Pastoral Care, the second in a new story-collection series from Landfall Tauraka and the University of Otago Press, is an accomplished debut. Auckland writer John Prins offers fully formed characters in lively and often tragi-comic stories that explore, among other things, contemporary Pākehā dislocation.
In the Covid-era opening story, Lake Pukaki, Ross is travelling around the South Island, leaving his family unsure whether he is coming back home or staying with Flo, his new, much younger, employee/lover. Ross thinks he is “drawn to rivers, burns, glens, brooks” because of “his Scottish heritage. All that babbling. The water spoke to him.” He imagines “true love this time, with Flo. Beautiful Flo”.
Meanwhile for Flo, “the transition from lust to disgust happened like a lifted blindfold”. She is equally unromantic about the South Island, where she “could not feel any further from Auckland and still be in New Zealand. Her lips had never been so dry and look, another silly lake”.
Paul, the main character of the title story – by far the longest in the collection – is also adrift. A young father struggling with his lack of purpose in life, Paul fears his identity is “not fixed to the land in a way he could be proud of. It was not fixed to any land really, or ocean, star, river, lake, nothing. He was his job.”
His job is teaching – a “relentless act of communication” – and his favourite time of day is his commute, “insulated from the noise of life, cocooned in his car, slowed by heavy traffic”. To teach and to be a father and husband was “so much to be, and still it wasn’t enough. He needed to be more ambitious, more productive, more attractive, more social, and more than all of those things, he needed to earn more money.”
Prins’ take on New Zealand masculinity is sharp and insightful. In A Good Man, Adam spends all his time in a gym that “carries the smell of disinfected sweat and sweet peat. Large men live inside the walls, concerned only with the image of themselves.”
In The Falls, brothers Liam and Brett have inherited a Piha bach built by their ancestor Aidan Dillon, a man “on the front lines of the New Zealand colonial project” who was “too proud to return home with less than he arrived with”. Our history, Liam realises, “was filled with people too afraid, or too ashamed, to admit they’d been wrong”.
In comparison, many of the women in this collection are steady, competent, wise presences – as wives, principals, bosses – although Prins never leans so far into this dynamic that it becomes preachy or sexist.
Some are more flawed. Mara, the main character in Rapture, is having a relationship with an AI chatbot and dreams of “ascending to heaven to live with Jesus”, which would be “less lame than living with her parents”.
Settings in these stories are fresh and particular. The furniture in the Piha bach “was draped with old sheets so that entering was like interrupting a family of ghosts. They stood staring out the windows, reclined on couches, gathered around the fireplace.”
The South Island viewed from a car reveals the “blaze of a blonde hillside”: Aoraki Mt Cook’s “eastern wedge brooded in shadow. The mountain’s lower slopes dipped into the lake. Straw grasses swayed like an Andrew Wyeth, or Rita Angus.”
In Hawke’s Bay, the harbour is a “round salty belly”, the sky is “a vast dome of swimming pool blue” and the rivers Tutaekuri and Ngaruroro are “twin umbilical cords”.
In But Baby, I Love You, Bernard criticises the New Zealand literary scene for being “too small, too naive, too earnest, too unsophisticated, too obsessed with identity, national or otherwise”, though he later clarifies that “local writers had been trying valiantly to articulate the question of this nation for some years now, offering up their experiences, and all readers ever looked for was themselves”.
In Pastoral Care, Prins offers us takes on identity that are both individual and national, spans our history and allows space for a range of flaws and insecurities without ever feeling like it’s reaching too far, or prescribing one specific version of man, teacher, writer, Aucklander.
Pastoral Care, by John Prins (Otago University Press, $35), is out now. A longer version of this review will appear at Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books, ANZRB.com
