Sam Mahon is a painter, sculptor and printmaker as well as a writer. His first book The Year of the Horse (2002) won Best First Book in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Since then, he has published The Water Thieves (2006) and a memoir My Father’s Shadow – A Portrait of Justice Peter Mahon (2008). He lives in North Canterbury.
Read an interview with Sam Mahon about his latest book, My Father's Shadow, for the Otago Daily Times
Read a review of Sam Mahon's The Water Thieves from the New Zealand Listener
BOOKS
The Year of the Horse
The Year of the Horse is written as a letter to a friend; a letter of farewell. It also traces the year Mahon spent making a bronze sculpture. In essence the book is 'a year in an artist's life'. 'But this was not Art, this was a commission. It took me a year to discover the difference.'
Mahon's story fascinates: he's an artist who takes on a commission from a large corporate as a challenge. The challenges inherent are immense – many unforeseen and unrehearsed. The corporate is Speight's and Mahon is to make a life-sized bronze of the Southern Man. The subsequent conflicts are laid bare – compromise, stress, pressure of time and the power of money are echoed throughout as the author battles with his own internal conflicts about artistic integrity.
The sheer physical immensity of the project is overwhelming; we are taken through each stage of development with determination. The reader feels the weight, smells the fumes, coughs the dust. We go from the Mill, to the foundry, to the old railway workshops.
We also become cronies with the few helpers along the way – Sam engenders an easy intimacy and respect from those of whom he seeks help – and manages to convey their irreverence and camaraderie with heartfelt affection. He's keenly observant and takes a certain pleasure in the quirkiness of human nature. His many friends call in, trips to the river and mountains feature, he flies his small plane for pleasure and we soar with the sense of freedom, the exhilaration. The big concerns are discussed and mulled over; Art, philosophy, Art. It's also a story about the joy of discovery and finding a way to live one's life. Mahon is a virtuoso writer – his writing sings with a beautiful sense of rhythm. He creates a rich sense of drama; intent on living every moment. The humour is masterful, quiet, subtle.
The Water Thieves
"The Waitohi is our nearest river. It’s where we’d go on summer days too hot for work...We basked in cool water, grinning at each other as it slipped around our chins...This was a no-man’s paradise until...until the pumps went down and trenches opened up the earth...to mine the river when, indignant, she slipped at last beneath the stones to hide."
The Water Thieves is a marvellous and engaging account concerning our most valuable natural resource. Sam Mahon, galvanized into action by rumours that the Hurunui River is under threat, agrees against his better instincts, to become involved in local politics.
Mahon embarks on a crusade that rivals the best of Shakespearean comedy: he’s comically disarming yet often a blistering social satirist. His energy for sustaining the good fight is prodigious, his techniques for gaining media and political attention are hilarious, bloody-minded and bold. From pyrotechnics to mock funerals, from stabbingly witty speeches to asking men in power to drink polluted river water, Mahon demonstrates all the qualities of a firebrand.
Poetic, passionate, provocative: Sam Mahon weaves the world of the artist and the activist with skill and immediacy. A protest song for our time.
My Father's Shadow
'My father communicated best from a distance, in an exchange of letters, and even then we had to work to find him between the lines.’
Described often as ‘a man for all seasons’, Justice Peter Mahon is perhaps best remembered for his role in the Erebus Inquiry: an inquiry into the worst air disaster in New Zealand’s history. In My Father’s Shadow, his eldest son, artist Sam Mahon, draws a composite portrait of Peter: a rational, moral, astute and complex character, but a father whom the author hardly knew.
In poignant lyrical prose, an expansive story emerges, operatic in scope, of Peter Mahon’s life – through his war years and the Senio offensive, his distinguished legal career, to the insult keenly felt by a proud man when the Court of Appeal questioned his immortal line ‘an orchestrated litany of lies’ – as soldier, lawyer, judge, naturalist, father, colleague, husband. He was at the time of his death ‘one of the ten most admired New Zealanders’.
Artfully woven throughout, the memoir exposes the dynamic and the ongoing legacy between these two strong personalities – the rebellious artist-in-the-making, and his tolerant, distant and revered father. Written with a spirited clarity, startling honesty, and humour, My Father’s Shadow is a captivating and extraordinary New Zealand story.