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no binding/type specified HK$72.00
Chameleon Press
More reviews by David McKirdy
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Zoom Out by Peter Maize
In ZOOM OUT, PETER MAIZE's first novel -- and the latest in a number of recent novels set at least partially in Hong Kong -- Maize seeks to illustrate we are never really in control of our lives and that this fact is worthy of periodic reflection, all most effectively illustrated by showing defining instances in the lives of the two main characters as a series of chance encounters or decisions made on the spur of the moment and based largely on emotion. Maize mirrors these personal scenarios with the Chinese student protests in Tiananmen Square, at first charged with energy and focus where the students are definitely in control, but then falling into disarray as it reaches its final tragic conclusion.
Maize captures well the minutiae, the limitations and the frustrations of small town life in America, where material success or lack thereof is a defining element in most people's lives. The drudgery of life in the provincial television station where news-presenter Amy Spencer works is mirrored by the dead-end existence of Brian Tyler, a middle-manager in a supermarket in the town where he grew up. They both want more out of life but whereas Amy is an ambitious career woman with definite ideas about her optimum career path, which is what brings her to Asia, Brian is a substance and alcohol abusing slacker going through life with as little effort as possible until events conspire to change things and he too ends up in Asia. They both find that things are not as they had expected and each in their own way realise that their lives are not going in the direction that either of them had planned.
The appropriately titled ZOOM OUT sometimes reads more like a film-script than a novel with sharp cuts occurring regularly and alternating between the lives of the two characters. This has the effect of keeping a forward momentum within the story, but can at times result in stark changes of scene: Brian decides in a drink-fueled epiphany to go to Asia in search of enlightenment and the next time we encounter him it is on the back of an elephant in northern Thailand.
Maize is best at describing the circumstances and environment that both his characters find themselves in; his description of Brian sucking the nitrous oxide out of cans of whipped cream while at work in the supermarket illustrates well the mindset of the substance abuser. Amy is the more credible of the two protagonists and her attempts to negotiate the fraught space between two vastly different cultures will strike a chord for many Asian readers. Brian's self-expressed claim be a seeker of spiritual truth isn't entirely consistent with his thoughts and actions; his final conclusion -- as he signs on as crew on the aptly named 'Spirit Chaser' for a yacht journey to Europe -- is that his life seems alright as long as he keeps moving.
The link between the two characters is tenuous at best and one doesn't really feel that the metaphysical proposition that the flap of a butterfly's wing in the Amazon rain-forest results -- by a chain of cause and effect -- in a thunderstorm in the South China Sea, is particularly well illustrated here.
Maize's journalistic ability both as an observer and a writer is well in evidence; he has a good eye for detail and ZOOM OUT is a worthy first effort.
- Editor's note: 'Zoom Out' is published by Chameleon Press, associated with this publication.
David McKirdy
07/02/2006
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David McKirdy is a Hong Kong-based poet and an organiser of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival. His work appears in the collection Accidental Occidental. |
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