The Pale North

by Hamish Clayton

1998, Wellington. A series of catastrophic earthquakes has left the city destroyed. Returning to the ruin from London, a New Zealand writer explores the devastation, compelled to find out for himself what has become of the city he left years ago. As he drifts through the desolate streets, home now to the shell-shocked and dispossessed, he finds among the survivors a woman and a child. And although they are haunted, hostile and broken, the strangers feel eerily familiar to him: as if they promise the answers to the mysteries he once swore to leave behind.

A layered meditation on love, history, creativity and loss, The Pale North is an audacious and disarming novel, a forensic journey into one writer's short but singularly brilliant body of work.

Invoking W. G. Sebald, Julian Barnes and Lloyd Jones, Hamish Clayton's new novel is every bit as visionary and intrepid as its award-winning predecessor, Wulf.

224 pages, Paperback

First published July 29, 2015

About the author

Hamish Clayton was born in Hawke's Bay in 1977 and educated at Victoria University of Wellington. His first novel, Wulf, won the NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction at the 2012 New Zealand Post Book Awards. In the same year, he was a Writer in Residence at the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, and in 2013 he held the Buddle Findlay Frank Sargeson Fellowship in Auckland. He lives in Wellington.

Reviews

[Alan Wightman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a clever and unusual novel.

Many writers, naturally, draw on their own lives for material for their stories. It is presumably common for an author to find success with an auto-biographical work but then struggle to sound convincing outside their direct set of experiences. Clayton however, has already demonstrated skill in the latter area, in his fine debut effort, Wulf. Now, in the Pale North, he focusses on the times and places in which he has lived. But a straight fictionalisation of his own life would, one feels, be unsatisfactory to Clayton. So, in the first part, Gabriel writes a novella about Ash, and in the second, Petherick discovers the novella and discusses how closely Ash's fictional life reflects Gabriel's "real" one. The reader can then amuse themselves trying to guess how much Gabriel's, Ash's and Petherick's life reflects Clayton's. And then, muse on whether it matters what the source is.

Thrown underneath this literary playfulness is a more serious theme - the relationship one has with one's home town when one knows that a natural disaster is a plausibility. Wellington lies in a zone of high seismic risk, and its residents know it. The first part of the novel is set in the aftermath of a major earthquake, but unlike most fictional post-apocalyptic tales, this is set in the past. The destruction of the earthquake has, inevitably, been fore-shadowed in a photographic exhibition by Ash's friend Colin. This quickly recalls the recent major earthquakes in Canterbury, but the relationship between the fictional earthquake and the real earthquake becomes authentically messy.

There are structural oddities in the first part that readers may struggle with. They should persevere. The second part throws light on some of these. For the rest, repeat readings may be required.

Oh, and there's a ghost. Or ghosts. I'm not sure.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Pale North is the second novel of Hamish Clayton, New Zealand author of Wulf which is one of the most memorable of books that I've read since taking up blogging. (See my review and a Sensational Snippet). It was too much to hope for that its successor could be quite as splendid, and The Pale North is not, but it is an interesting book. The judges for the Ockham New Zealand Books Awards thought so too, because they longlisted it for the 2016 prize. It is, however, a most awkward book to discuss without spoilers, because even the way the book is structured is a spoiler of sorts.

The contents page lists two titles: The City of Lost Things, and In Dark Arches, subtitled, when you get to it, 'The Ghosts of Gabriel North'. Begin reading, and you find yourself immersed in the horror of a city destroyed in 1998 by earthquake - and it's not Christchurch (which suffered its catastrophe in 2011), it's Wellington, New Zealand's capital city.

To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2015/12/31/th...

[Grace Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting novel, one I'm going to have to reread to appreciate, I think

[Harold Coutts · Rating 1 out of 5]

beautiful wank. didn't finish. it does do interesting things with narrative if that's ur cup of tea

[Ashleigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a longtime resident of Wellington who has recently moved away, "The Pale North" instantly pulled me in with its description of the earthquake-ravaged city. It didn't take long to become intrigued by Ash's story though, although there were moments where it didn't feel quite right - it was just a bit too romanticised; like a memory, the closer you get to the characters, the more they slip away. So I was relieved as well as intrigued when I turned the page at the end of "The City of Lost Things" to discover that the novel takes a narrative turn and that the first half is essentially a novel within a novel. Clayton has cleverly tied the two parts of the novel together with echoes of the story in its commentary, creating a carefully arranged narrative web to form a convincing whole. As with Barnes' "Flaubert's Parrot" and Nabokov's similarly-structured "Pale Fire", the reader gleans more from what is not said than from what is explicitly stated. Like Ash's ghost in the botanic gardens, Gabriel North is an unspoken presence in "The City of Lost Things"; likewise, the mysterious Simon Petherick is the enigmatic protagonist of "In Dark Arches" - each 'author' allowing us further access to the other characters, but each keeping themselves at arm's reach from the reader.

I read the bulk of this book in the middle of the night while tending to my newborn son, so I feel as if I've only given this novel a perfunctory reading, but I feel also that this is a novel which will reveal more of itself with subsequent readings. I found myself thinking about this book long after I'd finished it - which, for me, is always the mark of an excellent novel.

[Josephine Ensign · Rating 3 out of 5]

A hauntingly beautiful book overall, although the overwrought (and somewhat pretentious perhaps?) writing style was off-putting to me in places. I especially loved the interweaving of photography and visual art throughout the book. One of my favorite passages :"During travel, home becomes a compass, constantly wavering, now bringing me closer to knowledge of a foreign street, now guiding me away, pushing me to an embrace of things unfamiliar. Home: always the lens I write through; always the aperture and indirectly the focus."

[Lorna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got impatient with the first half at times, with the over-elaborate, almost forced musings of the narrator. Then with the second half, that all falls into place as a deliberate literary device. The language is beautiful, there are hooks to draw you in all the way through. A book that leaves you thinking, with unanswered questions - and more questions and possible solutions every time you think about it.

[Ashley Lamont · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hmm...an enjoyable book but I will need to read again to capture what missed first time around.

[Terry]

Deeply reminds me of Hicksville in its opening pages.

[Johanna · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the first half but couldn't get into pt 2 so didn't finish it