Russell Haley: A Spider-Web Season & The Transfer Station

Hazard Press $24.95

Review Jane Westaway*

It's fair to assume that the name Harry Rejekt tells you all you need to know about the character. And sure enough, the protagonist of A Spider-web Season lives alone on a rundown rural block, with a decaying Honda Civic at the gate.

He's left-handed, out of work and shops at the Tirau Antique and Opportunity Shop.

But that's not all there is to Harry - he enjoys a rich mental life.

Standing in the yard of his former employer, he thinks about the phrase "all and sundry."

"All is everything. By definition. So what can sundries be? Some special pieces or things. Rubber pencils. Edible six-inch nails. Objects so different, so out of the ordinary, that they go beyond all - I think I must be some kind of sundry, Harry decided."

Harry dreams of Dublin, Venice, Zanzibar and Reykjavik. He fantasises about Erminthea Thoroughly who owns the Wild World in Cambridge, selling essential oils, health foods and vitamins.

He dons a velvet cloak to disguise his anonymous looks and calls himself Justin Discard, hoping his former boss will re-employ him.

On the brink of asking Erminthea to have dinner with him, he tries to do something about the horrible brown stain in his toilet bowl.

Some may baulk at the lack of a single narrative thread or any over-arching meaning in A Spider-web Season. But the rhythm of Harry's daily life has a lovely Zen quality, in which a lost and found dressing-gown is as important as too much money spent on a faulty vehicle, and acquiring a puppy outweighs the loss of a potential lover.

It's not that Harry doesn't get grumpy or sad, but that he is too engaged in life to yearn and whine; in fact, "If anyone had asked Harry Rejekt how he felt, he believed he could say without any qualms that he was happy."

Few writers try, let alone succeed, in portraying happiness, but Haley does. Harry is a wonderful character, eccentric and endearing, and these stories about him are warm, imaginative, clever, funny and sly.

The book is dedicated to Haley's son Ian, "who claims to see some resemblance between Harry Rejekt and his father," suggesting that just as Harry tells himself stories about characters named after grammatical elements (But, Take, Seize, McVery), the author amuses himself with these stories of Rejekt/Discard.

The Transfer Station takes up the final third of the book. Originally published in 1989, it surveys a far bleaker prospect than Harry's world.

Seen through the eyes of a recently widowed old man, it's set in an environmentally ruined stretch of coast where garbage is continually processed and poured into the sea.

The old man has little reason to want to go on. But a chance meeting with two young women renews his will to live.

Unlike Harry, though, he settles for "getting by. And that seems to be enough for the time being."

* Jane Westaway is a Wellington writer.