Review: Bug Week

In a banner year for helpless frustration at the universe, it’s difficult to pass judgement on the first voice we encounter in Airini Beautrais’ Bug Week, even if European furniture, fancy wineglasses and a museum coworker aren’t really convincing answers to a boring marriage and the entropy of human life in general.

This first story, winding up in a muddled affair and a sudden mystery, offers a relatively gentle introduction to what follows. There’s plenty of sex (and death) in Bug Week but mostly we’re looking at the one adult theme to rule them all: the battle to keep it together. Why can’t we have even a temporary reprieve from things and situations falling to bits? Who keeps rewriting our story when we’re supposed to have a grip on it?

Bug Week offers plenty of bittersweet pleasure in its snapshots of people butting their heads against that first question. Sometimes it plays out in infidelity or existential discontent or remembering a friendship that didn’t survive the pressures of quasi-bohemian life in Wellington (Billy the Pirate Poet). Perspective and voice shift across the collection too, ranging from third-person distance to first-person resignation, confession and, in one case, a cri de coeur that grabs the reader by both sides of the collar (Psycho ex).

Mood and setting are equally varied. Beautrais returns to Wellington across several decades and social scenes, while another standout piece (A pair of hands) takes place alongside the Whanganui river. Two others play out in the former East Germany and a magic-realist vision of a down-at-heel fishing port for good measure, giving an opportunity for further fine adjustments of the tragedy-comedy mix and offering interesting breaks with the rest of the collection – one featuring a wider cast of characters shown at a calculated cool distance, the other turning anthropomorphism into a straight foil for mixed-up human priorities.

These are truly short stories with no words wasted; there’s a sense that each piece has been boiled down to its core elements, then polished to a fine gleam with a poet’s precision of language and imagery. None feel plot-driven in any obvious way but I think calling them “character studies” undersells Beautrais’ superb command of story, whether it’s the careful restraint to bring a narrative to its peak at the brink of a revelation rather than the revelation itself (The teashop) or to place a character in a striking situation and then set them walking almost immediately out of it tugging threads of sour disillusionment as they go (Sin city).

Bug Week is an accomplished and entertaining read but one with an emotional punch that belies its length. The latter stories in particular signal with increasing force that for more than half of humanity, having your life defined or rewritten by others against your wishes isn’t a metaphysical proposition. Male dominance hums discontentedly under its breath in some places, struts along through unbalanced relationships, messy break-ups and outright abuse in others, then reaches a stunning apex at book’s end that’s as much about erasure of identity than the event itself. It made this reader sit back in shock but it’s far from gratuitous and a fitting end to a collection that looks unflinchingly past the illusions we have about ourselves.

Sam Finnemore