Review: From There to Here: A memoir

Joe Bennett is probably Aotearoa's most consummate and (intermittently) funny columnist. I use the parentheses not as a criticism, but because he can also write gloriously excoriating political and social commentary. Demagogues or poseurs from Wellington to Washington are regularly peppered by his laptop.

He's also a brave man. Brave inasmuch as columns are probably the most ephemeral lit form around. (Yes, yes, except for reviews.) Monday's pyrotechnics wrap Tuesday's potato peelings. No wonder he turns to writing a book now and then. Actually, scrub that sentence: it sounds patronising and the blurb for From There to Here notes that he's written over a score of them.

This one is a memoir. Wrapped in one of the better Before-And-After covers you'll meet this decade, it starts with his dad, aged six, being bitten by a dog in Sheffield. (As Bennett would probably note, that's a geographical location, not an anatomical one.) It closes in the late 1980s – indeed, more volumes seem pending – when Joe is a housemaster at an unnamed, instantly identifiable Christchurch boys' college. He's after wider horizons, so he tries to book his car on the ferry to Australia.

Yes, he does say “the ferry.” Typical Bennett: you read the sentence; then you go back, to check he really did put that and to chuckle at it. He writes lucidly, vigorously, in quick cadences that sometimes drape themselves with images. His spoken voice sounds in the printed word; that's always satisfying. From the start, mundane mixes with mythical. His 80ish-year-old elder brother “scooted around the bend towards Hampden Park and unimaginable happiness.”

Dogs and cricket appear early on. If you're a JB reader, you'd expect that. So does rugby, which was a surprise to me. Rugby with perspective, of course – when Bennett's team goes on tour, the captain quickly cancels all games so they don't interfere with the touring.

Before then, he leaves school, goes on the dole, enters Cambridge, where he's transfixed by a lecture on horse pee. In no particular order, he makes it to France, British Columbia, a Greyhound bus through the US, Spain (where the locals will insist on speaking Spanish). Eventually, it's New Zealand and that ferry. He tries teaching and likes it. He also tries submitting his writing to a number of literary mags, who don't like it.

Most rites of passage are covered. He loses his (straight) virginity on a stone tomb in a village churchyard. Talk about one-upmanship. Two pages further on, he witnesses a knife fight in a French flophouse. Talk about nimbleness. You never have a chance to be bored. There are scores – I'll venture “hundreds” – of neat little character / caricature sketches. A surfeit? Let's say an abundance. 

Structure is conventional, execution adroit. He's good on the pathos of old friends; opens his heart a few times. Good also on the epiphanies and crises of young manhood; he can build a minor epic around a deadlocked front door. He can also unsettle. His maternal grandmother is “a shrill torrent of complaint....a cruel woman.” For others in his life, there are bloomings of love, even a few stretches of soppy affection. Some of his best bits are tragedies; you can't read the death of that elder brother and be unmoved.

A separate paragraph is needed to note his reading. He swallows books like a drain. Thomas Hardy is there by p 9. Wordsworth, Waugh, EM Forster join the list, though he's never dandled on Forster's knee. (Read Chapter 18 to understand.) Eight names are listed in one paragraph on p 130. It's apposite, not affected.

Joe Bennett is usually a good, subversive, entertaining short read. Replace the last adjective with its antonym and you've got this memoir.

Reviewed by David Hill