Review: Offshore Service and Other Stories, by Craig Cliff

Craig Cliff’s second book of short stories, Offshore Service and Other Stories, arrives 16 years after his first, A Man Melting, was published. A Man Melting contained much celebrated entries like ‘Another Language’, which won the Katherine Mansfield novice short story award. It brought a sharp eye and sharper character analysis to its inspection of the lives of a series of complicated, often lost young men. No wonder, the following year, it took out the Commonwealth Writers Prize for a First Book. 

Of course, New Zealand literature has long had a fascination for glorifying the forlorn hero; or, as he’s more commonly known, the ‘man alone’. Strong, reserved, independent, resourceful, disdainful, particularly of women: he’s existed in one literary form or another since the first arrival of Pakeha settlers. There he was, albeit a little unformed, in works patronizing Māori, like H. B. Marriott Watson’s The Web of the Spider (1891). There too, in narratives exploring a new strange land, like John Bell’s In the Shadow of the Bush (1899). 

It was, though, the first generation of New Zealand-born writers, like Frank Sargeson who truly heroized the ‘man alone’, roughening – rather than smoothing - his edges into a series of relatable, masculine sorts: the loyal laborer; the industrious itinerant; the honourable bloke. Since writers like C. K. Stead, Lloyd Jones and Craig Marriner have kept the ‘man alone’ alive. 

In A Man Melting, Craig Cliff took this rather desolate archetype and modernized him. Cliff’s protagonists were adrift in a world they didn’t understand or like. But, rather than a cool Sargeson replica, they were emotional, indicative of the cultural zeitgeist of the time: the SNAG (ergo, sensitive new age guy). 

Now, nearly two decades later, Cliff returns with a powerful, well-crafted second collection. In its examination of the strengths and frailties of the male psyche and masculine relationships, it picks up where he left off while adding extra and more meaningful elements to his authorial examination, like men’s feelings about their relationships with women. 

The opener, ‘My Yale and My Harvard’ sets the tone with its multilayered scrutiny of male sensitivity and the bonds forged and broken between father and son through books, taxi rides, migration and shifting perspectives of the woman who abandoned them both. In this regard, other standouts include ‘Robinson in the Roof Space’ which channels author Johann Wyss to create a work about a Hibiscus Coast realty agent, his dream of becoming a novelist, his unusual writing routine and what happens when life gets more intriguing than fiction.  

Unlike in A Man Melting, the works in Offshore Service look at men, their interiority, behaviors and connections through women’s eyes. The interconnected relationship stories, ‘Recessional’ and ‘Processional’ are a case in point. They focus on a Napier woman living in Australia, Amelia, as she navigates a chauvinistic ANZAC day set-to, romance, resettlement, family, old beaus and her partner’s aerophobia. Meanwhile a more collective perspective on the world frames ‘Thirty Ways of Looking at Marumaru South’. Here, an entire community, their mores, hypocrisies and vulnerabilities are exposed in a deeply penetrating new take on how to tell a story. 

Cliff also adds a sophisticated intertextual overtone to his book. Each story can be enjoyed without the reader being aware of the author’s clever use of literary craft, but knowing about it adds an extra edge to the author’s storytelling. It’s there, for instance in the polished ways each story offers homage to an influential international work of literature like Moby Dick and The Three Musketeers. Other works nod towards local storytellers, as Cliff experiments with form and narration. For example, the story ‘Parents in Decline’ frames the same perspective as fellow Dunedin author Christine Johnson’s celebrated story, ‘They’. 

In all, Offshore Service is tender, visceral, poignant and penetrating. Not only for its authentic, sensitive and emotional portrayal of contemporary man, but also for the significant things it tells us about modern life.