Tales travel in time and place
Waiheke’s Alex Stone already has good gallery cred as a highly competent visual artist, whose abstracts often make potent use of ancient symbols. One such work is the cover image for these 20- plus stories, which indicate Stone is no sluggard when it comes to writing as well.
They’re an emphatically diverse lot. Nearly every piece strikes out in a new way and direction. The result is a book that reads like an anthology.. It uses a range of narrative voices: the child of an emphatically recognisable politician; a 1600s mariner in peril; an idiosyncratic aviation machine which is part of an even more idiosyncratic list of lists. Even an elephant tells one story.
Subjects and styles are just as eclectic. ( So are lengths, from 1000 to about 15,000 words.) There’s an empathetic bus journey; a shed and shadows with a young man affected by art and love; a blind hitch- hiker in Australia’s outback; two young Zulus who compete in the 1904 Olympic marathon; a neat travel journal of a passport crisis in Swaziland.
Settings are all over the place — geographically, that is. We skip from India’s North Sentinel Island to the Hauraki Gulf, the threatened west coast of Australia, a swollen and sagging Auckland apartment, Johannesburg (“the Great Now- Ungolden City”) and a location labelled “Somewhere”.
Some pieces are in conventional narrative form. Others are presented as film scripts, a stack of images, even a chunk of Afrikaans poetry. You sometimes feel you’re walking through a group exhibition.
Stone has that essential and sometimes under- respected quality of writing stories that engage you till the end. He likes his people and enjoys his eccentrics, who manage to include a “wizened white English artist jungle king” in the Caribbean. Read the opening piece, the ambivalent rescue of a group of refugees and you’ll feel for each character.
He does sometimes take you by the wrist and point out a moral. He’s inclined to squeeze a metaphor out of almost every moment or movement. The proof- reading needs a lot of work. Once upon a primitive time, “selfpublished” usually meant smearily printed, poorly bound, awkwardly written, but this adventurous work shows how things have improved.