Breton Dukes’ latest short story collection is a thrilling, surgical examination into the everyday tragedies of domestic New Zealand.

The New Zealand man is a topic that is well examined by pretty much every art form we’ve ever had. Hell, our most famous stereotype is “the man alone”. The loner (usually a straight, white loner) who is separated from society, usually literally but often psychologically. He’s moody, brooding, and often called things like John Hobson (The Quiet Earth), Smith (Sleeping Dogs) or Johnson (the book actually called Man Alone). He’s someone you read about, but wouldn’t necessarily make eye contact with at a bar.

What Sort of Man is, thankfully, not about men alone. But it exists in the same realm. Breton Dukes’ third collection of stories (following Bird North and Empty Bones) focuses on nine people who have been, whether in one sudden life event, like the birth of a child or conversion to a new religion, displaced from those around them. They’re isolated, but often not physically. Each story, be it focusing on two elderly men who invest slightly too much in a casual swimming meet-up or a man caught watching porn on his work computer, gives us a snapshot of a character at a specific point of their unravelling, whether they know it or not. These characters are also driven by compulsion, sometimes very simple (read: uncomfortably relatable) like sex or hunger, and sometimes more complex, like the seemingly unattainable goal of being a good father. 

Throughout, Dukes shows a stunning attention to detail and an enviable skill in turning the most domestic things (a run, an encounter with a dog in a park, a trip to the zoo) into the stuff of thrillers; everyday anxieties turn into Tom Clancy thrillers, in the best possible way. He also has a sense of place – especially Dunedin, where most of the stories are set – that emphasises the moody, constantly damp feeling of the city. Aotearoa’s sunshine with Edinburgh’s hangover.

The most evocative and compelling story here is ‘Bullfighter’, which is one of three stories in the collection to feature a woman, Michelle, as a point-of-view character. Dukes toes the line between detail and misery porn in this story, where he describes a young couple – she a Lotto store worker, he a checkout operator at Countdown – and their attempt to stay afloat. It’s gruelling stuff. Take this paragraph opener:

“Michelle wakes hungry. No lunch yesterday, no tea. The pillow her face is on stinks. The mattress feels sunk and damp like the cupped palm of somebody’s sweaty hand. She rolls onto her side and air shifts up from under the duvet. She stinks too.”

This kind of detail, in this story, is a double-edged sword. It locates us in the character’s situation, immediately and viscerally, but a few times Dukes lingers on details past the point of comprehension and into the realm of tautology – the passage above makes its mark by the third sentence, by the fifth, the details are less illustrative and more tracing over the same lines. 

It’s a minor quibble to make, especially when Dukes turns that eye for detail to action. When Michelle inevitably, tragically, returns to the pokie machines, convincing herself this is how to make the most of what little money she has, Dukes captures the thrill of winning and losing that comes from this kind of gambling. It’s like reading a report of the most depressing heist ever:

“She looks at the flashing jacks then presses GAMBLE, setting a single playing card whirling against a glittering black background, blinking first hearts and then clubs. She shifts her forefinger to hover RED, but then shifts back and taps BLACK. It wins. Now she’s got 200 credits. Adrenalin surges, causing her breathing to change and her feet to move a little on the stool’s low rail. GAMBLE. This time, quick as, she hits BLACK.”

Dukes is as attuned to the inner lives of his characters as he is to their everyday lives. Evan, the central character of the titular story, is a care worker for an autistic man. He is also juggling being a new father, and his wife returning to work. He’s struggling with the idea of being a care worker and while it’s never explicitly stated in the story, there’s the clear implication that he sees this as a feminine, emasculating role. 

He says, to himself, towards the end of the story: “Could this be his job? Going around helping people in need?” like he’s suggesting that he go into space and fight aliens, it’s that ludicrous. Dukes particularly excels at these resolutions, subtly connecting dots for the reader that his characters can’t or simply won’t. All of his protagonists are displaced, whether from society or from their own idea of themselves, and the way he hones in on the tiny tragedies that these displacements have on our lives is quietly devastating. 

What Sort of Man doesn’t break down the man alone archetype, it absolutely can’t, but it widens that archetype. We’re all a product of our circumstances and expectations; both expectations we hold for our own life and those other people have for us. We’re all alone in some way, even when we’re together. Life is a series of isolations, now more than ever, and the way that Dukes captures, with photo-perfect detail, the soul of a person in isolation, is not just excellent, but relevant. We’re not at our most alone when we’re not around other people, we’re at our most alone when we can’t even sit with ourselves.

What Sort of Man by Breton Dukes (Victoria University Press, $30) can be ordered from Unity Books. 

Review copies of Tina Shaw’s pandemic novel Ephemera landed in letterboxes just as the country went into lockdown. Here, she reflects on this strange new reality.

These new times have the uncanny feeling of fiction – of science fiction, or post-apocalyptic fiction. In other words, the unreal has become real.

I keep thinking of Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel which portrays a North American world blasted by a killer pandemic that leaves only a small, scattered population. In March, Cloud Ink Press published my own sort-of post-apocalyptic novel. I can’t claim it’s anything close to Station Eleven, which is brilliant, but it’s a New Zealand take on the idea of a global catastrophe.

The significant difference between my novel and what’s happening now is that I used the scenario of a virus that attacks worldwide computer systems, not a biological virus. It’s still bloody eerie for me. Déjà-vu on a world scale. All I did was write a novel – a fictional story. What’s happening now is, obviously, all too real, there’s no comparison, and yet…

As we emerge from level four lockdown, I can’t help feeling that I’ve been here before.

In my novel, Ephemera, there are airport closures, fights breaking out over bottled water and in bank queues, and people getting stuck – here, and overseas – with people desperate to come back home. I created a Kurtz-like character (as in Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad) whose family is stuck overseas while he is in this country. Another character, Nelson, is a capitalist who had the cunning foresight to stockpile pharmaceuticals from before the Crash. And in the novel’s ‘now’, hospitals have stopped working for lack of supplies and libraries are being used by the homeless.

Mainly, I wanted the lights and the internet to go out in my story – essentially to be a survivalist scenario – so invented a system break-down (hopefully Covid-19 won’t also lead to nationwide power failure and survivalist living!). In the world of Ephemera, seven years down the track, Aotearoa is still without power and internet. We are isolated from the rest of the world. And a bunch of normal people are trying to get ahead in a world that has irrevocably changed.

I write about small communities that have sprung up along the Waikato River as people reinvent their lives after the Crash. Hierarchical structures have changed – doctors are top of the heap, for obvious reasons, while fund managers have low value unless, of course, they have practical skills. Cynthia, the doctor in my novel, is being held hostage in one of these small communities because of her status value, while Adobowale Ackers (a Pākehā man who was once adopted by an African brotherhood) has found a living as a river trader on the Waikato. In my imagination, people would have adapted – or not. Ruth’s father, an insurance broker, vanishes early on, once it becomes clear what a mess the world is in.

Ruth is my narrator, an Ephemera Librarian (yes, there are such things) at Auckland Central Library. I’ve created scenes in which she goes into her workplace, even though it is dim (no electricity, remember) and most of the books have been taken to fuel cooking fires. She comments: “Since the Crash we had lost so many seemingly vital things, such as fuel to power vehicles, and electricity to power most other things. And don’t even get me started on coffee and tampons.”

Funny old Ruth worries. “What would happen to the Ephemera Collection without air conditioning, proper conditions: would the tickets and stubs and postcards grow mouldy and start to disintegrate? If things carried on indefinitely, would we lose the entire collection? The idea filled me with horror. The Ephemera Collection would truly become ephemeral.”

As books have been my whole life, one of the (many) things I’ve found bewildering so far with the spread of Covid-19 has been the library closures. Of course, books would be potential transmitters of the virus and places of congregation, so we had to shut the libraries. Yet books are also lifelines. Books are how we survive, emotionally. Thank God we have ebooks.

I could imagine some young person reading Ephemera one day in the future and, having not learned the history, saying “that couldn’t really happen”. But maybe my novel could be considered a kind of lesson plan. Fiction, I reckon, can actually be a kind of road map: here’s how you might navigate a new world.

I’m not saying it’s foolproof, but fiction can offer a possible way forward, especially when hope is being challenged, such as now. Fiction can, surprisingly, offer hope.

Of course, this is all just background to a story which I have created around Ruth’s journey to find drugs for her sister Juliana who has TB. She has a plan to cycle down south, assuming the roads are still open, to the old Huka Lodge “where the drug entrepreneur was apparently holed up”.

Just as a novel set against the backdrop of Covid-19 would be about more than just the virus itself – and I’d be willing to bet there will be novels springing up sooner or later from this fertile material – Ephemera explores a human story.

It’s what storytelling is all about: creating a world. It just happens that the world of my novel seems to have come true, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. It’s also about the ways storytelling comments on real events. My scenario might have been imagined, yet in the future, there will be novels that draw on what is happening now in an attempt to interpret those events.

I believe that fiction has a secret superpower of portraying our deepest and darkest fears in such a way that we might come to better understand them. I believe fiction has the power to help us through these kinds of events and offer meaning. In five or 10 years’ time, books about Covid-19 will hopefully lend empathy and understanding to what was a traumatic worldwide experience which we all lived through, just like people once lived through World War II –we’re still writing books about that experience.

I just hope that we will all come out of this time relatively unscathed. Maybe then it will seem like simply fiction.

Ephemera by Tina Shaw (Cloud Ink Press, $29.99) can be ordered from Unity Books.