Weekend in Tiramu

The author is easy to spot as I walk through Christchurch airport. I recognize Owen Marshall Jones (he drops the surname for his nom de plume) from the photograph on the back of Coming Home in the Dark, one of the most sublime collections of short stories published anywhere in the world in the past quarter century. Why else come to Timaru, where its author is resident?

‘A weekend in Timaru?!’ said the winemaker I’d left behind in Auckland. ‘Are you serious? Bill Bryson was being kind when he wrote it was the most boring town in New Zealand.’ In Owen’s car, en route from the airport to the most boring town in New Zealand, where he has lived for many years (his father was the Methodist preacher there), I ask him about Bryson’s comment. ‘I wondered about that,’ Owen says. ‘I was told that he hadn’t actually been to Timaru but that he always had to earmark one place in his travels as “The Most Boring Place” and poor old Timaru was elected when he came to New Zealand.’ Timaru is certainly uncelebrated. Yet it was the birthplace of the legendary 1930s racehorse Phar Lap, Richard Pearse (who achieved manned flight before the Wright brothers), the world heavyweight boxing champion Bob Fitzsimmons (1891), and the world mile record-holder Jack Lovelock (Berlin Olympics, 1936). The oak tree Hitler presented to Lovelock still flourishes in the grounds of Timaru High School for Boys. Owen Marshall’s short stories, however, will be more enduring than any Nazi oak or four- or two-legged sprinter. But who is he? It would be a miracle if you had read even one of his short stories. I was introduced to his invigorating tales late one night in 1993 by a Kiwi wine-grower who thought they might cure my insomnia. The Ace of Diamonds Gang kept me glued for six straight hours. Marshall was an epiphany, and you don’t fall asleep with an epiphany in front of you. Demotic, delicate, unsentimental, ruthless with words, and completely in command of memorable characters, he struck me as parochial, oh yes, but also universal. The most difficult magic a short-story writer can confect – even William Trevor struggles in my view – is the creation of character. In Marshall, I found a fabulist whose stories are a match for those of Pritchett, Katherine Mansfield (his countrywoman, of course), Fitzgerald, Maupassant or Chekhov. Now, somehow, I have managed to wangle a weekend at the home of New Zealand’s greatest living creator of minor fictional characters. Marshall has surely taken a chance inviting me here at the end of my three-week tour of the vineyards. Equally, I have taken a chance coming. What if he has smelly feet of clay? A wife who smokes pungent cheroots? Large dogs? What if this cunning literary thief (and all good fictional writing is theft) is planning vivisection? Opening up the English wine writer and reassembling him in a coruscating piece of satire? I am shown to my room. The air is free of tobacco smoke and there is no sign of dogs. With its distinctly feminine furnishings and Primavera wall-print, it is not what I expected. It was once, when she was a schoolgirl living at home, Belinda’s. Her father looks like a secondary teacher himself (not a difficult role for Owen, as he once was one). His features, pale and unsunned, are topped by a haircut which suggests the ecclesiastical in its abrupt, slightly monkish rotundity. He is in his late fifties or early sixties I suppose, husband to Jackie who works in the Miss Timaru fashion shop. One’s literary heroes cannot all look like Auden or Mrs Woolf (or speak viola-vibrantly like Fay Weldon). But Marshall doesn’t give a fig for being seen as a writer. For him, being published is reward in itself. With some trepidation, then, for the next two days I eat and drink with the Marshalls, tour Timaru, see some of the places I recognize (thinly disguised) from his stories, have dinner with locals, go for walks, and, most spectacular of all, on Sunday we drive to see Mount Cook. This is New Zealand’s greatest peak and its foothills, which I timidly explore, its glacier, which I study the fluid end of, and its flora and fauna, make for a memorable day. The air is like a new gas altogether: invigorating, lung-expanding, liberating. And, of course, Owen and I also gas, gas, gas. What about? We talk about short stories and their writers. The greatest surprise is the modesty of Owen’s disposition, mental outlook and lifestyle. I expected to find a character halfway between Carver and Pritchett – that is to say lugubrious, highly strung, ambitious – but instead he is exactly like a retired schoolmaster who has loved every minute of his teaching career and is now following full-time the hobby he has practised part-time for decades. He is the living embodiment of the cliché that for a true writer, one who can burrow beneath the skin of a character, it is not how far the body goes but how far the mind travels. For such a writer impossible destinations are visited with ease:

I need a lover; not just someone to lie in bed with when it rains, or to stop the fridge banging when it switches off, but because my complexion is bad again. A roughness has developed on the skin between my lower lip and chin, and my forehead and nose have a greasy sheen whatever cleansers or astringents I use. The women in my family have wonderful skins provided they are bedded regularly. It isn’t something we discuss often, but it’s recognised all the same. I knew that Richard was having an affair when my sister Jane developed enlarged pores, and cousin Amelia, a PE instructor at the Police College, could talk all she liked about a vegetarian diet, but her life was in her face.

(From ‘Living at the Belle Monde’, Coming Home in the Dark)

With such a writer, it is important to attend to the subtleties of each sentence, how the stress falls, the manner in which each thought connects to the next. It is, as with carefully constructed poetry, necessary to sense the dark side, feel the melancholy even when the words seem to say something else, something verging on the comic:

My brother Raf lived on seventeen hectares of gravel close to West Melton. He had been a tutor in economics at Lincoln, but resigned on a matter of principle. He said it was a form of hypocrisy to pretend any skill in financial affairs when the best salary he could command was that of a tutor. Raf said that the most important things to achieve in life were privacy and revenue. At West Melton on seventeen hectares he had privacy, but the income was precarious. Raf ’s best crop was manoeuvres. The army paid him for access to the river bed. Heavy manoeuvres was the better paying crop he said, but harder on the ground.

(From ‘Cabernet Sauvignon with My Brother’, The Ace of Diamonds Gang)

There are failures, of course. I don’t care for Owen’s mystical side, and some of his stories fail to take the customary risks for which we so admire him. But even the failures carry a peculiar, insistent charm.

The world is divided between those who have owned a Triumph 2000, and philistines; between those who have had sex, and those prepared to give it another try; between those who remember the old school haka, and those who attend no reunions even in the mind. The world is divided between those who have a favourite corduroy coat, and those with no affection for habit. The world is divided between those who maintain the distinction between further and farther, and . . .

and one is forced to plead for the author to cease this showing-off, but he goes on like this, as he has already done for a page and a half, for another page and a half (the story is called ‘The Divided World’). But in the same collection, The Day Hemingway Died, there are scintillating characters who make up for these slips in taste.

Thorpe even managed to resist the greatest of all threats to a miser – women. It was achieved only after a bitter lesson shortly before he left the badminton club. He stood for some time watching a women’s doubles, and the graceful, scissoring legs of Hannah Stevens had seduced him into being included with her in a group which went to the Chinese restaurant. Once Hannah Stevens began to eat he had realised the enormity of his mistake. Hannah showed complete determination in the satisfaction of her appetites, and the cost of the fried rice, pork and mushrooms was equal to a year’s badminton subscription. In matters of money Thorpe was quick to learn and he never again made any decisions after looking at girls’ legs. To recoup the money Thorpe went without dental care for fifteen months, and the bouts of toothache hardened him in his misogyny.

(From ‘The Spendthrift’, The Day Hemingway Died)

Marshall is, then, very much a New Zealand writer, just as Chekhov was a Russian one. In both cases the settings may be local, often banal, but the themes are freighted with a humanity which makes them universal. The stories always grow outwards from the characters; the reader does not feel the heavy-handed presence of the omniscient author for whom those characters are mere puppets. There is a wonderful sense of world-weary marvelling at humanity’s infinite capacity to astonish, dismay, horrify and, just sometimes, to triumph against the odds. In order to achieve this in a form where brevity is crucial, an order of finesse is required which not only makes us accept the characters, seeing even the tragically flawed ones as human beings, but does so without making us feel that we are being preached at. This finesse is the essence of the Owen Marshall style. The only problem in admiring such an author is the difficulty in obtaining his books in the UK. I’ve managed to find a sympathetic bookshop in Gisborne, North Island, which sends them to me, and at abebooks.com, last time I looked, there were several of his short-story collections available second-hand. Ignore the Casebook in Accounting Information Systems which also comes up via Abe’s generous search-engine sweep. That’s another Marshall. Though, knowing the Owen one as I now do, it is not impossible that such a title will one day appear to announce yet another marvellous collection of his short stories.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 8 © Malcolm Gluck 2005