Under The Microscope

AN ABUSE OF POWER, by Trevor Reeves; illustrated by Judith Wolfe; Square One Press 1990; 142 pages; $19.95

The Clyde Dam has been pretty much recognised as a fiasco all round -- over-spec, over priced and overdue. What isn't generally perceived is the rather murky background of the whole affair, from power politics to dodgy geology.

This book attempts to pierce that murk, but it looks through a glass darkly. It suffers from problems common to advocacy journalism in that it assumes a reasonable knowledge of the issue to start with, and never really stops to explain what happened when clearly enough. The cartoons, like any prolonged series, sometimes work and sometimes don't. Some of the more abstruse ones could well have been left out in favour of a few explicatory maps of the site area and diagrams of dam design changes. Reeves has difficulties at times describing such things solely in text.

Given the subject, An Abuse of Power deserved to be better written. Certainly the story has more twists and turns than any Ludlum novel, but the mixed tenses used throughout makes those twists more torturous than need be.

The book does convey a sense of urgency and the author's outrage over the rather cavalier fashion in which the project went ahead. It brings that feeling across to the reader, making you feel you should be doing something about the situation. In that sense, it succeeds. Perhaps the most important thing about this book is that it raises important questions concerning political involvement in our major public works. A pasted-in update at the back is a nice touch, showing that those questions still remain to be answered.

Cathryn Crane, NZSM