James McNeish (1931–2016)

A difficult novel to read. Mackenzie, the shepherd and his dog become mythic and heroic figures in a story that is folk legend in New Zealand. The emphasis on the heroic overwhelms the fiction and sometimes obscures the narrative.
An aspect that I do like is McNeish's treatment of early Canterbury settler society. Central to Pakeha New Zealand's beliefs about itself is the concept of "niceness" and the inevitable benefit of a dominant European ethos in the country. McNeish reminds us that this was achieved through dishonest land purchase, the overwhelming of Maori spirituality through Christianizing bullying, diseases and a blitzkrieg on nature. This latter is illustrated well with description of the fiery destruction of the tussock highlands in preparation for conversion to pasture.
To end, a favourite quote:
"Whenever Polson came down to Christchurch he was conscious of making a moral as well as a physical decline".… (más)

From the jacket flap: 'Belonging is an oral portrait of a nation: Israel'
Watching the newspaper reports of the Yom Kippur War, New Zealand writer McNeish was in the south of France on the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship. 'A small nation, Israel, was attacked by two bigger nations, Egypt and Syria, and I experienced, for a reason I cannot adequately explain, a feeling of frustration and helplessness. Each night we watched the war on French television; each night through the eyes of cameras stationed on the Egyptian and Syrian sides, the war came closer until it seemed to me, a non-Jew, uninformed and uninvolved, watching from the sidelines, that a nation might be conquered and obliterated, It worried me, out of all proportion to other world events. 'Is it possible,' I remember saying to my wife when the war had finally ended, 'that one can exterminate a nation?"
He travelled to Israel in 1974 and then again in 1977 when he interviewed a cross-section of 15 Israelis to find out what ties them to the ancient Jewish homeland.
Included in the 15 are a non-Jew of Indian descent who has a Jewish spouse and an Israeli Arab woman, the others are native Israelis and those who arrived at various times in the nation's history, these include Ada Sereni who was the head of the Mossad Le-Aliyah Bet in Italy (1945-1948) which organised the illegal immigration ships to the mandate of Palestine.
Another interview is with Sylva Zalmanson who at the time was still waiting for her husband and brothers to join her from Russia. They were the Soviet refusniks who were involved in the 1974 Dymshits–Kuznetsov aircraft hijacking affair or The First Leningrad Trial. Also a painful interview with Robert Mimouni who had just lost his 15 yr old son, Jean-Jaques, in the 1976 Entebbe hijacking. Another is a Yemenite Jew who describes his journey 'on the wings of eagles' (Operation Magic Carpet) to the land of the bible.

Very profound reading, we look back now over 40-odd years and see how much the political landscape has and hasn't changed.… (más)

Read it all in one day, a damn good yarn, he is a great story teller...
The leit motif is an examination of the outsider in a society - maybe lal writers are outsiders, that is how they can observe and comment...
A pity about the photos, too dark, the book is otherwise a pleasing object, but the photos within have been treated roughly - every one of them is too dark, so that some are practically just silhouettes.
His loving relationship with his father - and the photo of his father - are both deeply touching.… (más)