What makes a person vulnerable to a cult?
Holbach grew up in Auckland in the 1950s and 1960s. Belief in magic helped him to deal with the unhappiness of his early years until events left him feeling cursed. During adolescence, he places his faith in science and looks at religions the way others observe the behaviour of ants.
He is slow to fall in love and when this happens it ends badly. Misfortune prompts him to flee to London. The outlooks of the squatters he lives with there challenge his middle-of-the-road beliefs.
Coincidences further unnerve Holbach. A fundamentalist sect tempts him and its attraction grows after he falls in love with the sister of its charismatic prophet. A battle rages in Holbach’s head between rationalism and the urge to make a leap of faith. And how he is to explain the sect’s euphoria-inducing blessings?
The novel deals with the inability to decide on beliefs, post-war New Zealand society, London’s 1970s counterculture and fetishes that range from a penchant for dental nurses to the obsession with beauty that Holbach shares with his mother.
Holbach grew up in Auckland in the 1950s and 1960s. Belief in magic helped him to deal with the unhappiness of his early years until events left him feeling cursed. During adolescence, he places his faith in science and looks at religions the way others observe the behaviour of ants.
He is slow to fall in love and when this happens it ends badly. Misfortune prompts him to flee to London. The outlooks of the squatters he lives with there challenge his middle-of-the-road beliefs.
Coincidences further unnerve Holbach. A fundamentalist sect tempts him and its attraction grows after he falls in love with the sister of its charismatic prophet. A battle rages in Holbach’s head between rationalism and the urge to make a leap of faith. And how he is to explain the sect’s euphoria-inducing blessings?
The novel deals with the inability to decide on beliefs, post-war New Zealand society, London’s 1970s counterculture and fetishes that range from a penchant for dental nurses to the obsession with beauty that Holbach shares with his mother.
Review by Maggie Taylor
New Zealander Paul Burns’s short story Folie à Deux won the Leonard A. Koval
short story competition in 2012 and was published later that year by Labello Press
in their Gem Street Anthology. In the call for submissions to the competition, the
publisher announced that they were ‘looking for writing with guts and honesty.
Humour is appreciated. Simplicity is foremost. Bravery is key’. In his second novel,
The Bush Baptist, Burns harnesses these skills and applies them to stunning and
disturbing effect.
Burns’ postmodern ‘pilgrim’s progress’ is unabashedly based on John
Bunyan’s 1678 anti-papist treatise of the same name. In particular, he borrows
some of the same chapter headings and the format of Bunyan’s allegory. The
novel’s opening salvo, ‘The First Stage’ sets the scene in 1950s suburban Auckland
and provides a cultural and philosophical backdrop to Burns’s main character, the
strangely named Holbach Thomas. We join Holbach on his journey and follow his
wanderings without a moral compass, from an early propensity to use his fists rather
than words, to semi-criminal accruals of cash, major misadventures in love and a
longer look at the deep psychological guilt that drives his choices.
Brutally honest from the start, Holbach’s first sentence proclaims, ‘I injured a
child in 1978. The press portrayal of the event sent me scurrying to London’ (1). In
this meandering story, it takes Holbach a while to actually get to London but readers,
New Zealand natives or not, will soon realize that they are in both familiar and
unfamiliar territory. We recognize the well-known, down-to-earth colonial values and
physical bravado of the Kiwi bloke, but this flawed and apparently ‘not-so-innocent
abroad’ living in 1970s South London is difficult to like, despite what seem to be
unnatural and unfortunate events that have occurred in his early life. The death of a
friend, confusion, the Cold War, coincidence and the will to make magic work, all
consume the formative, intuitive mind of the young Holbach.
Slowly but surely, Burns’s very visual remake of the Bunyan myth creates an
alternative, Kiwi road movie through a politically savvy and secularized counter-
cultural London – the book’s working title was ‘Camden’ and the author’s introduction
to the novel quotes Robert Tressell’s 1914 novel about the British working class, The
Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Burns highlights Holbach’s ongoing confusion of
myth and reality by mixing and matching familiar (Hampstead, Battersea) and
unfamiliar names for places and people, such as Error Hill, Wicketgate, Interpreter
House (where he finally meets his match), his friend Cobby, Grimm, Miss Truss
(mistrust), Onesta and Pickthank Books. For a reader not well versed in the original,
deciphering the names and remembering all the characters that spin in and out of
Holbach’s life can be a struggle, but the odd names and clever structure of the story
mirror the weirdly magical journey and creature cunning of the creator as well as that
of his lead character.
Like Christian’s journey in the Pilgrim’s Progress, Burns too leads his reader on
a frustrating quest that is almost a psychological thriller, a jigsaw puzzle of characters
and confrontations, all trapped in a devious game of snakes and ladders. Holbach’s
ultimate travel/travail takes him to Interpreter House in Hampstead where he meets
the charismatic leader of the Concordite sect, Kenan, and his beautiful but mystifying
sister, Mehetabel. Both entranced and repelled by their fierce but fundamentalist-style
convictions, Holbach is drawn into their web of anachronistic rules and codes of
behaviour. After much heartache and some cunning word-fencing with Kenan,
Holbach overcomes his own secularized mindset and finally giving in to the power of
love, makes a life-changing decision.
Burns’s ace in his final, multifaceted game of religious poker is Mehetabel,
who, along with Holbach, is the most compelling and clearly drawn character in the
story. We both love and hate her for the unwavering belief system on which she
stands firm against the encroaching wider world. There is much to admire in Burns’s
subtle and fascinating depiction of Holbach’s true love as an alter ego of the famous
flame-haired warrior, the ‘Martyr of Solway’, Margaret Wilson, who drowned in 1685
rather than renounce her Covenanter convictions.
The reader embraces the showdown with Kenan in a scene set in suburban
West Hampstead, and wills Holbach to win the girl at last. The style in which the story
moves between passages and the filmic quality of the narrative leads the reader to
suddenly believe they know where the story is going, but Burns still has surprises in
store. The Bush Baptist is a dense, well-researched and brilliantly executed tale of a
‘Bush Baptist on the fringes of faith’ (446) but as Burns makes abundantly clear, it is
not easy to escape our own personal and cultural history. In Holbach’s final decision
he finds his moral compass at last; it is for him the only sane and safe pathway. As a
filmmaker, I can see this anti-apocalyptic story being made into a film.
Journal of New Zealand & Pacific Studies
Volume 2, Issue 1, April 2014
pp 110 - 11
Journal website
Review reproduced with permission of journal editor, Ian Conrich.
New Zealander Paul Burns’s short story Folie à Deux won the Leonard A. Koval
short story competition in 2012 and was published later that year by Labello Press
in their Gem Street Anthology. In the call for submissions to the competition, the
publisher announced that they were ‘looking for writing with guts and honesty.
Humour is appreciated. Simplicity is foremost. Bravery is key’. In his second novel,
The Bush Baptist, Burns harnesses these skills and applies them to stunning and
disturbing effect.
Burns’ postmodern ‘pilgrim’s progress’ is unabashedly based on John
Bunyan’s 1678 anti-papist treatise of the same name. In particular, he borrows
some of the same chapter headings and the format of Bunyan’s allegory. The
novel’s opening salvo, ‘The First Stage’ sets the scene in 1950s suburban Auckland
and provides a cultural and philosophical backdrop to Burns’s main character, the
strangely named Holbach Thomas. We join Holbach on his journey and follow his
wanderings without a moral compass, from an early propensity to use his fists rather
than words, to semi-criminal accruals of cash, major misadventures in love and a
longer look at the deep psychological guilt that drives his choices.
Brutally honest from the start, Holbach’s first sentence proclaims, ‘I injured a
child in 1978. The press portrayal of the event sent me scurrying to London’ (1). In
this meandering story, it takes Holbach a while to actually get to London but readers,
New Zealand natives or not, will soon realize that they are in both familiar and
unfamiliar territory. We recognize the well-known, down-to-earth colonial values and
physical bravado of the Kiwi bloke, but this flawed and apparently ‘not-so-innocent
abroad’ living in 1970s South London is difficult to like, despite what seem to be
unnatural and unfortunate events that have occurred in his early life. The death of a
friend, confusion, the Cold War, coincidence and the will to make magic work, all
consume the formative, intuitive mind of the young Holbach.
Slowly but surely, Burns’s very visual remake of the Bunyan myth creates an
alternative, Kiwi road movie through a politically savvy and secularized counter-
cultural London – the book’s working title was ‘Camden’ and the author’s introduction
to the novel quotes Robert Tressell’s 1914 novel about the British working class, The
Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Burns highlights Holbach’s ongoing confusion of
myth and reality by mixing and matching familiar (Hampstead, Battersea) and
unfamiliar names for places and people, such as Error Hill, Wicketgate, Interpreter
House (where he finally meets his match), his friend Cobby, Grimm, Miss Truss
(mistrust), Onesta and Pickthank Books. For a reader not well versed in the original,
deciphering the names and remembering all the characters that spin in and out of
Holbach’s life can be a struggle, but the odd names and clever structure of the story
mirror the weirdly magical journey and creature cunning of the creator as well as that
of his lead character.
Like Christian’s journey in the Pilgrim’s Progress, Burns too leads his reader on
a frustrating quest that is almost a psychological thriller, a jigsaw puzzle of characters
and confrontations, all trapped in a devious game of snakes and ladders. Holbach’s
ultimate travel/travail takes him to Interpreter House in Hampstead where he meets
the charismatic leader of the Concordite sect, Kenan, and his beautiful but mystifying
sister, Mehetabel. Both entranced and repelled by their fierce but fundamentalist-style
convictions, Holbach is drawn into their web of anachronistic rules and codes of
behaviour. After much heartache and some cunning word-fencing with Kenan,
Holbach overcomes his own secularized mindset and finally giving in to the power of
love, makes a life-changing decision.
Burns’s ace in his final, multifaceted game of religious poker is Mehetabel,
who, along with Holbach, is the most compelling and clearly drawn character in the
story. We both love and hate her for the unwavering belief system on which she
stands firm against the encroaching wider world. There is much to admire in Burns’s
subtle and fascinating depiction of Holbach’s true love as an alter ego of the famous
flame-haired warrior, the ‘Martyr of Solway’, Margaret Wilson, who drowned in 1685
rather than renounce her Covenanter convictions.
The reader embraces the showdown with Kenan in a scene set in suburban
West Hampstead, and wills Holbach to win the girl at last. The style in which the story
moves between passages and the filmic quality of the narrative leads the reader to
suddenly believe they know where the story is going, but Burns still has surprises in
store. The Bush Baptist is a dense, well-researched and brilliantly executed tale of a
‘Bush Baptist on the fringes of faith’ (446) but as Burns makes abundantly clear, it is
not easy to escape our own personal and cultural history. In Holbach’s final decision
he finds his moral compass at last; it is for him the only sane and safe pathway. As a
filmmaker, I can see this anti-apocalyptic story being made into a film.
Journal of New Zealand & Pacific Studies
Volume 2, Issue 1, April 2014
pp 110 - 11
Journal website
Review reproduced with permission of journal editor, Ian Conrich.
