Fiona Farrell: Fiction and Factions
Photo: Matt Bialostocki
www.thethreelamps.com Auckland Writers Festival ’18
This year’s University of Auckland Lecture at the Auckland Writers Festival took place in the tent – a packed Heartland Festival Room – on Thursday May 17th. Fiona Farrell spoke for forty spellbinding minutes on how fiction and politics intersect in New Zealand writing. Fiction, she argued, often best puts its finger on the essence of political comment. Novelists, have a crazy freedom, the force of the external narrative supported by the private narrative driving the story, allowing political views to be artfully expressed under cover. ‘Is every one of our imaginings political?’ she asked, and compared politics in novels to the way pieces of hokey pokey are embedded in ice cream.
Fiona started with ‘tosh’ – specifically 1889, and the political messages embedded in PM Sir Julius Vogel’s futuristic novel, Anno Domini 2000 or, Woman’s Destiny. The tosh is in the plot: evil Australian Sir Reginald Paramatta conspires to abduct brainy Hilda Fitzherbert and lure her away from political office and imperial romance. But, writing four years before women got the vote in New Zealand, Vogel predicted that by the end of the millennium, women would hold the highest posts in government and authority.
In an age where opinion is often delivered in snatches, or via the bombardments of social media, Farrell delighted in the outlasting power of the novel in its many forms. She discussed international examples – Orwell, Atwood, Anais Nin, and Jane Austen – before moving onto our own, including Mansfield, Shadbolt, Knox, Gee, Morris, Grace, Lloyd Jones, and Grimshaw, describing the role they have played in negotiating the ‘fractious fault lines’ —gender, race or class — that run the length of a country. Farrell noted how it’s possible to choose to see or ignore the politics embedded in novels, and that novels often outlast politics. Just like Hilda Fitzherbert, Vogel’s heroine, Farrell told the crowd, novelists can continue bobbing along on their lightweight air machines, powered by quickly revolving fans, with the power to look down and imagine.
