HOME THEATRE
by Anthony Lapwood (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30)
Home Theatre, the debut collection by Anthony Lapwood (Ngati Ranginui, Ngai Te Rangi, Ngati Whakaue), features 13 stories linked by the Repertory Apartments, a crummy Wellington building that used to be a theatre. Its characters include Ashton, an astronomer at the Carter Observatory; Emma, a drunk who gets stuck in a broken lift; and Jay Storm, a bass player who hallucinates the bright blue horse depicted on the cover. Lapwood’s work weaves together the fantastical and the real, embracing speculative fiction, magic and dreams.
In the opening story, The Source of Lightning, a stranded time-traveller known as a chrononaut needs — as in the movie Back to the Future —a boost of lightning to fix a problem with his time-travel gear. Unlike the romping adventure film, this story is claustrophobic and violent. The climactic scene uses a Wellington landmark, the bright orange wind wand on the waterfront, and many of the stories take place in a version of the capital that is both recognisable and suspicious.
A dark, dreamlike sense pervades Home Theatre, suggesting that all is not as it should be. In The Difficult Art of Bargaining, fussy pensioner Liv rediscovers an old headscarf in her wardrobe: “It was like retrieving a forgotten memory, as in those moments before sleep when the mind coughs up its more peculiar suggestions.” The longest story, Provided with Eyes, Thou Departest, opens with “His wife washed up over and over again on the lakeshore,” which turns out to be widower Bryce’s recurring nightmare. In fact, Lapwood creates an aura of alienation so successfully that some readers may struggle to find emotional connection with the stories.
One notable exception is The Ether of 1939. Set when the theatre-turned-apartment building was a radio factory, the story’s point-of-view character is Jack, who can hear a voice on a radio speaking from the future. (It’s the chrononaut again, from The Source of Lightning).
Jack is gay, and rendered lonely by homophobia. What he hears through the radio is the 21st century domestic life of a man in a relationship with another man. The voice from the future, rendered as a transcript, is a revelation: “The idea that Jack might ever make a home with someone was transformed from something preposterous and obscene into something achievable, perhaps even ordinary.” In a brief but affecting moment of queer community, the chrononaut says that if Jack writes him letters and buries them, he will dig them up in the future and read every word. “It was a chance for guiltless confession. A chance for true expression, a chance to be his real self,” Jack realises. “He will hear me and see me, and he will know me.”
The stories of Home Theatre range from just a few pages to quasi novellas, and many explore isolation and disconnection. The inhabitants of the Repertory Apartments may long to “dream larger dreams” as Daniel says in Jobs for Dreamers, but most face a colder reality in this unsettling new collection of stories.