Outliers: Eight Antipodean Tales by Michael Jackson

Author Michael Jackson is an interesting character. He is the author of over 40 books; fiction, poetry, memoir and anthropology. The creative and the academic. He studied in Auckland, Wellington and then at Cambridge University in England. He has taught at Massey University in New Zealand, and at others in Australia, the USA, and Denmark.

Knowing this snippet of biographical detail will help explain some of the preoccupations in these eight stories. Many feature students and various universities in New Zealand and England; characters are often academics, devoting their life to study and teaching, but not in a stuffy way. They are interesting and three dimensional. There is a strong emphasis on parents and the influence they have on their children. Sometimes by not loving or deserting their children, not being there as role models. They are rarely a happy positive influence. There are frequent mentions of trying to place your own personal history or find your ancestors. And, as if that didn’t sound bleak enough, there is plenty about death – a lost son, a lost brother, an attempted suicide and a successful one. There are multiple strained and difficult relationships between men and women, some that don’t work out or struggle to stay together. There are a few divorces.

After hearing all that you would be wrong to think that this is a collection of bleak stories. Far from it. These are well observed portraits. The shortest story comes in at six pages and the longest 47. Six of the eight tales are told by a first person narrator, although each one is a different character.

Some tell about friends and acquaintances made at university who then stick around in the narrators life, popping in and out every few years. At one point the completely self-obsessed Gene writes to the narrator of his story:

“I remember my mother, whose selfish clutches I struggled to escape, and my father who I never knew but was expected to replace. I remember Anna for whom I was never present. You alone of all the significant figures in my life is unremembered because you are more present to me than I am to myself.”

Quite a few of the characters have difficulty forming or preserving relationships with women. One or two of the younger men are painfully shy and find it hard to talk. Those that do talk tend to spend much of their time obsessed with themselves rather than the needs of those around them. Jackson, who is obviously an expert with words himself, does a grand job portraying those struggles to find the right word or create the right opportunities for them. People are rightly suspicious of one character who is always able to find the right words.

The title of each of the eight tales is a noun; The Gardener, The Inventor, The Historian or The Bystander. All very different, but all with certain similarities. What I like is just how many characters you encounter, all with an interesting but very different tale to tell, something that makes each one unique. Some stories are a tiny snapshot of time, others are an entire lifetime told in a handful of pages. The characters are so well drawn that they all feel very real, like friends of a friend. In the final story – a forty-year career captures in fourteen pages, the narrator talks about Michael McGowan who he met at university and continued to bump into occasionally over those forty years. The narrator, for reasons even he is unsure of, has kept all of McGowan’s letters from over the years. This allows him to make some observations:

‘But in all this time, McGowan remained, like my homeland, both an indelible presence and a link to a world which no longer existed. Long after everyone had exchanged their typewriters for word processors, and wrote emails rather than letters, McGowan adhered to the old technology. He wrote, not as of he was aging, but as if the world was passing him by: Megan divorcing him, the house they had bought in Wellington sold for a loss; their son, named after Eamon, drowned off a West Coast beach; his government job taken over by computers.’

The cover of Outliers is beautifully selected, an abandoned wooden villa with an orange-rusted tin roof, the only splash of colour in a landscape that rises from the tree-edged paddock to steeply sloping valleys, to a rocky mountain top high above. It is bleak but it is full of stories and beautiful to unpick the layers. The book has wide French flaps so that you can open out the back, front and flaps to give the full extent of the enormous empty landscape. The questions you ask of the picture require stories to be told.

Reviewer: Marcus Hobson

Ugly Hill Press