John Prins. Pastoral Care. ISBN 978-1-99134810-4. Landfall Tauraka short story series. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2025. 246 pp. RRP: $35.00.
Leon Edel once claimed that in Henry James’s first (seldom-reprinted) novel Watch and Ward (1871):
His fault was that of most first-novelists: he tried to cram all his future performances into the single work; and he achieved a fiction rich in thematic material and overstuffed in performance.And yet, as Edel concedes: ‘it shows us the artist, working within a literary tradition, grasping his form, and in possession of a verbal ear that will give him a transcendent style.’
John Prins’ first book Pastoral Care is not a novel, but a collection of short stories. The eponymous novella which takes up more than half of its length might justify the comparison, however.
Not that there’s anything particularly Jamesian in Prins’ approach to fiction. There’s quite a range of styles on exhibition here, from the epigrammatic precision of ‘Lake Pukaki’ to the gentler ironies of ‘Rapture.’
Certainly I have my favourites among them. ‘Lake Pukaki,’ for me, is just a bit too polished. The situation it records is both absurd and tragicomic, but it leaves me wanting to clap more than sniff away a tear or suppress a guffaw. Maybe it needs to relax a bit, to insinuate itself into the audience’s consciousness without quite so much epigrammatic wit. But others may well disagree.
‘Rapture,’ though (perhaps for personal reasons) seems triumphantly successful to me. Perhaps you have to be brought up religious to see the humour in a protagonist who’s constantly having to balance her strange attraction to her friend Lucy and the incessant demands of God:
Mara felt Lucy was created in God’s image, and that a shared magnetic consciousness existed between them. Next time they passed too close to one another, there would be a collision.The ending, too, is exquisitely apt. I don’t want to include too many plot-spoilers in here, but the combination here of earthly emergency and possible divine agency is both funny and poignant: one of the things that Prins does best.
The press release for his book accuses him of setting out to reinvigorate the ‘tradition of social realism in New Zealand short fiction.’ There’s something in that, I suppose. Certainly there are no metafictional attempts to break the fourth wall – nor do any angels (or demons) pay a visit. I think he’s set out to record the world as he sees it, with imagination and vigour, and further attempts to supply a typology at this point in his artistic trajectory would probably be premature.
Who, after all, could have intuited The Portrait of a Lady – or, more to the point, What Maisie Knew – from the more conventional plot mechanics of Watch and Ward? And yet, as Edel reminds us, we can find there the kernels of much of his later imagery: an old lady with a ‘green shade over her eyes’, for instance, who will reappear to much greater purpose in The Aspern Papers.
What’s most fascinating to me about Prins’ book is to see, in its other eight stories, so many tropes and ideas which reappear in the novella ‘Pastoral Care’.
Take, for instance, his fictional poet Bernard Jane, author of the collection But Baby, I Love You. In the story of that title, an unscrupulous publisher has persuaded Jane to recast a set of poems inspired by his overwhelming love for his newborn son so as if they were ‘addressing a romantic lover.’
Bernard was curious, then disturbed. The publisher calculated sales projections and it was a no-brainer. Domesticity, childcare, and the awe inspired by fatherhood were not profitable in 1983. They would sell three times as many books filled with machismo and sexual innuendo.There’s a certain willing suspension of disbelief required to entertain the notion that any New Zealand poet could make enough from the sales of their latest poetry collection to provide for their family, ‘and feed them, and keep them warm,’ but the conceit of the story is that Jane is a kind of James K. Baxter / Sam Hunt / Glenn Colquhoun combo whose every word is treasured by his contemporaries – even those in the ‘literary scene’ he so despises:
You mean all those writers whose every story ends at the beach, or in the water, and who’re unable to write a metaphor that isn’t a bird, or a tree, or a river, and whose self-deprecation is nothing more than thinly veiled self-loathing. That literary scene?It’s an odd story. It seems to hinge on the idea that lying about the nature of your poems is okay if it makes you some cash, and yet that it’s all those other dully nationalist writers who should be denigrated as sold-out hacks. It doesn’t quite compute. As Jane himself is honest enough to admit at the opening of the story, ‘There was so much to be ashamed of.’
Reading ‘Pastoral Care,’ however, the connections with ‘But Baby, I Love You’ really start to bear fruit.
Paul Whelan, its protagonist, has a lot in common with Bernard Jane. They’re both reluctant, put-upon fathers, and long descriptions of domestic lack-of-bliss dominate the opening sections of both narratives. Paul, however, is an English teacher rather than a writer, and his principal literary idol appears to be – Bernard Jane.
There’s a long, agonising description of one of Paul’s lessons, where he attempts to get his class to pay attention to the minutiae of a Jane poem entitled – you guessed it! – ‘But Baby, I Love You.’ I have to say that I’m with the kids in the class on this one. Even after I’d looked up the word ‘Domp’ [Delayed Onset Muscle Pain] it was rather difficult to fathom.
It didn’t help that Paul was trying to get them to read it as a poem about romantic love, while reserving till Monday the ‘bombshell’ that it was ‘actually a poem about Bernard Jane’s newborn son.’
Paul’s lesson is a disaster. It isn’t helped by an old black-and-white clip of Bernard Jane himself pontificating about the dreadful responsibility of having been declared ‘the Father of the Nation’ by a Landfall-lookalike called Framework magazine.
But then, that’s presumably the point of the passage: to puncture Paul’s conceit, his conviction that he’s controlling the class and their reactions to him, when in fact they’re barely tolerating him. Bernard Jane is a particularly bad role model for him, because his example encourages the kind of top-lofty nonsense which gets Paul into so much appalling trouble during the story.
The first, most important criterion of any story must be: Does it keep you reading? ‘Pastoral Care’ kept me reading – with a vengeance. I couldn’t put it down. That was not really the case with the earlier stories in the collection. I enjoyed them all: some very much, but they didn’t exactly compel me (with the possible exception of ‘Rapture’).
Waiting for the hideous denouement looming for Paul at the end of his catalogue of disasters felt a little like watching David Brent crash and burn in The Office. No warnings, no words-to-the-wise can turn Paul aside from getting drunk with his favourite actor (a sort of Sam Neill clone called Owen Durham); then provoking an absurd affray with some of his stroppier students at an afterparty, which ends with him soaked and humiliated in their swimming pool, having drowned the wrong phone: not the one belonging to the student who played him their mocking videos of him, but (alas) his own.
I galloped through Prins’ pages as if on steroids, longing for some kind of an end to these terrible blows to poor Paul’s self-esteem. Maybe you have to have been, at some point, a teacher to empathise with him fully, but I’m not sure. I suspect any reader would be drawn in by this slow-motion car crash.
But then he goes soft on us at the end!
Paul asked if Anne [his head teacher] knew anything about what had happened at the Vlassitches’. She did, she told him, and it was all a big nothing.All a big nothing! Actually she’s asked in the big hung-over buffoon to see if he’d be willing to act as head of English for them next year.
I, you, every reader that ever lived, was surely expecting Paul’s little racket to be rumbled: all the dreadful, embarrassing mistakes he’d committed during this day from hell to be rained on with fire and brimstone from on high. But John Prins decided otherwise. He let his hero off with a warning. Now isn’t that a whole lot better than ending your story ‘at the beach, or in the water’, or else with a metaphorical ‘bird, or a tree, or a river’?
The novella seems to me a great length for Prins. It allows him the scope to develop his characters, and yet forbids too many tangents. It’s not that he isn’t good at short stories: he is – very good. But ‘Pastoral Care’ is an accomplished, fully-formed, completely focussed piece of work. I liked it a lot. It leaves me eager to read more by this writer.
Time Out, Mt Eden: Pastoral Care booklaunch (29/8/25)l-to-r: Sue Wootton, John Prins, Isabel Haarhaus
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(30/12/25-3/1/26)
Landfall Review Online (2026).
[Available at: https://landfallreview.com/but-baby-i-love-you/]
[1504 wds]
Landfall 1 (1947)
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