http://www.stuff.co.nz/inl/index/0,1008,955081a1936,FF.html
Christchurch, New Zealand.
Saturday, 29 September 2001
Pages 2, Weekend Section
FEATURES
After seven years of waiting for Lynley Hood's A City
Possessed, writes Martin van Beynen, many will be expecting a monumental book.
Given her previous books, Hood – a reserved woman with a
formidable intellect and indefatigible capacity for work – is unlikely to
disappoint.
Her first effort, a 1988 biography of Sylvia Ashton-Warner,
won the 1989 Goodman Fielder Wattie Award and her third, a social history of
the child murderer Millie Dean, was widely acclaimed.
Both books revealed a starkly honest appraisal of her
subjects where nothing inconvenient was left out.
Everyone involved in the creche saga can look forward to a
similar treatment if the lawyers have not stood too much in her way.
"I do not believe it is the writer's role to protect
the petty, the mean, the self-deluded, and the dishonest from having to face
published evidence of their own actions," she remarked some years ago.
Getting A City Possessed published has not all been smooth
running. Getting the right publisher was not without its problems, and when the
Canterbury University Press came to the party it seemed a match made in heaven.
The relationship, however, turned after several years into
acrimony. Reasons remain sketchy, but problems arose with deadlines and the
length of the manuscript and Ms Hood sought another publisher, finding one in
Longacre Press.
Ms Hood was brought up in Hamilton, the daughter of a city councillor
who believed a career in a corner dairy would be the thing for his girl.
Instead, she went to study physiology at the University of Otago where she met
her husband Jim, now an associate professor in dentistry.
At 40, and after three children, she discovered an
"elemental need to write", and the books followed.
Although Ashton-Warner and Dean seem very different subjects
to the creche case, there is a common thread.
Sylvia Ashton-Warner called them the "dark forces of
the undermind that determine our actions", and in Millie Dean, Ms Hood
sketched out how the dark forces combined to produce a hysteria which
reinforced stereotypes and prejudices, and turned Dean into a scapegoat.
In A City Possessed, Ms Hood is expected to argue Peter
Ellis was similarly a scapegoat and victim of long-held irrational fears about
satanic influences in society, boiling into a hysteria about child abuse.