Rawness of high country backdrop to super novel
WINTER TIME
Laurence Fearnley
By JESSIE NEILSON
Dunedin writer Laurence Fearnley has crafted awardwinning novels, short stories, and works of nonfiction, many set in the landscapes she knows so well. A New Zealand Arts Foundation Laureate (2019), she has also had two excursions to the Antarctic, one of which was as a specific arts fellow.
Her previous novel Scented focused on the sense of smell and the imaginative that can come out of this.
Winter Time is Fearnley’s second novel to home in on one of the five senses, in this case, that of touch. However, this is where the similarities end.
Winter Time is set in the freezing highcountry landscapes of the Mackenzie Country, home to clear, wide starry skies, tussock and few people.
Her story opens with a newly grieving Roland March. Loss, he knows all too well. Roland has returned to the Mackenzie Country from Sydney to wrap up the estate of his childhood home. He is the sole survivor in a family
Dunedin author Laurence Fearnley ridden with bad luck. As his mother had died when he was young, Roland had been the responsible brother raising his three siblings. Now the last sibling, Eddie, has ostensibly met his end by careless driving in slippery terrain.
Each death has become harder for Roland.
His childhood home is now surrounded by subdivisions, as visitors come and go.
This journey back is different as it brings with it the sharpening pricks of unease. He comes across locals who are hesitant to speak of connections with his brother. His discomfort reaches a new level when anonymous, online harassment begins. It is no small feat to lay his brother to rest while trying to work out what is going on and if he is the target and why.
Fearnley’s work is beautifully crafted as the reader feels drawn into the depth of the clear cold and isolation.
Roland’s experiences unfold in the third person, yet this narration holds him close and with care as he seeks to protect his positive feelings towards his home terrain. Various antagonists shatter his peace of mind. However, he remains ever gentle as he acts as homemaker and caretaker of his family, trying to see these perplexing matters right through to the end.
Jessie Neilson is a University of Otago library assistant
The subheading of this book is ‘‘How Apple Became a TrillionDollar Company and Lost Its Soul’’.
Oof. Don’t pull any punches, Mr Tripp Mickle — which is either a brilliant name for an investigative reporter or some sort of backstreet law firm.
It is a titillating entrance to a book that turns out to be a measured, calm, exhaustively researched exploration of how Apple, the almost unimaginably wealthy and influential tech firm, effectively conquered the world, and in turn changed its focus from innovation and inspiration to a relentless pursuit of market dominance.
Mickle speaks to more than 200 past and present Apple executives to try to humanise the corporate behemoth and its modus operandi, and the result is a fascinating glimpse behind the silicon curtain.
He focuses on the diverging pathways of Jony Ive, the genius British designer who had the ear of late Apple founder Steve Jobs when it came to designing beautiful new gadgets that (cough) aimed to help the human race, and Tim Cook, the relative automaton who followed Jobs into the company’s top chair and proved to be a more prosaic type of genius.
Dollars, baby. The Apple logo might as well have become a dollar sign as the company segued from innovation to sheer commercial clout.
Mickle paints a picture of a corporation that perfected the art of making a profit but lost sight of the reason — that it made our heart skip with joy with the products it developed — it attained its lofty position in the first place.
The author does not bother with excessive colour but he shows a neat ability to skip between the major strands of the story.
The result is a genuinely interesting, if regularly deflating, examination of what a technological megapower has done to us and to itself.
Hayden Meikle is ODT sports editor