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The Spinoff
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
An interview with Damien Wilkins the morning after winning at the Ockhams
Claire Mabey talks to Damien Wilkins about the drama of the night and what it means to have won. Delirious is a profoundly moving book. It's about an ageing couple – Pete and Mary – who are working out how to do the next and last phase of their lives. The narrative shifts between their past and present and centres around the nightmare of losing their only son, Will, when he was just a boy. At last night's Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Wilkins arrived to the theatre just in time to give his acceptance speech. It was a tense night, Wilkins appearing like James Bond on the stage, late yet so smooth. In this interview we discuss what the award means, and what source material he used to create the world of Delirious. Claire Mabey: Good Morning. How are you feeling? Damien Wilkins: Still buzzing. It's all pretty overwhelming and strange. The amateur dramatics of it kind of overtook, I guess, the emotional impact of it in a funny way. The whole delays in the flights. The would I wouldn't I appear. I haven't really focused on what it all kind of means because it was all about the mechanics of getting here. CM: It was one of the most thrilling Ockham ceremonies that I remember, and lots of people at the party afterwards said the same thing. Just to recap for the readers: your flight was delayed in Wellington. You eventually got on another Air New Zealand flight and then had to track your way through Auckland in a festival car, racing to try and get to the Aotea Centre before the night ended. At what point did you realise that there was a particular urgency around the fact people really wanted you in the room? DW: Probably about halfway in that car journey. When I got in the car, I thought they're just wanting the full complement of people there. And that they were hoping to get me there in time for the reading. But then there was a funny exchange where Gillian, who was driving for the festival, was in touch with someone who said she had permission to exceed the speed limit, we'll pay the fines. Gillian said, 'Oh, my uncle's a rally driver, so we'll just channel him.' She didn't drive dangerously, but she was flashing lights to ask if she could pass them. It was like being in a weird cavalcade and at every moment there was some bizarre thing. Like getting off the plane I was at the back and they spent seven minutes trying to attach the rear door stairs. A tunnel was closed, there were roadworks. Every moment was extended. It was like being in a cosmic joke about someone who can't get to a thing, like being in a dream. Gillian was in constant contact with the organisers, letting them know how far away I was. Eventually we just slammed on the brakes, pulled around into the car park, and basically I ran on. In a way it relieved me of that anxiety about being in an auditorium and not being able to use your body; how you're frozen there waiting. CM: Your speech was remarkably calm and together. You said at the end a line about about being a pickpocket and a thief. I wondered what you did steal to make the novel? DW: The details of people's lives. My sister's last months. The character Claire, who's Mary's sister [in Delirious]: what happens to Claire is pretty much what happened to my sister, Miriam. Obviously things are choreographed differently: that wasn't her situation in terms of her family or anything like that. But without Miriam and us going through that, it doesn't exist. And then my mother's track through delirium and then through dementia. Novelists can be pretty ruthless about what we, let's face it, steal from life, but we are part of that life. The book is not a memoir, it's a version of life that allows that stuff to be released into a different atmosphere, in a different world, and maybe that's quite good for the writer, rather than to treat it as a memoir, where you're maybe still stuck in that world. Maybe fiction allows us to recalibrate it, in a way. You're still using that basic, deep emotional landscape, but you found a different setting for it and different coordinates. And maybe that might help us change it and offer it to a reader who doesn't need to know my sister and or my mother. That's the thrill of it, when you realise that a scene you've written about actually makes an impact on a stranger, rather than on people you know. Good novels allow us to enter these lives in a way which hopefully lets the dignity of the source material still sit somewhere. But it's that strange area that fiction moves from a very private space into a public space. And I'm interested in the way that that works in writing. How do you start telling a scene which moves the reader from the facts of something to feeling? CM: Why was the death of a child something to explore? DW: I mean, I'm not sure. But one of the things that Fergus, my publisher, said to me was who might be impacted by this book or worried about it, just in my circle. We talked about my siblings. I'd given them the book to read before I put it out in the world. So my brother's son, my nephew, had a moment a number of years ago where he was in a life and death situation. It was just really hard. He recovered but the level of pain was just unbelievable. So maybe that was behind it. But I'd actually, until Fergus said that about who might be impacted, I'd never really considered that my brother would be affected by it. Will [the boy in the book] wasn't in any way connected with what happened to my nephew. My nephew has made a full recovery but there was just that sense of utter devastation that was looming for my brother and his his wife. So maybe that was behind it. I remember writing past that scene where Will's body is looked at. I didn't have it, I'd written past that and I looked back and thought no, they have to go. They have to see him. It seemed a dereliction of my duty not to have that scene. I did feel obliged to go back. CM: That's very brave. DW: No, not brave, Just necessary. CM: So the award that comes with $65,000 which we know, to a writer, is huge money. What does it mean for you? DW: Economically it's really useful. I can give some money to our daughter who had a root canal and now needs a crown. She can't afford that so it's nice I can help her out. I'm a bit torn about the extent to which it all sits with the winner. I do actually miss the runner up money; a more even division of the spoils. We've been selected in this kind of group and it would be really meaningful for everybody to have that little bit of money, rather than a winner takes all thing. I understand it in the sense that it makes a big splash in terms of media impact and generates good things for the ecosystem. But it's like gold, silver, bronze medal, isn't it? Except it's just gold. CM: You've seen big changes in the industry over your career and as director of the International Institute of Modern Letters. What are the most significant changes? DW: The makeup of MA classes. When Bill [Manhire] set it up in the late 90s, there were just 10 people selected, and that was from a pool of sometimes up to 90 or even 100 applicants. It was our subjective view of the very top of a very large, pretty strong pool – so lots of really good people missed out. And now, because we've got three workshops and 30 places it's allowed us to build classes that look different in terms of ethnicity and age. Our graduates are the walking adverts for the the programme so I think our name is better known among a broader group. There's also the long overdue feelings about representation and who gets to tell whose story? How do you manage kind of these kind of tricky ethical issues? That's a component now, as it should be. CM: What advice would you give your younger self – the same one that won this prize 30 years ago for The Miserables? DW: If you have early success your expectations tend to be out of whack with what the world is about to deliver. I remember, after 10 years of writing, that my sales were zero. And I really did think, why am I doing this? Even though The Miserables had won the award, been published in America, in the UK, then I had another two-book deal. But it was hard yakka. And my career didn't really develop in ways that I might have been dreaming about. So, as I say to my students, it's a long game. How do you maintain the kind of urgency around your own creative impulses against the economic tidal wave sweeping you out in another direction? You've got to work at that. I don't have any magic sort of formula. But what's exciting and interesting to me is that the desire to to write is undiminished. Every year I see a fresh lot of faces around our building, and I know that within those 30 people there are books waiting to be written. There are countless stories waiting to be told and that's the exciting thing. So rather than be depressed about careers that don't happen we focus on that sense of new promise. Most people come to a reckoning at some point. They go, how do I do it? How do I feed my family, feed myself and do this other deep thing I want to do? That's the gift of teaching writers, is that you see that renewed every year, and that gives me heart. And some of these students I've taught have shifted my sense of what I can do as well. I think of Breton Dukes, Pip Adam, Airini Beautrais: they're just suddenly pushing at barriers and pushing at form and and so you get this kind of jolt. There's no complacency here. There's a sense of new possibilities that other writers are seeing. It's not quite competitiveness, but it's certainly encouragement. The Spinoff Books section is proudly brought to you by Unity Books and Creative New Zealand. Visit Unity Books online today.
The Spinoff
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
Live updates from the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards
Books editor Claire Mabey blogs this year's Ockham New Zealand Book Awards ceremony live from Aotea Centre, Tāmaki Makaurau. Welcome to the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards! These are the awards for writing for adults across fiction and nonfiction. The prize money is the largest in the land and a win can change a book's life. Tune in from 4pm for some warm-up posts, and from 7pm for a blow-by-blow of the ceremony as it unfolds. The Spinoff Books section is proudly brought to you by Unity Books and Creative New Zealand. Visit Unity Books online today.
The Spinoff
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
An alarm bell: The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey, reviewed
Books editor Claire Mabey unravels the dark questions at the heart of the latest book by one of Aotearoa's most prolific and successful novelists. The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey is a propulsive experiment in excavating, at a slant, a certain kind of Britishness. Not only is this experiment page-turning, it is deeply serious work. The unravelling of the novel's central mysteries and mythologies ultimately compel the reader to evaluate what it means to be alive in a human body that can learn, dream and think for itself. 'In this world,' says Chidgey's character, Mother Morning, 'it's not possible to have everything we want. Everything we think is right. Sometimes we have to make difficult decisions. Yes?' This stern line of thought comes on page 11 while Mother Morning is taking a lesson with her three boys – identical triplets Vincent, William and Lawrence who live in Captain Scott house, one of a string of Sycamore houses, and who are looked after in shifts by Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night. The boys study from The Book of Knowledge (strangely reminiscent of that skewed and limiting artefact known as the Encyclopaedia Britannica); they report their dreams to Mother Morning who religiously scribbles them down in her Book of Dreams. Their misdeeds – both minor and significant – are recorded in The Book of Guilt. The boys are sickly, and require an ongoing regimen of pills, syrups and injections to help them beat 'the Bug'. And if they do, if their Mothers and the doctor ever deem them healthy enough, they might just wake up one morning to find a brochure on their pillow: a pamphlet filled with the promises of Margate. Where all the healthy kids go, with its Dreamland fun park, its sun and 'vast expanses of gold sand' … 'It's a children's paradise, with trampolines, roundabouts, swings, rock pools, seawater swimming pools and the sunniest and driest weather anywhere in Britain.' Margate becomes a central container in the novel for illusion-by-design. The cover of The Book of Guilt is a segment of a real, vintage 1950s poster used to promote travel to the seaside town. Even without knowing a thing about the events to be unfolded in The Book of Guilt it is an image we might unpick as spectacularly uncanny on face value alone: the mother figure is barefoot but wearing a tidy, 50s housewifely dress, pearl earrings, and her hair is set. She has a wide open mouth, her teeth are perfect. The boy leaping by her side is the picture of health. The skies are almost perfectly clear. The sea is flat and friendly. In the background a man is seated in a striped deckchair, reading the paper, absorbed in news. Two other boys, one with his thumb in his mouth, look after the mother and the healthy boy, bouncing away from them. Fading seaside towns are microcosms for faded histories and dreams – and the UK's coastline is littered with them. The layered architecture of eras gone by affects a kind of haunting; the bright surfaces and ice cream shops pasted on top peddle dreams of beachside holidays often, in reality, rudely spiked by hyper-aggressive, Hitchcockian seagulls. Pastel-coated shopfronts and dusty vintage stores soften the detection of darker underbellies and thinly disguise the failures of capitalism to inject the buoyancy required to keep the nostalgia at bay. In Chidgey's hands, Margate is a poster child; a symbol of a national mythology that embedded itself in England's green hills after the end of Chidgey's version of World War II. What would England be like had World War II been resolved by treaty and not victory? This is the speculative heart of The Book of Guilt. What if Hitler had been assassinated and Germany negotiated with? What if concessions had been made and 'difficult decisions' arrived at? Chidgey's latest novel is uncannily similar to Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (which she has not read). It takes similar aim at British identity by puncturing its society with the normalisation of skewed medical ethics. What both novels have in common are questions of nature versus nurture and the eternal thought exercise of what does it mean to possess a soul? The two writers share an interest in the dehumanising potential of such questions. Both Ishiguro (one of the greatest novelists of all time) and Chidgey (fast becoming one of the greats herself) investigate how whole societies, entire countries, can enter a path of gross moral corruption one person, one concession, at a time. The Book of Guilt is being billed as a huge novel for the UK's publishing year. And it will be: Chidgey's prose has a hungry quality. There is an energy in it that demands we embrace the characters (the book shifts between child narrators and adult ones) and see all the things. The book is littered with the artefacts of 1979: Spirographs; TV shows Mork & Mindy and Rainbow; Stickle Bricks; dainty sandwiches; and carved soaps of pale green. Chidgey's prose is alive with the stuff of place and environment that launches the reader wholly into her worlds. Take this, from the first page: 'Before I knew what I was, I lived with my brothers in a grand old house in the heart of the New Forest. It had blue velvet curtains full of dust, and fire surrounds painted like marble to fool the eye, and a panelled Entrance Hall hung with old dark mirrors. And oak griffin perched on the newel post of the creaking staircase; we touched its satiny wings for luck whenever we passed, and whispered the motto carved on the scroll across its chest: Verité Sans Peur.' The quality of Chidgey's writing – its richness, its pace – means that this is not a book you can easily put down, despite the sinister drag of its undertow and queasy anticipation of its secrets. You can spy the twists and the slow revelations, but you hope you're wrong; and then the story twists again and it hurts. The Book of Guilt is inevitable in the way that another book published this year is inevitable: Crooked Cross by Sally Carson was published in 2025 by Persephone Books, which specialises in republishing old, often forgotten books, mostly by women. Crooked Cross was originally published in 1934 and the author died in 1941. Carson's novel is about a German family in Bavaria and how each of them responds to the rise of Nazism and the dehumanising of the Jewish people. It's a profoundly affecting read not in the least due to the knowledge that Carson (who was British but who travelled to Bavaria frequently) was using the novel form to document the violence of her times, and because the outcome of the story is … well, history. Chidgey's book is speculative historical fiction. But the project of it resonates with Persephone's project of republishing a novel that witnessed the rise of fascism and how the scapegoating of a group of people was seeded, and took root, among an entire population as justification for genocide. By changing history, and introducing us to a Britain which used treaty concessions to open the door to grotesque medical mistreatment, Chidgey asks the reader what Carson asks hers: What would you have done? Would you have had the moral courage to resist? What grievances, what perceived fears might you allow to get in the way of the preservation of life? Would you attempt to argue the nature of a soul? Would you allow yourself to take part in a project of dehumanisation, even if it was framed to you as necessary for the greater good? These books settle in the mind as totems: through the vicarious qualities of fiction they scream at us to wake up from whatever illusions we might be under and pay attention to the history we're living through right now; to remember that history can, and does, repeat. The novel form lets us into the heart of the humanity at stake, the humanity we're letting slip: the mind sets, the papering over of reality with skewed politics, with facades, and what narratives dictate what some deserve, but not others. The Book of Guilt is not only a terrifically compelling read – it is also an alarm bell. purchase at Unity Books.
The Spinoff
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
Give Way the Musical is an ode to the mid-2010s millennial hardout
Claire Mabey reviews 'a very Wellington comedy about love, war and who rules the road' – inspired by an article on The Spinoff. Those who know me well might question the logic of deploying me to review a show called Give Way The Musical given I am not well educated in either road rules or musicals (my favourite is Jesus Christ Superstar the TV version; and my understanding of give way rules is vibes based at best). And yet, there I was in Circa Theatre eager to understand how this 'very Wellington comedy about love, war and who rules the road' was going to work. First of all, Circa Theatre is sort of flash now. I walked in the door as if onto the set of Stars in Their Eyes: dry ice billowed around the foyer, giving the new cafe called Chouchou the hazy air of a 90s soap opera. Circa's formerly 70s-era cafe has been transformed into a dream of pink neon and tidy pastries and $7 lemon, lime and bitters. I half expected Carrie Bradshaw to toddle up and order a Cosmopolitan before heading into the theatre for some legislative hijinks. I sat in my theatre comfort zone – right up the back, where I can get a full view of the stage set which, on this night, was both arresting and funny. Road cones demarcated the stage area while a cluster of traffic lights hung above, a chandelier fit for the foyer of the Ministry of Transport building. Panels hugged the circumference of the stage and were printed with images from road rules tests (which I found triggering given I failed my licence not once, not twice, but thrice). At first I thought the audience was going to be sparse (many empty seats) and I pre-cringed, imagining a smattering of forced laughter as the energy of the cast far overpowered the energy of the audience. But then, in the nick of time, a flood of students tumbled in and took their seats all around me. The volume of the theatre immediately rose and I was able to relax. The show started with a bang. Or rather, a banger. The cast burst onto the stage with a five-part harmony, a give way sign and a tune that indicated that this was a musical that was going to enjoy leaning hard into the power ballad. We're introduced to Sophie (played by Lily Tyler Moore), a 24-year-old policy analyst at the Ministry of Transport who is disenchanted with her lack of influence and busting to make her mark. Sophie's uncouth ambition is the engine of the show: she's a caricature of the pre-burnout, millennial hardout; the type-A student in need of therapy to unravel the influence of her 70s-core parents (amazing cameo scenes with those two in kaftans and on the wines, lamenting their daughter's career choices and personality flaws) who has emerged from the raw freedom of student days and marched into the workforce as a determined kiss-arse earnestly trying to implement a legacy project before she moves on to bigger, better policy jobs. Tyler Moore is perfect in the role: small but mighty; her tremendous effective facial expressions conveying Sophie's unhinged commitment to work over all else. Her best and funniest scenes reveal her loathsome inner fantasies: in one surreal moment she dances with a pair of Count Dracula-like incarnations of the Minister for Transport (who was Gerry Brownlee in 2012) that dance in capes and top hats and sweep her into slow dances that end in an unsettling air-pashing sequence. For me, the star of the show is Ben: Sophie's nerdy colleague and doomed love interest, played by Jackson Burling. This is a show that plays into stereotypes to make its points and it works. Ben is happily complacent in his work and instead focuses his energies on being romantically optimistic: his camp tantrums and Flight-of-the-Conchord-esque fails provoke much of the show's regular laughs. With its core of office comedy, Give Way is a gentle pisstake of those whose working lives are dedicated to manipulating niche interest areas to improve our lives no matter how inconsequential to the vast majority; or alarming to a vocal minority. Steven Page (writer) obviously had a gleeful time using the machinations of 2012's change to the give way rules (intricately reported by Toby Manhire in The Spinoff) to foreshadow the events that came 10 years later, in 2022 (the same year as Manhire's article was published), when a Covid-plagued government implemented vaccination rules and brought down upon them the ire of the anti-mandate convoy that camped out on parliament's lawn. In Give Way, the vocal minority is represented by Nick (played by the magnificent Bronwyn Turei) who can't cope with change and who sees any attempt to update our lives as a betrayal of the country, of our Kiwi ways. In response to Sophie's proposed changes, Nick rouses a rabble, plants viral videos titled 'alien child traffickers are melting our brains' online (to which Sophie reacts: 'why is nobody looking at the research!') and plans a convoy to protest the changes that he's convinced will lead to chaos and death. At half time (which arrived fast: a good sign) I talked to some of the students sitting around me to check what they thought of the show so far. Quinn, who is second-year at Victoria University studying English literature as his major (*teary eyes emoji*) and politics as a minor said he thought the range of the actors was incredible. 'Not just their vocals but their physicality – how they can switch so fast. It takes a lot out of you just playing one role, let alone several.' Quinn was six years old when the give way rules changed so found that aspect super interesting. 'I've had to google who the minister was and what the road rules were before.' Students from Whangamata Area School (visiting Wellington to tour parliament and Te Papa) were enthusiastic. 'I'm enjoying all of it!' said Ethan. 'It's really good. I like the stage and the piano,' said Josh. 'I like Randall,' said Eric. 'He's better than everyone else.' It was Krishna's first time seeing a live show, and a musical, and he loved it. 'The way the songs are written flow so seamlessly into the script,' he observed. And Lachie thought the humour was properly funny. I agree with all of them. Particularly Quinn's observation about the actors' range: the character and costume changes were so fast I found myself imagining just how they did it. Layers? Backstage help? And Ethan is bang on about the live music. Pianist (and musical director for the show) Hayden Taylor is on stage the entire time, tinkling the ivories and adding a welcome self awareness. The live pianist – like the character's personal musician and life-event composer – heightens the main character syndrome that Sophie, Nick and to a lesser degree, Tanya (played by Carrie Green who is superb in all her roles) suffer from. Randall (played by Alex Greig), as Eric indicated, is an intriguing character. He's an older man, a former public servant who suffered for his efforts to change the road rules back in the 70s. We first encounter him in a medical institution being treated for hallucinations (it's thanks to Randall we get dance scenes with panda and sloth heads). Randall is a wise fool; a Shakespearean apparition there to both inject whimsy and counsel Sophie. While not the strongest singer (perhaps on purpose – a weaker voice reflects his vulnerable state of mind and body) I can see why the students liked him. He's a kooky counterpart to youthful optimism: a been there, done that sage whose point of view gives the show an off-kilter perspective that is both surprising and bittersweet. All in all, Give Way the Musical is a jolly good time. It's rare to see an original New Zealand musical which means it's rare to hear our lovely New Zealand accents singing about New Zealand stuff. As it happens, Give Way is one of two original New Zealand musicals playing in Wellington at the moment: down the road at Te Auaha, Amy Mansfield's I did not invite you here to lecture me is bringing the house down with its university-based comedy. If this convergence signals the start of a homegrown musical renaissance, I'm here for it. Give Way the Musical (written by Steven Page) is playing at Circa Theatre until May 24. Information and tickets are online at Circa Theatre.
