Reviewed by Bernard Gadd

REVIEW:

This book can be enjoyed both as a deftly light satire on the new right's corporate agenda and as a nicely judged spoof on the sort of future fiction that takes itself direly seriously. A glance at the cover picture, the yellow pages, and the almost grinning photo of the author should warn readers that this is not another tory author acting the sage, wielding weighty concepts that in the end challenge not much. This a writer with a zest for the zany which pastiches the zaniness of actual life … and whose underlying seriousness of purpose is shrewdly left to the reader to discern.


Almost all popular conspiracy of power theories are on show ... the Masons, the corporations, the political elites, whacky scientists, the Mafia. And all the conspirers are revealed as learning how possession of power is not only like being part of an almost infinite set of Russian dolls, but that every doll can be interchangeable and might in fact be working both sides of any street. And on show also is a near future course of corporate history in which New Zealand features as the Promised Land of exile for the Corporates (and/or the rest) until the stricken world is again a fit place for the Second Coming of the Global Market. In short, now we know what the Rogernomics coup d'état was all about.


The narrative form of the book in itself is a lovely spoof of future and alternative present fictions. There are a series of introductions, some by the anonymous finder of the cassette audios whose transcription forms the bulk of the book, and some by the narrator of the tapes, Hymie Spitzerella of the Noo York Mob, vitriolicly meeting his death in darkest Otago. The narrating voices have a taste both for cliché as well as for the portentous literary or near literary quotation yet are livelier than those proffered by most NZ literature.


Allen Gray provides, this time in lampoon of best seller fiction, for a host of reader expectations … supernatural kea, foreboding hillsides, sexual martial arts, mobsters, events that echo those of books movies and the TV news, references to Classical Mythology, GE, and, as the commercial hypsters say - much else.


The shortness of the book is also a plus … the reader is left to consider how much of the book's mickey-taking points us towards ecological and economic ideas to be considered very seriously. Gray, a writer on environmental topics, at present works for the Parks and Gardens section of the Oamaru local authority. This is his first novel (or novelette). May it not be his last.

Bernard Gadd