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Here & There,
Now & Then
short stories
by Isa Moynihan

In this richly textured collection Isa Moynihan weaves a tapestry of places and times, past and present. In New Zealand on a Sunday afternoon in spring the serpent whispers fantasies of murder, cross-dressing, adultery and exotic lovers. On a summer beach a couple recognise the end of the golden weather. On another beach a child watches a drowned girl being carried ashore. A country grandmother fights back against family and other threats to independence. A mother is tempted to destroy her adult daughter's image of Daddy dearest, and in ‘True Colours’ an artist and his child paint their pictures of separate realities.
        In our South Pacific playground a writer looks for more quirky angles and a perfectionist looks for more malleable raw material for his ideal woman. Farther afield on a cruise in the Greek Islands a New Zealand family is almost collected by a strange 'family' from a yacht, and in Finland a New Zealand writer tries to turn straw into gold.
         In 1957 in upcountry Malaya a Thai woman offers a spell for lonely wives, and two young women, one Kiwi, one Irish, compare their colonial pasts and plan for the future. In contemporary Singapore an expatriate finds herself out of place and, finally, out of time.
        In an imaginary world a kindly giant solves the problem of upwardly mobile women, And in the distant future on separate planets, men and women breed creatures for different purposes.

Reviews

Here & There, Now & Then has all the fascination and intimacy, wit and humour of high-quality storytelling.  In the opening pages of the first story, “Temptations”, Mrs Madison snaps at the snake: “’Yes, well, we’re living happily ever after, aren’t we?’”.   Mrs Madison’s question provides an apt introduction to this collection of short stories where we are often confronted with a surprise ending.  Moynihan’s character tells us, “After twenty years wives, assaulted by sun and wind and frost, became sexually invisible.”  The reader is soon made part of the story, as we gather information and draw our own conclusions.  We hear Mr and Mrs Madison discussing cross-dressing, their son Steve trying on his first dress, their worry over daughter Louise and her lover Atma, whose long black hair uncoiling and slithering down his naked back makes her shiver with lust.  We hear also the serpent in the garden tempting each of the characters, and we witness Mrs Madison’s thoughts when she sees her “husband’s bald head rising above the chair back”.
    All this is very enlivening but it is not without counterpoint.  In examining the characters in her stories, Moynihan does not scruple to lay bare abuse (as in “Pygmalion on Holiday”) and here, as elsewhere, she is concerned with the vagaries of sexuality.  In this story, “the fat, balding, middle-aged git” is one such character who leaves his mistress to take a break in Vanuatu.  He imagines that a young woman is making a play for him: “I feel more like the George character in Seinfeld, the little fat guy believing, against all odds, that maybe this time he’s going to score”, he muses.
    Thus, Moynihan dispels any simplistic notions of a homogeneous and cosily bound community life.  Personalities clash.  When the teenage daughter Natalie in “The Collectors” on a holiday cruise to Greece with her parents is introduced to the fourteen-year old son from a yacht she thinks there’s something slimy-creepy about him, but he’s the nearest thing to a human being she’s seen since they left home.
   Professor Newman, the cruise professor, with his penchant for likening what happens in the daily life of his guests with Greek mythology, has the last word:

He straightens up.  There’s the New Zealand family, the father carrying his daughter.  Her face is pale – she seems to have passed out.  How disgusting!  They’ve allowed the child to get drunk.  What kind of parents – They’re actually singing!  Something that sounded like poke Harry, Harry.  Really! 

    Looking on at these disputes from the safety of an armchair, the reader sees the edge to Moynihan’s humour.  There is something both very funny and rather disquieting in reading that the father in “True Colours”, who is painting a portrait of his ex-wife, who has “become a corporate with designer clothes and a brisk manner”, adds little touches to it year by year: “Her mouth is harder, her skin less luminous, her eyes less bright.  Portrait of Dorothy Gray.  I begin to shadow the lines bracketing her mouth.”
     “Unfinished Tango” is one of my favourite stories in the collection.  Moynihan’s powers of social observation revel in the story of a filmmaker on a trip to Finland – there she has a “room mate Lucie (pronounced ‘Lootzie’)”, is interviewed by a middle-aged woman journalist, and meets a “forty-something academic” from Finland.  Unfortunately, her trip doesn’t give her the excitement or stimulation she’s been looking for: “The magic land failed me.  Turned out to be just as dull as every other ‘developed’ country, its cannibal trolls replaced by predatory journalists and sad professors.”
    For all its humour Here & There, Now & Then maps out a terrain that has many cracks and fissures that you can fall into and get trapped and buried in.  These are the pitfalls of living and learning.  For here we have different generations, different perceptions, different foolishnesses, different wisdoms.  But there is also love and respect.  So what if life is messy.  It’s part of all of us.  Here & There, Now & Then explores this “mess” and in doing so provides us with a witty and humorous take on what it is like to be human.
    Certainly, these stories capture the strains of contemporary living.  For example, the constant ambiguities and displacements that surround Lucy Wentworth’s life in “On the Ice Flow” threaten to remove her from her home to a granny flat or rest home.  The fragmentary, portrayed in cinematic flashes, introduces an undercurrent of fear, which is followed by a subversion of comic status as the old lady “refuses to be tidied away into old ladyhood”.
    In the story, “Death of a Maiden”, death comes into the child’s life in different ways as she attempts to make sense of what is happening around her:

More importantly, Libby wants to ask when her mother will be back, and she wants to ask if she can have a baby sister instead of a brother – or maybe one of each?  But she doesn’t because her mother’s mother looks so serious and far away, and because Libby is a little in awe of her.

   In the next story, “In Those Days”, a mother tries to come to terms with her own imminent death, whilst “seeking revenge on Daddy via his daughter”. There is a transparent construction of alternative, yet conflicting, worlds and words, which are brought to bear at the point of contact between mother and daughter, who turn out not so different from each other after all.  “Out of Place, Out of Time” takes place in contemporary Singapore, where an expatriate finds herself out of place:

Today, some months later, I am sitting at a table in a basement room in the student building.  I am very uncomfortable, not just because of the stupefying heat but because again I feel totally out of place.

   The third section of the book sub-titled “Out There”, contains two stories, “The Kindly Giant” and “True Breeding: A Fable”.  These stories vary completely from those that have gone before.  “The Kindly Giant” moves us into the future, where he “could smell life forms but for the moment they seemed to be invisible”.

The Corporate Giant is not a bad giant – that sort of fee-fi-fo-fumming went out aeons ago.  He’s popular with his fellow giants who call him CG.  He gives chocolates and flowers – as well as small amounts of gold – to the little people who help him.  Little people not unlike those at present sitting in his chairs.

   The last story, “True Breeding: A Fable”, is the longest in the collection.  It also takes place in the future, in a time where the sexes live on separate planets.  As the female narrator tells us:

My generation, the third from the Departure, was the last required to take the compulsory courses in the horrors of Earth.  Now that men are no longer relevant, and we can safely assume that they will not follow us here, our daughters are no longer taught to hate and fear them.  I still do, unfortunately, and I ask myself: what if their world is still there, unchanged?

And if we shiver slightly, it is surely intended that we should.  The narrator is dispatched in silence from the Booth. To where? she questions. “There may be nothingness, a black hole, THE END?”  But the sense of menace is there right up to the fulfilment of her function in the Great Programme. 
   The power of Moynihan’s writing comes to the fore in this story; in paragraph after paragraph she thrusts forward themes and ideas with an economy of words that pushes our minds at times to comprehend. The images, however, remain in our dreams – or our nightmares.  The interweaving of sexual references and natural/religious imagery with ironic undertone is achieved effectively and with balance.  Like many other stories in this collection, this one demands to be reread and thought about.
   Moynihan can strike home with entertainment that seems so effortless.  It is this ability to adapt the writing to the subject that is a central part of her craft.  The seemingly artless lines, individual fragments of conversation, wit and humour, build up to a whole that moves us by the directness of its communicative force.

Reviewed by Patricia Prime, Takahe 62

The pleasure of a short story collection is that you can pick it up, have a quick read and put it down until you have another few spare minutes, without losing track of where you were in a longer story or novel. From the lovely cover artwork by Kirsty Nixon to the last story in the book True Breeding: A Fable, this book provides stories for various moods and interests.
          In Helen’s Story, the main character is a writer whose publisher has suggested that her books need “More sex, perhaps?'' She travels to Vanuatu in the hope that a few days' break will give her the inspiration she needs. With Pygmalion on Holiday we see Helen through the eyes of Bill, who is in Vanuatu on a break from the stresses in his life.
          “Lucy Wentworth,'' in On the lce Floe, ''is a bright, active, friendly young woman who happens to be 70 years o1d.'' Lucy's daughter and son-in-law think she should be in a granny flat so that if she suffered from age-related illness she would at least be on the property where they wouldn't have to travel to look after her. Lucy, though, proves she's perfectly capable of looking after herself. The skill of this writer shines through every page and, while the topics are different, each story is memorable.

Alyson B Cresswell Freelance

This collection of short stories by Isa Moyahan is difficult to classify. Some, which are very brief, make a sharp social comment about some feature of contemporary life, and I found myself nodding in agreement. 'Sunday at the Beach with George', about refugees, is one of these which I found extremely moving.
    Along the walkway from our right a young man approached pushing a child in a stroller. They were both quite black. Not a common sight in Kirksbridge, but something about the man said 'educated middle-class'. (you can always tell, can't you?) We smiled at him as he passed. He smiled back."
    Other stories are set in the colonial days of Malaya of the 1950s, and made me realise how much our understanding of life and society has changed since then.
"The wife of the Assistant District Officer introduced her to the women, who had all subsided gracefully to the floor. Like silken scarves, Millie thought. No bones, no joints no effort. She blinked, half-expecting them to float up and away swirling and twirling, up and away ... She blinked again. They were still there, eyes and teeth gleaming softly back at her."
    Moynihan herself lived in Singapore and Malyasia before settling in New Zealand, and I can imagine she must have drawn on her experiences in these countries. Author of Sex & and Single Mayfly (1996), Moynihan has a keen eye for the foibles and feelings of her characters, so much so that at times I found myself catching my breath as she cut to the quick with a cynical comment or came up with a surprise ending.
    Moynihan's writing is clear and easy to understand, and I like the way the collection has been put together under the three headings of Here & Now - Now & Then - Out There.

Kath O'Sullivan New Zealand Writer's Ezine 

        Awards & Placings

Temptations: (Highly Commended Sunday Star-Times 1999; finalist in BNZ/KM Award 2001)
Sunday at the Beach with George: In top ten NZ Short Short Stories 2000
In those Days: Very Highly Commended in Auswrite 2006
The Kindly Giant: In top three of competition run by National Radio

Born in Ireland, Isa Moynihan lived in various European countries and in Singapore and Malaysia before settling in New Zealand. Her fiction has been published in literary magazines and anthologies in New Zealand, Australia, Britain, Germany and Finland. In 1996 Sex & the Single Mayfly, a collection and novella, won the Reed Fiction Award and was published, with additions, in 1997. Her novel, The Rashomon Factor was published by Bookcaster Press in 2000.  

From reviews: 
‘I think she’s a very good writer. I wanted to read more of her immediately.’ Kim Hill, National Radio

‘A fine collection of stories, sharp and quirky, about contemporary life.’ Booknotes, NZ Book Council

‘Moynihan is a sophisticated, witty and thoughtful writer.’ Joy MacKenzie, New Zealand Listener

'Those of you who, like me, thoroughly enjoyed this author's short story collection Sex and the Single Mayfly will know that her first novel is likely to be a treat. You will not be disappointed in this clever, amusing, fast-moving tale, a page-turner indeed ... Don't miss this novel.' Kathy Gillard. The Press, 23/9/2000

'Set against the glamorous backdrop of a luxury cruise, Moynihan's story of drug-smuggling and deception is glossy, fast-paced, sure-footed, and utterly absorbing from beginning to end.' Sarah Quigley

'Fiction editor of Takahe  magazine, Moynihan knows how to take a storyline and maintain its impetus, mystery and intrigue. Tightly woven as a novel, the ending is satisfying too. I look forward to reading more of Moynihan's writing'  Penny Robinson, The Wanganui Chronicle, 26/9/2000

'The Rashomon Factor teases and intrigues. It is a fascinating hall of mirrors where neither the characters nor the reader can trust their first or even second impressions.' (James Norcliffe)

TITLE               Here & There, Now & Then
AUTHOR         Isa Moynihan
PUBLISHED    2007
CATEGORY    Short story collection
FORMAT         Paperback
EXTENT          13 X 19 cm, 150 pages
ISBN                1-86942-088-8    978-1-86942-088-8
PRICE              NZ  $25

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