{"id":927,"date":"2017-01-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-02-05T04:01:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/?p=927"},"modified":"2025-05-03T13:53:10","modified_gmt":"2025-05-03T01:53:10","slug":"false-river","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/2017\/01\/01\/false-river\/","title":{"rendered":"False River"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Paula Morris<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Penguin<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Otago Daily Times, 2017<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

One of the things I love about Paula Morris is her versatility, which is clearly evident in False River<\/em>, an anthology of stories and essays reflecting the breadth her interests and her skills as a writer. \u00a0Among its pages European fables rub shoulders with slices-of-life from Mt Roskill. Discourses on historical figures sit alongside deeply personal portraits of her late parents, each exploring the complex relationship between fact and fiction, and the truth that lies in the heart of any story. This same ambiguity is reflected in the collection itself; while some pieces fall clearly on one side of the fence or the other, several essays have previously been published as fiction, and three of the non-fiction pieces explore the difficulty of untangling historical reality from popular myth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is hard to pick favourites from such a strong selection, but three pieces particularly stood out to me, one from each fac\/ictional category. In the deliciously wicked \u2018Premises\u2019, <\/em>a writer is commissioned to produce a movie synopsis for a major studio and proceeds to pitch the plots of Jane Austen\u2019s novels from Northanger Abbey to Persuasion, each without success (the producers prefer Bront\u00eb, although they can\u2019t decide which one). Simultaneously highlighting Austen ability to transform the most convoluted of scenarios into brilliantly timeless social satire, and skewering a myopic, formula-driven industry bereft of light and magic, this story left me laughing in smug delight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In \u2018Women, Still Talking\u2019,<\/em> a \u2018fictional\u2019 version of which appeared in Takah\u0113<\/em>, Morris describes the way in which her mother \u2013 an inveterate gossip who drowned her listeners in anecdotes about friends, neighbours, strangers whose conversations she had overheard \u2013 presented other people\u2019s stories because she was unable (or unwilling) to share her own. It is bitter irony therefore that her final illness should rob her of language, a silence every bit as painful as her physical decline. In this essay and its companion, \u2018Inheritance\u2019,<\/em> Morris pieces together what she can from her own understanding and memory, giving her mother the voice she could not find in life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another mater-familial relationship, that of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose, is the focus of \u2018Rocky Ridge\u2019, <\/em>a synecdoche for the collection as a whole. <\/em>Like so many of us, Laura\u2019s Little House series was a touchstone of Morris\u2019s childhood, and whilst in the US she embarked on an expedition, both physical and intellectual, into Laura\u2019s American Frontier, only to discover that \u201c[t]he \u2018true story\u2019 was only true some of the time. And a lot of what wasn\u2019t true about the books was the work of Rose Wilder Lane.\u201d<\/em> Although fascinating in its own right, her thoughtful examination into the \u2018real\u2019 history of the family also explores the distinction between the truth and the whole truth, and the question of who controls how and what is told. Although now aware of the elisions, omissions, and deliberate framing behind the Wilder books, they remain as magical to me as when I first read them, and here, to my mind, is Morris\u2019s most important message.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lessons can be learned from any story, true or not, and perhaps what matters most is that it be a tale well told. In False River<\/em>, this is certainly the case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paula Morris
\n
\nOtago Daily Times review 2017<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[263,349,500,18,277],"class_list":["post-927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-263","tag-anthology","tag-nz-author","tag-odt","tag-paula-morris"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=927"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/927\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1859,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/927\/revisions\/1859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}