Review: Middle Distance: Long Stories of Aotearoa New Zealand
Middle Distance: Long Fiction of Aotearoa New Zealand is an anthology of new writing which travels from the empty expanses of the Southern Ocean to the fall of a once great house, from the wharekai of a marae to the wasteland of Middle America as emerging and established writers break new territory in character, setting and storytelling.
Aotearoa is a diverse and complex place, and so too are our stories, our voices. In Middle Distance, Craig Gamble has gathered a spectrum of those voices and showcases that diversity in long story form, curating a journey through the literary and the speculative, the weird and the sublime, the intensely personal and the unexpectedly horrific.
The choice of format is a good one, with each story running to roughly 10,000 words, about twice the length of a short story, allowing the writers to explore an idea and the spaces surrounding that idea in more depth than a short story, while enabling the editor to select a broad range of works which suitably complement and contrast each other across a range of styles, settings and genres.
As with any anthology, not all the stories will resonate strongly with every reader. With my own preference for the speculative, I found plenty to enjoy in this volume where the stories delved into fantasy, horror and science fiction, and I was able to appreciate the literary stories and the line that so many of the entries in Middle Distance walk between the two.
Octavia Cade’s Scales, Tails and Hagfish sets this tone in the opening pages, with her story of a girl who wishes most violently that she was a mermaid, a theme which is bookended in a completely different frame by Kathryn van Beek’s Sea Legend.
There are stories of pure fantasy, such as Rem Wigmore’s touching exploration of shared otherness in Basil and the Wild, and Jack Barrowman’s dark epic The Dead City, which is screaming out to become an episode of the animated short story series Love, Death + Robots. David Geary’s The Black Betty Tapes, a found footage journey through the madness and rise to dystopian power of Queen Elizabeth III, rounds out the escapist thread of the collection in an unexpectedly hilarious and disturbing manner.
At the purely literary end of the scale, Getaway by Nicole Phillipson draws us into a dark place far from Aotearoa, both externally and internally, in a manner then bleakly contrasted in the next story, Backwaters, by Emma Sidnam, where New Zealand is the foreign land and the ghosts are all in our minds.
Like Backwaters, Maria Samuela’s The Promotion also delves into the challenges of coming to this country as a migrant worker and the systemic and generational issues which can litter the road even when it’s paved with the best of intentions. Anthony Lapwood’s Around the Fire struggles with childhood gone wrong resolving into dysfunctional adulthood, while Samantha Lane Murphy flips the narrative in Like and Pray by exploring grief and faith through the distorted lens of social media.
School Spirit by Joy Holley gives us a haunting ghost tale while J. Wiremu Kane’s Ringawera blends crosshatched swatches of race relations, sexuality and ableism rolled into a fragment of a murder mystery. Sam Keenan’s Afterimages, set in Wellington’s Victoria University during the war, takes us down a surreal path that wants us desperately to believe in the power of dark matter in a world quietly burning.
The delightfully unexpected highlight of the collection for me, however, was Vincent O’Sullivan’s Ko tēnei, ko tēnā. This story strikes the chord perfectly for both this anthology’s objectives and for the long story form, telling a darker story of colonial Aotearoa, contrasted with the glowering decadence of distant England, weaving together a weft of seemingly disparate threads which snap together in a perfectly executed delivery in the closing sentences.
Middle Distance is that rare creature in the world of long (short) fiction, bringing together the vistas and flavours of both the fantastic and the sharply real, showcasing the breadth of this country’s writing talent and the depth of our stories, and threading them seamlessly together. Ka mau te wehi!
Reviewed by Dan Rabarts
Ka mau te wehi! (Fantastic, awesome)
