Welcome to Hellhole

We are fat and ugly and our wine is over-rated. Miriyana Alexander finds out who is stirring us up.

If accalimed British writer Duncan Fallowell ever returns to New Zealand, it might have to be on a false passport.

His new book, about a three-month trip to New Zealand four years ago, Going As Far As I Can, is released in March and paints a scathing picture of the country: our people are ugly and fat, our cities are architectural ruins and our wine is over-rated.

The novel has already attracted international attention, with Spectator reviewer Roger Lewis saying New Zealand comes across as a "philistine hellhole". "There is no nonsense about scaling glaciers or being polite about Maoris here."

Fallowell's harshest criticism is of the destruction of Edwardian buildings in the city centres. He says Christchurch's Cathedral Square is a "visual disaster zone" and Auckland is "not my idea of a town".

But Wellington offends him most: "I'm in a state of shock. Where to begin? . . . Wellington has been even more catastrophically demolished than Auckland.

"This is the capital city, so one was looking for style . . . who the hell is running this place?"

Fallowell, who has published three novels and other books, also despairs our lack of sex appeal: "I'm fed up with people being fat and ugly and covered in tattoos. I'm fed up with unwashed hair and spotty complexions."

And: "The women seem very confident. The girls can be outrageous, rushing at you while waving a chunk of fast-food, squealing inanely, and lots of them have lesbian haircuts and they don't do cleavage. But however high-spirited, it all takes place somehow in slow motion."

Our wine and culture cops it too. Fallowell has been searching for the perfect rose and is unimpressed with one recommendation: "Nose: vague odour of running shoes and swimming pools soon fading away . . . Taste: nothing, no taste at all, with a faintly chlorine finish coming out of the blue. At twenty dollars a bottle this is incomprehensible."

Fallowell calls Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson "artistically weak", saying he's produced nothing adult since the magnetic Heavenly Creatures. "When Hollywood gets hold of these weak sort of men - artistically weak, that is - all turns to dross."

Fallowell also lays bare the casual gay sex scene, revealing his encounters in the basement of a central Auckland sex shop where men go for anonymous sex, and his use of escort services.

Not every sentence is damning, however. Fallowell had the best fish and chips of his life at Invercargill's Ascot Park Hotel.

He thought Cheltenham Rd in Devonport, Auckland, was "one of the great residential streets in the world"; that Akaroa was heavenly; and that Christchurch people have "spontaneity, madness and sexiness. They dress more smartly than other New Zealanders too".

Booksellers here are eagerly awaiting the novel. Tilly Lloyd, co- owner of Wellington's Unity Books, expects it to be "temporarily controversial".

"No one puts the knife into nice, green, friendly, scenic, hip, cultured, espresso-addicted NZ and gets away with it.

"But . . . once we've all had a chance to read the book, we may find we agree with some or all of it. Fallowell is no slouch."

Fallowell's publishers Allen & Unwin declined to comment and Fallowell is not doing promotional interviews until next month.

- Going As Far as I Can, by Duncan Fallowell. $35, published March 7.

THE QUOTES

Their rugby All Blacks thing is a bit overdone. They load it with more than it can rightfully carry. Is it rugby that makes them emotionally autistic, or is it emotional autism that drives them to the escape of rugby?

The narrow emotional ledge on which the nation squats does indeed have a grand view, but its population must suspect that it's possible not merely to squat but to launch oneself into space, to spread one's wings and fly. But that quiet, friendly, hard-working Protestant modesty holds them fast.

There is something androgynous in the look of the Kiwis . . . and you don't see skinny people either. Hairlessness, chubbiness, androgynousness are also features of the Pacific Islanders, so maybe it has something to do with the geography, which gets to everyone eventually, regardless of genetic origins.

Taupo is a holiday encampment extending for miles in a bleak, lunar suburbia. There is something repulsive too about the lake, which is harsh and steely. And beyond, hideous vistas of dust where they've harvested pine trees, an endless nuclear-blasted death to the limits of the horizon.

- © Fairfax NZ News