HUMOUR
The Age
Saturday October 17, 2009
A Nest of Occasionals By Tony Martin Picador, $29.99 APART from all the other reasons it's good to get axed from commercial radio (look at the sorts of people you'd otherwise have to talk to at industry nights), it's been good for Tony Martin as it's given him time to write books. This one continues in the vein of Lolly Scramble, self-deprecating, daggy comic memoir, and mines the vein well.There are the things that are funny because they are so familiar: all the paraphernalia of 1970s boyhood, and the more esoteric corners of nerdy 1970s boyhood: not just attempts to remake Star Wars with the school video camera but UFO Dinky toys, and all this against a backbeat of all the silly, funny things kids get up to. I'm not completely sure whether the line "I was standing behind the school incinerator, melting stolen crayons into its scorching depths as part of our long-term project to turn it into a giant candle" is actually a joke or not.Then there are the things that are funny because they are so strange and terrible, such as Martin's certifiably poisonous Nana, back in his home town of Te Kuiti: when her daughter-in-law, Martin's Aunt Dawn, lost her foot in a freak lawnmower accident, Nana sent her a note in hospital saying "Too bad it wasn't your head." By the end of this book, New Zealand comes to seem like something only David Lynch could have dreamed up.
© 2009 The Age
