Statues

by Graham Billing

In Statues Graham Billing has created a world, half-way between fantasy and reality, where the symbols of life and death become actuality. Duncan Bracken gives up his life as a television personality to supervise the construction of a huge statue garden in the grounds of an eccentric showman aristocrat. The statues, commissioned from a variety of sculptors, are to represent human life in every possible form; perhaps also to provide Sir Callum Logan with something original to perpetuate his name. Among the statues Bracken begins to find a solid imperturbability and peace, tempered by the presence of his ex-wife, Miriam, who is still mourning for their dead child. But even in this stone-still world human savagery intrudes; and in the crisis Bracken finds his own solution.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Graham Billing was a New Zealand novelist with a background in journalism and seafaring. His novel, The Slipway (1974), was described by The National Observer as ‘A work of discriminating intelligence,’ and it was published while he was a Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago in 1973. The Chambered Nautilus (1993) was described by Denis Welch as ‘Breathtaking in scope, almost biblical in depth.’ Billing died in December 2001, and his last novel, The Blue Lion, was released posthumously in 2002.

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

this book was Billing's second novel and you can tell he's still working out this whole writing thing, because sometimes when he tries to do a long sentence it turns out a real clunker. it's much more ambitious than his first book though, and there are some parts that actually work really well. like apparently all of his books the main character is a disillusioned man struggling with a doomed (in this case former) relationship. he has been roped in to doing work on an eccentric wealthy man's statue garden at the request of his ex wife, the wealthy man's secretary. all of the statues represent some value or emotion or meaning and Billing has a lot of fun with these at various points in the book. the book ends with a seriously violent and quite unsettling pig killing scene, which has overtones of myth and ritual just like a lot of scenes in some of his other books. this was mostly interesting to me in the context of Billing's other work but it's fairly atypical for NZ literature in the 70s so also pretty interesting from that perspective.