals. I want them to go.”

(Photo: Supplied)

Vic Books had to temporarily close – who would want to walk past the blockades and the hecklers to get to the shop? Also, omicron rates were rising. “If you feel uncomfortable coming into the city, you can work from home,” my boss said. Some of us did. On the 25th of February the traffic light setting changed to red. “Please work from home if you can,” we were told. On the 2nd of March the protesters were evicted from Parliament grounds, not before setting fire to the playground. 

We kept working from home. We were scared to catch Covid. We had become comfortable in our Microsoft Teams camaraderie. We paired smart shirts with comfy pants. We drank our own coffee. “It’s so great to be able to get your washing in when it begins to rain,” we agreed. We worried that we were killing our city through neglect. It depended on us, the lanyard wearers. We were an ecosystem. Would they be able to keep on making bánh mì if I failed to buy one each week? Shops emptied, cafes closed. David Jones said it wasn’t renewing its lease. 

I walked down to the veggie market again in May. It had still not returned. I felt furious at the protesters for robbing me of purple carrots and cheap feijoas, consigning me to overpriced supermarket vegetables. Where were all the students? I pitied them, having to attend their lectures online. I went to Vic Books. It was still the same light-filled, calm oasis. Perhaps a little too calm. I browsed the enticing new books stand. They had it just right – not so many as to overwhelm, and stacked up in Mesoamerican pyramid formation. I chose Coco Solid’s How to Loiter in a Turf War, and Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House. Lisa was about to review the Egan on Radio Active – she hadn’t got to the end but it hadn’t come together yet and she was wondering if it would. “Let me know what you make of it,” she said, stamping my loyalty card. 

“I will,” I promised. “I’m a big fan.” I returned to work with my paper bag full of books. I would try not to read them too fast. Or maybe I would read them fast and cancel my Netflix, Disney+ and Neon subscriptions to free up some funds. I felt good because I had supported a local business. It needed me. But I was not enough. 

Vic Books will remain open at the Kelburn campus, and there’s a huge sale on at the Pipitea store until it closes. 

Thanks to Juliet Blyth, former GM of Vic Books, for the story about the Parsons bookshelves.

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Sascha Stronach’s The Dawnhounds: (Image: Tina Tiller)
Sascha Stronach’s The Dawnhounds: (Image: Tina Tiller)

BooksJune 14, 2022

‘A homecoming for New Zealand fantasy’: Tamsyn Muir reviews The Dawnhounds

Sascha Stronach’s The Dawnhounds: (Image: Tina Tiller)
Sascha Stronach’s The Dawnhounds: (Image: Tina Tiller)

Pōneke writer Sascha Stronach (Kai Tahu) has filled his first novel with fungi, queer pirates – and frankly brazen amounts of Aotearoa. 

What does the quintessential fantasy city look like, and why is it a cod-medieval London – or sometimes Paris, or sometimes Venice? Why indeed is the “fantasy setting” a vague mishmash of Europe during the Hundred Years’ War, as written mostly by people who don’t know what the Hundred Years’ War involved? How can some writers tap so unselfconsciously into evocative fantastical worlds that draw on their own countries’ histories and culture, and yet others reach into the toybox for the blessed and much-worn Fantasy London, with its mismatched sets of kings, knights, elves and dragons?

It’s a difficult question to answer. One might as well ask why so many Regency romances are less interested in the English Regency than they are in writing pastiches of Georgette Heyer. Dungeons & Dragons has helped create a kind of extruded fantasy product that was wafted around near a bottle of Ye Olde Medieval Tymes and retains an interesting-bits-filed-off Tolkenian cast of elves, dwarves and halflings. Growing up, I certainly assumed all fantasy had to look like this and be written like this, even if you weren’t English. Maurice Gee’s world of O was an interesting poser. Susan might have fallen into the shadow world from the South Island, but O itself feels interestingly shorn of explicit New Zealand signifiers. I thought I understood why as a child: it would have been naff otherwise. As much as I loved watching Suzy Cato, I understood that she could never have the international glamour of Sesame Street. Kiwi-written fantasy had to escape New Zealand in order for its readers to relax – and if it didn’t, it was bravely signalling to the world that it too did not intend to escape New Zealand. It was own-brand. For Kiwis only, perhaps dreaming only to diminish; to get on the Sir Julius Vogel longlist, and remain Galadriel.

When I first opened up Sascha Stronach’s The Dawnhounds, my first thought was, “Oh, my God. He’s actually going for it.”

Portrait of a long-haired young Māori man, backdrop is a deep green wall, branches of mānuka arranged behind him.
Sascha Stronach (Photo: Supplied)

Soon I stopped patronisingly thinking about how brave it was and started thinking about how good it was. The Dawnhounds is a homecoming for New Zealand fantasy. Certainly it stands on the shoulders of extant Kiwi giants, but it is part of a brave new generation that is sticking its middle fingers at the American SFF market and fighting copyeditors for every single Australasian phrase or idiom.

It’s not easy. I once had a drag-out fight with an American editor over the word graunched. This is the same market that viewed Philosopher’s Stone as needing a translation to Sorcerer’s Stone so as not to trouble any American reader with reaching for an encyclopedia. Our opening perspective in The Dawnhounds is gulls, wind, and sweating like “a pig in a cookpot”; tāngata ferro-tattooists, and a ship called The Fantail. Is there any creation story more particular to New Zealand than a crew struggling to bring a boat ashore?

The scene is Hainak – “the mismatched city, the ragtag city, the city of walls and gardens.” In originality it reminds me of Mark Helprin’s New York from the magical-realism Winter’s Tale, which is a New York of boiled owls and ice. I can recognise New York because everyone with a television set has had an observational apprenticeship to New York. Hainak, though, is whatever you as a New Zealander bring to it – for me, it was Wellington and Auckland all at once, but thoroughly its own and all of New Zealand at the same time – a city that is technically its own island.

Our heroine is Yat Jyn-Hok. Yat is a cop who loves the city and who has watched it change with the advent of alchemical technology to a place she barely recognises. The heresy-hunting Cult of Crane has its stranglehold on the government and most of the police. She gets through her days with smokes and tinnies. The question of citizen or cop runs throughout The Dawnhounds: Yat is simultaneously criminal and copper – an ex-thief, she comes from circumstances she can’t really escape, and her sexual preferences (likely bisexual, though Stronach doesn’t rely on clunky modern terminologies) leave her in a perpetually liminal state. If she’s caught again with the wrong gender in the wrong club, her whole career will be on ice. She has to keep clear of the puritanical Bird Cult – the bin chickens! – but Yat couldn’t steer clear of disaster if you put her on rails.

I fell in love with Yat immediately. Rarely do women get to be the heroes who try to keep their heads down and fail so spectacularly. Yat is high when she shouldn’t be high. Yat doesn’t make good choices. Yat falls headlong for the wrong women. Yat hallucinates long-dead lovers and goes to raves and yet can’t shrug off being a cop. Paraphrasing The Wire, Yat gives a fuck when it is not her turn to give a fuck.

“You like heroes, Yat?”

“Heroes, sir?”

“Heroes,” drawled Wajet. “You know – sword, armor, fight a taniwha and all that.”

Yat does not like clever-dick questions from her superiors. Eventually, she gives the reluctant: Taniwha gotta be fought. Yat inevitably learns a lesson about fighting taniwha herself, though again, not an easy or pat lesson. She gets involved in a murder case – sees ghosts – gets shot. Don’t worry, this is in the first hundred pages. Death only begins Yat’s tale of mad gods, myth-making, and crime. It ends in what is nothing less than Stronach offering up a new fantastical, syncretic pūrākau in the same way Tolkien offered Middle-Earth as a new English epic.

Pirates who talk in “Reo Tangaata”; taniwha, fungus – quite serious fungus – election years, flesh-eating acids, tinny houses, a city recovering from war and revolution and in a more macro sense, apocalypse. Nothing here feels shoehorned in. There is no sense that this is the 1990s Book Awards and we are hoping to impress people with a little bit of homegrown fantasy. Stronach isn’t assured: he just is – this is a book that fundamentally does not care if you want it to be Kiwi or not. It isn’t trying to slip under the radar in hopes of an American paycheque. This is dreamy, drugged-up, enormously imaginative New Zealand slipstream. The Dawnhounds is everything that the new generation of NZ SFF could and should be.

There are a number of New Zealand stalwarts working within the American markets of SFF. They’ve been there for a long time and their names would be familiar to many. But there’s still a sense that they’re on the literary equivalent of their OE – getting some short-form experience abroad before they come home and write a Kiwi Novel, sold through a Kiwi publisher to a Kiwi market. You can’t just write a Kiwi novel and then sell it to the Americans; they wouldn’t be interested, surely. When my science-fantasy quadrilogy was released in America, I waited until the third book to reveal that it was explicitly Kiwi at all – and had to dig in my heels whenever I got told that the American public “wouldn’t understand” something. I was flattered when Stronach asked my opinion when it came to The Dawnhounds and confused American copyeditors, on the understanding that I’d already bloodied my nose in the ring.

“I felt like I fought a thousand battles to retain NZ voice,” he told me.  

“THE AMERICANS DO NOT NEED TO UNDERSTAND IT; THEY CAN WORK IT OUT VIA CONTEXT CLUES,” I shouted back unhelpfully.

A battle fought hard – and won. The result is ferocious, pacey, bonkers, genre-defying. The worldbuilding is rich and fetid: so much has happened before the book even begins that informs the story, and you’re carried along in the tide – your hand is not held and you are not given ceaseless glossaries (an increasing trick of modern SFF novels which cannot decide if they want to be novels or lore guides). There are pirates! By God, there are pirates.

The Dawnhounds is a salvo for the international SFF market. Americans are getting a taste for Kiwi-inflected science fiction, fantasy and horror. Turns out they can work it out via context clues. That they have just been given a gift in this book is unquestionable. What about us? I see it as chance to kōrero about what our SFF future could look like – and even more importantly, relax into an SFF story that shamelessly absorbs, rather than escapes, New Zealand. There are no halflings here: just cops, salt water, and mycelium.

Read Sascha Stronach’s extraordinary essay about the writing of The Dawnhounds, and the landing of a lucrative three-book deal, here.  

The Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach (Saga Press, Simon & Schuster, $35) is available from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington. 

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