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Carl Nixon.body On The Beach 170212
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Body on the beach. By Sally Blundell | Published on July 21, 2007 | Issue 3506
In Carl Nixon's writing, we get nostalgia without the romance - seaside suburbs, streets and parks
underpinned by tension, tragedy and violence.. A father threads his way through the dunes.
It’s dark – the young men on the beach can’t see the features of his face. Into the ocean
he launches a small raft, a hand-made job, just big enough to carry a doll – one of the many
collected by his murdered daughter – out to sea and far away.. In the knockabout end of one of
Christchurch’s beach suburbs, tragedy hits, violently, viciously.. “The raft was a metaphor
for not having any control over things, for being out there, pushed around by the currents.―.
Carl Nixon, short-story writer, play-wright and novelist – a description inevitably prefaced
with the rider “Christchurch― or “southern― – discusses his first novel for adults,
Rocking Horse Road, a clear-eyed, unsentimental portrait of a small community trying to deal
with the rape and murder of 17-year-old local girl Lucy Asher. . “Lucy’s father is a
builder, so building these small rafts was something he could do. Making something and doing
something, that’s quite a masculine take on dealing with grief.― . Downing his second
latte in a busy city café, Nixon describes his interest in grief: how we deal with it, how we
don’t. For his MA thesis in religious studies at the University of Canterbury, he examined
how the new Anglican liturgy helped people with grieving (short title: “For they shall be
comforted―).. When it comes to death, he explains, we’re a perfunctory lot. If we get the
news on Friday, we’ll bury on Tuesday and be back to work on Monday. Done and dealt to.
No nonsense, no embarrassing carry-on – just the unspeakable grief that swells up in the
throat, unexpectedly, uncontrollably, days or months or even years later. . “I think we could
do grieving and death better. Longer. More protracted. And we need more formal rituals to mark
the end of the grieving period. We don’t seem to have the historical framework for dealing
with some of these things and it’s hard to construct new rituals.― Here he adds the
transition of boys into manhood as another inadequately marked passage. “In the 1950s,
churches would have had those rituals, but when they fell away they weren’t replaced with
anything.―. In Rocking Horse Road, the rituals for Lucy Asher are makeshift. Following the
discovery of her body in the sand dunes, local residents attach photos and poems to a noswimming sign on the beach (they come unstuck, ending up in the sand, stuck in the lupins,
tumbling down the road or blowing out to sea in a slow, sad dance characteristic of the poignant
detail in Nixon’s work). Mothers keep a more watchful eye on their children. Men –
fathers mainly, coasting down the road on a few beers – patrol the spit, that “long finger of
bone-dry sand― that marks the southern point of Brighton Beach, a precarious promontory
between the estuary and the sea. . A group of 15-year-old students, local boys on that jittery,
drawn-out edge between childhood and adulthood, take it on themselves not only to try to
discover Lucy’s murderer but also to conserve, to create the life of the girl who lived with
her family in the house behind the dairy down the road.. For Mark, Jim, Al, Tug, Jase and Grant,
she becomes an obsession, a furtive candle-lighting, clippings-collating fixation that runs like a
soundtrack to their emerging manhood, marriages, divorces and their eventual ebbing into broadwaisted middle-agedness. . “It was easy for me to imagine a group of young guys forming this
sort of religious order, a kind of sect. They idealise this virgin figure – there are strong
religious overtones― (although not as strong, he says, as those in the original short story on
which this novel is based). . “They’re not really interested in Lucy’s life. They want
the life they created for her. When she turns out to be less than ideal and to have had a sex life
– and a somewhat sordid one at that – they can’t deal with it.―. Nixon describes this
obsession- in few words. There’s a staunch realism here, a mastery of straight-up, pared-back
narration that has drawn comparisons with Owen Marshall. There are elements, too, of the wideopen spaces of Carson McCullers, the strong regionality of Flannery O’Connor. It is a world
neither heartland rural nor non-specific urban. . Rather, it’s the makeshift bits in-between –
the beach suburbs, the empty carparks, the bleached-out baches; the garages, attics and
clubhouses where relationships are provisional, days are long, nights are sweltering and storm
clouds stain the horizon. It’s a place both recognisable and specific; the kind of place, says
Nixon, that he really likes writing about.. “Some writers make a conscious effort to set their
stories in an unnamed town or some amorphous city. For me, that’s got no interest. What
interests me is real details of specific places. If you look at Tim Winton,― (Winton, Marshall,
Maurice Gee – Nixon reels off the names of some his most admired writers), “he always
writes about the same place, the same people. . “I really like writing about New Zealand. This
is where I grew up. I couldn’t write about anything else.―. The location for Rocking Horse
Road is familiar territory. As a young child, Nixon lived in the hill suburbs, overlooking the very
coastline where he later places the bloated body of Lucy. His father grew up in Brighton. Nixon
recalls visiting his grandparents there, summer weekends spent sailing on the estuary. . A
forthcoming novel, a ghost story (“sort of―), is set near Kaikoura.. “I love that area. My
grandparents had a bach there. I remember a big copper full of crays. We’d go fishing, mush-
rooming. This was before whale-watching and Kaikoura was just a little town on its own. Most
people would just stop there for fish and chips. I’m sure people who live there like it more
now, but I still love how it was, I still love that image of this small row of baches.―. This is
nostalgia without the romance, without the golden days. In Rocking Horse Road, as with his
award-winning short story “My Father Running with a Dead Boy―, Brighton’s
windblown dunes, the paint-peeled homes and the pine-needle parks are underpinned with
tension, tragedy or imminent violence. Lucy Asher’s death exposes a kind of whispered
brutality that pervades the popular beach suburb, along with the stench of rotting sea lettuce.
There’s the high-school teacher with the pornographic bent, the lone out-of-towner dragging
a little girl into the reserve, the young men tipping into a sudden, silent act of revenge, the selfappointed vigilantes with their softball bats and golf clubs, the boozed-up rugby fans lurching
out of the Empire Hotel to have a go at the “f—in’ dykes and commies― marching
past.. It is 1981, after all. . “The Springboks were coming and the country was simmering
with a violence that did erupt. I was 13 – quite a formative age. I remember seeing images on
TV and subsequently I’ve seen photographs of the protest marches. I read Geoff
Chapple’s 1981: The Tour – a really good read – and when you see images of Lancaster
Park and the hundreds of people charging through the railway yards, it was like a war zone.―.
For the young men in Rocking Horse Road, rugby is a “winter religion―, a tradition of
Saturday afternoons and middle-of-the-night vigils watching “our boys― in action, of postgame debates and father-son conversations about earlier acts of rugby heroism. As the narrator
says, “Sport was sport and politics was something else.―. “They definitely come from a
rugby environment, and they’re quite conservative – although they don’t know that
they are. It was interesting for me as a writer; it was hard to put my heart into someone who was
pro-tour.―. The violence that erupts outside the Empire Hotel – an “open-mouthed beery
broadside―, fights and flour bombs – is not unusual for Nixon’s work. In his 2006
collection Fish’n'Chip Shop Song and Other Stories (shortlisted for the Commonwealth
Writers’ Prize Best First Book award), a car is trashed in a beach-side carpark, retirement
village residents are terrorised by a group of thugs, a young boy is killed when a sand cave
collapses, tensions between father and son turn to physical aggression.. Is this the understated
rage so often described as a part of this country’s literature? The “underlying dreadfulness
of modern experience―, as US playwright Tennessee Williams defined the southern-gothic
genre? The opening line of Rocking Horse Road – “It was Pete Marshall who found
Lucy’s naked body down on the beach, near the end of Rocking Horse Road― – does
share the laconic threat of Ronald Hugh Morrieson’s gothic yarn, The Scarecrow. Is Nixon
exploring this same sinister thread?. Nixon smiles. He is quiet, genial, boyish-looking. He talks
enthusiastically about the craft of writing, fatherhood, rites of passage, soccer. . But he’ll
have none of the southern-gothic argument. . “There’s no such thing as a utopia and all
people have their dark sides. Our personalities are shaped by everything that happens to us –
and if there’s trauma it spirals out into the community and you become fixated on that. In
New Zealand society, I do think there’s an underlying violence, but at the same time
there’s a huge range in a writer’s work. Take Owen Marshall – many of his stories are
funny, light.―. Certainly Nixon’s work as a playwright covers the gamut of theatrical
genres – the triumphalism in his stage version of Lloyd Jones’s Book of Fame; the stark
social commentary of his adaptation of J M Coetzee’s Disgrace; the fast-track comedies cowritten with Craig Cooper, including The Complete History of NZ (Abridged) and Kiwifruits;
the rumbustious energy of The Little Mermaid, The Reluctant Dragon and Beauty and the Beast
for children.. A huge range, certainly, but menace and grief return, in great swathes of
understated tension, in his latest play, the stage version of his short story “The Raft―,
appearing at the Court Theatre as part of the Christchurch Arts Festival. A full-sized raft
anchored in a remote bay becomes a rite of passage, a victory over childhood terrors, a site of
overwhelming anguish and a symbol for all the unspoken emotion between a son and his solitary,
verbally inept father.. Nixon’s men do struggle to say what they want to say. Lucy’s
father in Rocking Horse Road, Jack in “The Distant Story― (another memorable piece of
short fiction featured in Fish’n'Chip Shop Song) and Bill in “The Raft― – they all
stand alone, or stand alone together, a clutch of grown-up men so ill at ease with any expression
of emotion or visible compassion. Even the younger men in Rocking Horse Road, shuffling in
embarrassed silence into the home of Lucy’s bereaved family, don’t know what to say or
where to look. They are reserved, manfully circumspect.. Why don’t they just talk to one
another? . “That’s what I’m writing about – men often don’t know how to talk
about these things. It’s all very well to say we should, but we just don’t know how.
It’s generational – our grandfathers didn’t talk to our fathers, they didn’t talk to
us.― . Such male reserve (think of Sargeson, Mulgan, Marshall) is beautifully portrayed in
Nixon’s short story “Weight―. In the gloom of a poorly lit garage, a young man and his
father go through the familiar ritual of lifting weights. The father has taught his son well – how
to breathe, how to place the weights safely onto the bar, how to place the feet on either side of
the bench. Now, on a night like any other, the relationship changes. Irrevocably. The son reaches
a new personal record – 220 pounds, a weight his father fails to match. It is a brief moment,
underplayed and underdramatised. “Reckon I’ll call it quits for tonight, eh?― his father
says casually. But he does not look into his son’s eyes. . He has said all he needs to say.. .
Retrieved from: http://www.listener.co.nz/culture/body-on-the-beach/ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. . . . .
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