Carl Nixon’s response
to this Landfall review of The Virgin and the Whale.
I don't
normally respond to reviews but this recent one in Landfall Online is so
eccentric that I can't help addressing some of the points that the Dunedin
reviewer, Patricia McLean, raises. Her most fundamental mistake, and it's one
made repeatedly, is to simply misread the text of
the book. To state that the narrator is "a rather pedantic and elderly
gentleman -perhaps a retired local historian or science teacher" and
"a dear old chap" is unsupported by any evidence.
In fact it is made
clear at the very beginning that the narrator is the author, myself, or at
least a fictional construction of myself. Numerous reviewers and other more casual
readers who have discussed the book with me have had no trouble whatsoever
grasping this. For this reviewer to later suggest that the Moon Virgin
character offers to translate German is again a misreading of what is on the
page. The character clearly offers to translate the language of the Whale,
something she has been actively doing just a few lines earlier (p.199). We are
not "given to understand" that Elizabeth's husband was an Englishman.
Where? Ms McLean's own imagination supplied that information. Also, to find the
fate of Elizabeth's husband "a loose end" is to fail to grasp the
role of the story that Elizabeth is telling to her son. The fate of the
Balloonist mirrors the fate of the boy's father.
You really don't need a PhD in
English Lit. to understand that. In fact it actually seems to be a hindrance in
this case. I may be being overprotective in responding to this poor effort at
all, but if you're going to review a book for a reputable magazine such as
Landfall some degree of intellectual rigour needs to be brought to bear on the
text as it exists on the page. I'd be keen to hear other people's opinions
2 comments:
I had a bit of a giggle at this. Is he complaining about how a reader interpreted his book?
Isn't that completely up to the reader, especially after it has left the author's hands?
I suppose it's a little different when that difference in interpretation is how its being presented to the public but isn't it on the author if there are even the tiniest openings to interpret it in a slightly different way?
In this particular case the 'interpretation' was almost wilfully indifferent to the text. If the author writes, "The sky was clear and blue." That does not give license to a reviewer to interpret that as being a sign of winter, and then complain when the text later describes the season as being summer.
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