Literary recession: New Zealand fiction, 1985-mid 1986.

Williams, Mark

Reading Lawrence Jones's comments in JNZL/3 on the year 1983-84 in New Zealand fiction with the task of reviewing the following eighteen months in mind is rather like looking back over financial reports in the months prior to the 1987 stock market crash. Who would have thought amid all those deals, mergers, new flotations and gearings up of the great bull market that a massive slump was just around the corner? Who would have guessed that following a year which saw the publication of the bonepeople and All Visitors Ashore so many forgettable novels would be published in the space of a year and a half? Although one or two novels valiantly resisted the bearish trend, of no novel published in 1985 could one say, as Jones says of the novels by Stead and Hulme, that they are likely to be remembered as long as Owls Do Cry and The God Boy, the highlights of that annus mirabilis 1957-58.

Yet the first half of 1986 saw a sudden, if unspectacular, resurgence of the literary bull market with the appearance of Patricia Grace's Potiki and Witi Ihimaera's The Matriarch. In the following six months to December 1986 the bull rose to unprecedented heights. Major new novels by Stead, Ian Wedde and Maurice Shadbolt appeared together with significant ones by Russell Haley and Mike Johnson. Even the minor novels of this periodby Marilyn Duckworth, Peter Hooper, Sue McAuley, James McNeish and Elizabeth Smither--constitute a demi-annus mirabilis of their own. My task here, then, is to chart the depths of the slump (noting the minor rallies) and to trace the beginnings of the recovery.

I

Cultural Encounters of Various Kinds

Stephanie Dowrick's Running Backwards Over Sand is a novel of 'overseas experience,' a theme as perennially important to the New Zealand Bildungsroman as sexual guilt is to the Catholic variety. Dowrick's achievement is to subvert most of the cultural cringe associations of the fledgling Kiwi's return to the ancestral roost. Zoe Delighty, her fabulously named persona, is, happily, not an unformed and callow provincial innocent who voyages back to the centre of things in order to face the reality of experience once again.

Instead, she is a woman of utterly idiosyncratic energy who undertakes adventures in Europe in the context of that process of 'reverse colonialism' by which the inhabitants of the former colonies living in Britain refuse to 'fit in,' choosing rather to import their own ways (p. 269). Like those English travel writers in the 1930s who journeyed to exotic places in order to encounter strange customs and extravagant discomforts, Zoe is minutely interested in the European scene, erotic as well as cultural, but too much already formed in the smithy of her native land to be made over into something new.

Dowrick's singular strength (which is also ZoO's) is her ability to inhabit a culture while remaining detached from its pieties. As she is able to place her character's feminism with deflating detail ('It was 1970 and Zoe was reading Doris Lessing' [p. 127]) so Zoe herself is able to enter the lesbian demi-monde without abominating a woman who speaks of 'these days of hairy legs and baggy overalls among the sisterhood' (p. 323). In a sense all Dowrick's characters exist edgily within some cultural world view in the way Zoe's stepfather James does by converting to Catholicism (he is a man who is 'grateful for this unexpected possibility to "borrow" a culture which distracted him, a set of feelings, references, convictions'), though most do so without his degree of inauthenticity (p. 39).

In other words, the novel is related to that contemporary species of travel writing which regards the proliferating cultures and sub-cultures of the late twentieth century as its provenance, a multi-layered and ungrounded world of endless interest. Dowrick's distinctive success is to make New Zealand part of that world. Tellingly, Zoe carries to Germany the works of two key between-the-wars literary travellers, the colonial Katherine Mansfield and the very English Christopher Isherwood. But the territory she moves into has become more complex and more centreless than that before 1939. It is a world in which there are no more unambiguous homecomings, either to New Zealand or to England or to Catholicism or, for that matter, to lesbian feminism. Which doesn't mean that one can't go to those places; it merely means one can no longer take root in them.

D.H. Binney's Long Lives the King (Heinemann) is set in 'Tavuora' (part historical New Zealand, part Pacific 'paradise', part myth) in the 1830s where Georges de le Roche establishes an ideal Pacific kingdom on the principles of absolute monarchy. The historical scenes, arranged in a series of tableaux, are intercut with contemporary scenes. Binney captures the bizarreness of European forms in transplanted settings by way of the absurd pretensions of his king set against the indefatigable pragmatism and rectitude of the colonist, Houndspore, and the chicanery of the local chief, Oneporoporo. As Michael Morrissey has pointed out, however, the novel is not merely an ambitious historical study of colonial New Zealand. (1) Binney seeks to do for the history of this country, too long regarded as drab and ordinary, what Patrick White has done for Australian history with his brilliantly stylized fictions. That is to say, Binney concentrates on neglected exotic and eccentric features of our past (his Grand Duke is loosely based on Baron de Thierry) and makes the textures of his prose rich and densely layered. Like White's, Binney's style is selfconsciously painterly in a manner that owes as much to romanticism as it does to modernism. Binney is evidently determined to be that 'more artificial' kind of artist that Katherine Mansfield said New Zealand needed, more than half a century ago. (2)

Binney's novel, taken as a whole, is less impressive than the considerable ambitions which produced it. The contemporary scenes fail to develop the anticipated dialectic with the past. The prose, for all its studied effects, lacks the stylistic range that makes White's mythicized historical novel Voss so impressive. The sentences tend to be finicky, cluttered and overworked ('Clamminess was in the air, consensual with the doddering age of the year, with low adrenalin, clogged pores and the numbed adequacy of the feasted, who rested' [p. 41]). Still, it is encouraging to see a New Zealand novelist unafraid to push the theatrical and surreal aspects of New Zealand's colonial experience into that fertile ground where history and fantasy enmesh.

Two other novels of 1985, Henry Cooper's Upcountry (Ken Pounder) and Ian Middleton's Sunflower (Benton Ross), are concerned with cultural encounters in a narrower sense of the term. The former recounts the erotic adventures of an English university teacher in Fiji, the latter those of an American language teacher in Japan. Both trivialize the theme of encounter by an obsessively voyeuristic concentration on women as passive victims of male sexual fantasy. The theme is made explicit in Sunflower when one of the male characters, who later watches through a keyhole as the heroine is penetrated dog-fashion by her Japanese lover, contemplates a comic-book image of 'a blonde giantess, enormously nude, being climbed by a horde of tiny Oriental men' (p. 16). Unfortunately, by placing at the centre of its interest a blonde and pliable Occidental giantess, the novel itself adopts much the same stance towards cultural difference as the comic book.

Karen Rich, the English teacher, finds on arrival in Japan that she feels 'naked, vulnerable and strangely stimulated' by the eyes that pluck greedily at her in the streets (p. 12). She is swiftly seduced by a young Japanese and the novel follows (rather than explores) the reactions to her of various Tokyo residents: a burnt out case of an American translator, a pair of salacious middle aged men, her homosexual employer, a bi-sexual housewife, a shoeshine man (intended to provide social range) and Karen's lover's parents. But we learn very little of the complexities of Japanese culture by way of these representative characters. We learn little convincing of what Karen hopefully calls 'your way of feeling' as Japanese (p. 50). Our eyes as readers are too rigidly fixed on the outward form of the visitor rather than upon the inner lives of the inhabitants.

Upcountry is a kind of erotic travel book in which the foreign scenery is exclusively the female body and the report is addressed to European males interested in vicarious sexual exploitation. The novel, it is true, has pretensions, but they are wholly transparent. Upcountry opens with an account of the rape of a fifteen-year-old Indo-Fijian schoolgirl from the perspective of the male consciousness that dominates the narrative. But by way of intercalated passages which recount tutorial discussions of Yeats's 'Leda and the Swan,' we are made to question whether it was in fact a true rape or a seduction. What is more interesting, and more telling, than the intercut material is the extraordinarily unabashed invitation offered by the prose to the male reader to participate in the fantasy of an act that involves the grossest kind of domination, cultural and sexual.

R.T. Corbett's A Rag ... A Bone ... (Ken Pounder) is primitive as a work of fiction. Corbett recounts events of post-war Indonesia from the viewpoint of a culturally troubled and sympathetic European observer, Ross Winston. The theme, then, is the old problem of colonialism: by what right do the Europeans find themselves in the colonized world? The novel neatly draws the lesson for contemporary New Zealanders in an epilogue by relating the rise of indigenous nationalism in Indonesia to similar recent events in New Zealand/Aotearoa. The connection in itself is a potentially fruitful one, and Corbett may well have made something of his material and his theme if he had managed to create convincing characters in which to embody them and had not chosen to confine himself to what Patrick White calls 'dreary and dun-coloured ... journalistic realism'. (3)

II

Varieties of Realism

'Realism' is a word that, especially in the pejorative sense in which it is sometimes used these days, is swiftly becoming as unsatisfactory as 'romanticism' has been for a very long time. When A.O. Lovejoy wrote his famous article on the discriminations of romanticism he pointed to how complex and self-contradictory 'romanticism' is as a critical term and much the same thing could be done for 'realism' at the present time. (4)

Commentators on contemporary New Zealand fiction like Lydia Wevers and Michael Morrissey have been saying of late that some major and irreversible break with the tradition of New Zealand realism inherited from Frank Sargeson is under way and that an important line in current writing is breaking altogether with realist assumptions about representation. (5) Looking at the fiction here which may be described as realist, I am impressed chiefly by the exhaustion of documentary realism and of that kind of realism which makes insistent moralistic demands on the reader. But 'realism' is a very broad term indeed, capacious enough to include New Zealand writers as various as Mansfield and Sargeson, Frame and Stead, so long as it is seen as an important impulse within their total fictional means but not the only one. Even social realism, a kind long dominant in New Zealand fiction and now under attack for being blind to its own sexist and racist assumptions, seems to me to have lots of life left in it provided that it understands how bizarre society really is, as Sargeson himself did and as Owen Marshall does.

Joan Rosier-Jones's Cast Two Shadows (Hodder and Stoughton) follows the painful journey of its heroine, Emma, out of brokenness and self-division as a half-caste, towards wholeness and healing by the acceptance of her Maoriness, of 'the noisy blood that calls out for recognition'. By and large, the novel's realist method is convincing and engaging. Rosier-Jones successfully makes us feel what it is to experience such cultural distress and uprooting. It is a pity that, in ending her novel, she cannot avoid introducing a dose of moral uplift when Emma, 'alone, unafraid and strong,' faces her future with her land reclaimed, her Maori identity accepted and her female selfhood calm and assertive (p. 251). This kind of rhetorical assertion of the values the novel so confidently shares with the audience it addresses works against the grain of the carefully established realist middle section and leaves us in the world of Eastenders, endlessly reaching into an inexhaustible storehouse of current cultural cliches.

Of the two novels by Heather Marshall that appeared in 1985, The Secret Diary of a Telephonist (Ken Pounder) and A Nest Of Cuckoos (Hutchinson), the latter is the more readable. Like Lauris Edmond's High Country Weather, A Nest of Cuckoos recounts the emotions of a woman, now middle-aged with children independent and husband dead, who looks back over the experience of a lifetime of wifely and motherly servitude and the thwarting of human potential involved. Both novels draw on a very marketable kind of realism: one which loosely fictionalizes a common experience that has not previously been widely or adequately dealt with in the novel because the general culture has placed little value on that experience and because those who have been part of it have had little leisure or means to write of it. The danger with this kind of novel is that once the experience has been made into fiction the potential of the genre swiftly becomes exhausted.

Marshall as a liberation-from-the-kitchen-sink realist is a flat and disappointing novelist. One is not really allowed to become fully engaged with the exasperated love of her heroine, Jocasta, for her four singularly unlovable sons, because the characters of the sons are made subservient to the social types the novel is continually exposing. She is much better when an odd surrealist quality creeps into the writing (chiefly because Marshall has only limited control over her mockery of social mores) and one feels that a stunted Evelyn Waugh talent is struggling to emerge. Take the description of her hippy son's manic restoration of an old house in the country by the addition of chip-heaters, ranges, mantelpieces, coppers, etc. The narrative as well as the house strains under the weight of all this Victoriana and one wishes Marshall had chosen to forget about the human experience she sets out to represent and had concentrated instead on her undeveloped talent for madcap satire. There are, for instance, more exotic religions in the book than there are in Moby-Dick. As over-the-top ridicule of current social idiocies this would be fine and enjoyable. Fastened to the explicitly humane concerns of Marshall's novel, the satire fails to find the right place to happen.

Patricia Grace's Potiki (Viking) is organized rather like Faulkner's As I Lay Dying with the various narrative viewpoints of several members of a family arranged in distinct but overlapping chapters. The novel records the struggle of an isolated Maori community against the depredations of the Pakeha. The children are educated in a system that not only ignores what is valued by Maori culture but actually speaks against that culture. The environment is threatened with being wrecked by developers.

Through all this the people learn a new strength and purpose, and discover a ground to their being as Maori within an antagonistic culture. They do this chiefly through the uniting and purifying figure of Toko, a crippled child who is born to a woman named Mary (no father is found) in a deliberate reversal of the Christian myth. Toko's broken form (representative of the apparent brokenness of Maori culture) conceals an enormous and saving force. He has a 'special knowing' which restores the scattered integrity of the people by intuiting the proper referent of the 'enemy' in the childrens' war games (p. 45). The enemy, of course, is the Pakeha who have to a great degree stolen the essence of the people, their land, from them and are trying to steal what is left. By knowing that enemy, by no longer internalizing it, by opposing the enemy out of their own stock of cultural memories, the people discover at last 'our own standing place' (p. 129).

Potiki has allegorical tendencies and the usual 'high prose' (that excessively dignified discourse in which indigenous truisms are conveyed) of the Maori renaissance. But it lacks the machinery of demons, gods and translations into the world of faery that we find in the bone people or Ihimaera's Whale Rider (Heinemann). It is, in other words, essentially realistic in the straightforward sense that it convincingly represents a world and as such it seems to me most successful--a part of the Maori renaissance proper, not of the gothic revival with which it is sometimes confused.

Marilyn Duckworth's Married Alive (Hodder and Stoughton) is a thoroughly assured, comic and acutely observant study of contemporary middle-class lifestyles, especially sexual mores. It is the kind of novel Duckworth produces with consistent panache. In Married Alive the lifestyles themselves have been eradicated by a contaminated flu vaccine (a kind of mini AIDS) which has made one fifth of the population insane and has left the rest of the population understandably paranoid about entering relationships. But Duckworth ruthlessly suppresses any tendencies her theme might have towards apocalyptic fantasy and allows the distorted sexual and interpersonal relations of post-vaccine New Zealand to comment on the quotidian present of suntan clinics and the inevitable male fingers and penises 'sprout[ing] through [the heroine's] teenage years' (p. 11). Primarily she is interested in her old ground, the dangers of and temptations towards sexual relations, and if she leaves out encounter groups and extended families, it is only to concentrate on the perennially ultimate thrill and danger in heterosexual relations: marriage.

III

The Other Tradition

Recently Lawrence Jones has re-examined the old argument that there are two distinct traditions in New Zealand fiction. (6) The first is the social realist line initiated by Frank Sargeson and still continued, with strategic modifications, by Owen Marshall and others. The other tradition, initiated by Katherine Mansfield, is more concerned with inwardness. Its most notable practitioner since Mansfield has been Janet Frame. The problem with this division is that its second tradition holds all the obvious attractions, given current social preferences. In place of a masculine, Pakeha tradition of social realism we have a predominantly feminine line of 'mirrors and interiors'. Rachel McAlpine's The Limits of Green (Penguin) is clearly and self-consciously written in opposition to the social realist line in New Zealand fiction. Its perspective is feminist and ecologically progressive. At the same time it substitutes an exuberant taste for magic, mythology and fantasy for the sober methods of realism. It contains a virgin birth, the magical vanquishing of cancer and an astonishing wish-fulfilment erasure of a nuclear power station. Presumably this is what Lydia Wevers means by writing that is 'outside inherited "Pakeha" traditions'. (7) Certainly it recalls, by its straining after the mythical, by its Gaian religiosity, some other recent writing in this country. There are remarkably similar passages in Hulme's post-bone people work, particularly in the story 'One Whale Singing' included in Te Kaihu/The Windeater (Victoria University Press, 1986).

The trouble with this literature is that in trying to bypass the whole continuity of New Zealand fiction since Sargeson, it simply returns to disguised versions of the old cultural impasses that the realist writers of the '30s so directly, and rightly, attacked. Such literature flatters an enduring romantic and nationalist image of New Zealand as a pastoral enclave. It is a renovated version of the 'kowhai gold' theme. And, just as Curnow, Fairburn, Sargeson and Mulgan fought in the 1930s to establish a realistic sense of the nation's limits and actualities, writers like Stead, Frame and Wedde struggle in their fiction to find an appropriate response to New Zealand social experience, in its bizarreness and its ordinariness, in the 1970s and '80s. If the eruption of the surreal into the ordinary in Janet Frame's Living in the Maniototo (Braziller, 1977) measures how far the bizarre and the threatening have moved into the everyday, McAlpine's magic realism without the realism merely makes one nostalgic for the tradition derived from Sargeson such writing is supposedly replacing.

Peter Hooper's People of the Long Water (John McIndoe) which won the Fiction Prize for 1986 belongs to the genre of fantasy novels which are not escapist but rest on some apocalyptic social vision. Hooper's novel, the second in his Time and the Forest trilogy, is set in a post-nuclear holocaust South Island where the remnants of the population have reverted (or advanced, depending on your view of our present technological civilization) to pre-literate tribal communities. The novel follows the consequences of the meeting of two of these tribal groups with opposing world views. The shepherd people have joined neoplatonist cosmology with Centrepoint Community morality. They value circles and flowing movements; they abjure vengeful sky-gods, meat-eating and hierarchy. The stag people are hunters. Their social structure is hierarchical, patriarchal and priest-controlled. Their god (officially) is old nobodaddy and he visits on them the usual proscriptions against pleasure that deity specializes in.

People of the Long Water is successful as fantasy literature, but I found its determination to be 'serious' distracting. The novel is a good read in the same way as Lord of the Rings (a not inconsiderable achievement). The prose is lyrical, portentous and sufficiently 'realistic' to encourage that suspension of disbelief that makes reading fantasy literature enjoyable. As post-apocalyptic fiction that seeks to dramatize the impulses in our present civilization which tend towards destruction and those which point to possible salvation, it fails to satisfy.

Jean Watson's Address to a King is a novel squarely in Jones's other tradition. Its narrative is monologic, the voice of a feminine speaker concerned less with observation of an external world than with the registration of a sensibility. Naomi Carter has a family, a former husband, a house and a job, all of which she describes in detail. But her real centre of focus is on those existential concerns that can only be experienced subjectively. In particular, she is obsessed with the passage of time, and in the face of time's ravages seeks to discover some meaning for existence. This results in a great lack of profundity and a great deal of striving after it. Here, for instance, is Watson trying to wrest out of a cliche one of those sudden quick probings at the very axis of reality at which Janet Frame is expert:

 'Don't you think that time goes faster as one gets older?' It was
 just a trivial passing remark, a cliche, people are always saying
 it. But out of all we talked about, the state of politics in our
 country and abroad, the latest book, from among all that the only
 thing that I can remember is Megan's casual remark about time going
 faster as one gets older. It doesn't of course--but it seems to
 (p.14).

The novel's compulsive existential preoccupation fails to uncover any great insights into our being in time. Naomi speculates that we have all 'been tricked somehow,' that our lives are 'threads on a speck in the universe' (p. 30). This is scarcely original or illuminating. When she remarks that she has 'almost run out of the time I set myself to think about time' (p. 43), one hopes that Watson is about to treat the problems of temporality and narrative with some of that playfulness which in Sterne or Beckett offsets the tendency to a gloomy inwardness, but the moment lapses and we are back inside a mind that searches for significance in every detail and finds only banalities. Again, when we learn of a character named Verne Pules we hope momentarily that Naomi's sci-fi profundities are going to be sent up, but it comes to nothing. Time is a devourer of everything, wrote Ovid, and that would seem to have summed it up once and for all.

IV

The National Epic

The work of Keri Hulme, Patricia Grace and Witi Ihimaera is at the forefront of what is commonly called a 'Maori renaissance'. That term signifies not merely a stronger Maori participation in the arts, both traditional and European-derived, than hitherto, but also a general revaluation of New Zealand culture around the Maori presence. Ihimaera's The Matriarch (Heinemann), written over the space of ten years, is an historical novel which attempts epically to record the whole response to colonization, political, military and psychological, of the Maori people during the 150 years of Pakeha occupation. I say 'epic' because, although the novel concentrates on a small segment of the Maori people, involving the locality, traditions and heroes of Ihimaera's own background, their experience is meant to be representative of the whole Maori experience. Moreover, in spite of its unavoidable dealings with fragmentation, the novel is fundamentally concerned with what Georg Lukacs calls totalities. When Lukacs defined the novel as 'the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totalities,' (8) he did not anticipate that novels would emerge again from peoples who put at the centre of their cultural existence their memory of a time before the descent into that brokenness that is, for Lukacs, inseparable from bourgeois consciousness.

For Ihimaera, the tragedy of the colonization of the Maori is deepened by his sense that in places like 'Waituhi,' which dramatizes his own childhood, the memory was still intact of a time before the worlds of inner and outer, of self and nature, had flown apart. This is the scene of pastoral and of the old organic world of the pre-European Maori. When Tamatea, the narrator of the novel, cries, 'where has the mana of the land, and the tapu of the land gone? Have the gods departed entirely from us and left the world only to man?,' the lament draws attention to lost presences of which the traces are still discernible (p. 105). The grandeur of the little village of Waituhi has gone. Its poverty and dilapidation are the visible signs of defeat. Yet there is another, invisible, Waituhi: the Waituhi of the family, the whanau, the ridgepole connecting past and present. This Waituhi is absent from the lives and even from the broken dreams of most of the present inhabitants. But it is operative for those, like Tamatea and the matriarch herself, in whom eternity still lives and moves because they possess the imaginative (spiritual, if you like) capacity to envisage it. It is in terms of this living fiction that we are meant to read passages like this:

 All of a sudden, the veil between day and night lifted, and the
 matriarch and the child were in some otherworld where gods and men
 commune. Where timelessness begins and there is no separation of
 past and present. A world energized with glowing forces and
 creatures of light fading in and out of the hills, the plains and
 the physical landscape of Waituhi (p. 109).

Taken in the context of a realistic historical novel, this would be merely purple prose, and such writing--overblown, charged with mysticism, gesturing towards the ineffable--accounts in large part for the extremes of irritation and rapture with which the novel has been received. (9) The point, I think, is that it is only by way of such leaps into grand guignol that the novel is able to figure forth the mana and the tapu that 'still remain' not in the world of outward appearances but in 'the heart and soul and intellect' (p. 110). That original world of the Maori can only be recovered in a work of fiction as 'fantasy', if we allow that word to mean not mere escape from reality or history but rather a richer engagement of the mind with experience than sober truth-telling realism allows. The terms 'reality' and 'fantasy' are not mutually antagonistic for Ihimaera. The world where the gods and humans communicate is 'a fantasy as well as a real world' (p. 192).

It is in this context that we are meant to see the intricate references to opera in the novel. Again and again the prose will inflate while describing some fantastical set piece staged by the matriarch then pick up some phrase from a Verdi aria. The attraction to Verdi no doubt owes in great part to the fact that, as John Beston puts it, Verdi 'was as ardently involved with the Risorgimento in Italy as Ihimaera is with the reassertion of Maoritanga in New Zealand'. (10) But Ihimaera is also drawn to opera because it allows him to focus on the Maori love of theatrical gesture which is so important in this book. Ihimaera foregrounds what he sees as a link between the Maori and the Italian peoples in their common love of coups de theatre: of the gorgeous and the fanciful. Moreover, opera's mixture of dignity, pathos, richness and exaggeration provides a necessary counterpoint to Ihimaera's dramatic presentation of Maoriness and the Maori possession of the past.

Opera is a vehicle capacious and splendid enough to convey the gravity, the romanticism, the exuberance, the colour, the religiosity, and the sufferings ('appogiaturi of the oppressed') of the Maori (p. 190). Thus the matriarch tells Tamatea that the land of his ancestors at Waituhi 'came to you beyond the time of men and gods to the very beginning of Night and the void. A thousand years and further back, mokopuna. We had eternity in us.' Here the novel suggests a means of judging the brokenness of pakeha civilization and the damage it has done to Maori culture from an incorruptible vantage point inside the cultural memory of the Maori people--one whose truth is in the richest sense of the word 'imaginative' (p. 6.).

It's there in Potiki also, of course, that remembered sense of an essential intact core of Maori culture in spite of all the evidence of brokenness ('We found our own universe to be as large and extensive as any other universe that there is' [p.104]). But it is far more powerful in The Matriarch because Ihimaera confronts so directly the terrifying centrifugal forces unleashed on the Maori by the arrival of 'history', yet finds in spite of all a continuity of Maori resilience and resistance peculiarly appropriate to his epic telling.

This is why the novel's central focus is not Tamatea, but the matriarch herself. The ground on which she chooses to stand forth as a Maori is uncontaminated by that sense of the negative which haunts the attempts of colonized peoples at self-definition and self-assertion. It is true that the matriarch knows from the time she enters adulthood that as a colonized person, she is 'a slave'. But, because her imagination has retained a connection to the spiritual worlds, because she spans the worlds of opera and actuality, possession of her Maoriness is unassailable. Neither Te Kooti nor Wi Pere, lineal ancestors of the matriarch who represent respectively violent resistance and resistance from within to the Pakeha hegemony and who dramatize those separate Maori responses to colonization, held as securely as the matriarch does the keys to that world, where the shadow of the Pakeha has not fallen. The matriarch, by her own definition, is one of the immortals; she is in touch with the gods.

It is as an epic that Alex Calder in Landfall welcomed and praised the novel, usefully observing that our usual means of responding to a novel of this sort are inadequate. C.K. Stead, on the other hand, reviewing the novel in the London Review of Books, saw it as simply a failed novel, historically misrepresenting and insufficiently realized. I think that somewhere between these two opposing viewpoints the novel will have to be gradually assimilated. The question is, what sort of epic is it possible to write in 1986 in New Zealand/Aotearoa? Nostalgia, at least, is not a way back to the world before the metaphysical spheres were broken. Fortunately, nostalgia is not the enabling ground of The Matriarch.

At the heart of Ihimaera's endeavour as a novelist is a determination to write a national epic that places the experience of the colonized people of New Zealand--military, political, ideological, spiritual--at the centre of the nation's efforts at self-definition. Jye Kang's Guests of the New Gold Hill (Hodder and Stoughton) examines New Zealand history from the viewpoint of the Chinese immigrants who came in the nineteenth century to work the gold diggings and remained as marginalized New Zealanders. Such novels of ethnic experience are common enough in the U.S., Canada and Australia but still relatively rare in this country. No doubt, more will appear and they will serve to complete the picture of a complex social whole. But to read Jye Kang's novel after Ihimaera's is to be impressed by the sheer scope of the Maori novelist's undertaking. National epics written from an indigenous viewpoint are rare enough. If we quibble with the details of their execution, we should be careful to admire the ambition which produces them. To turn from Ihimaera's complex and troubling novel to Yvonne Kalman's Riversong (Macdonald) is to be reminded how many senses the word 'epic' has. Kalman has produced an historical romance of nineteenth-century colonial New Zealand that is 'epic' in the same way as are those endless Australian drama series about life in the outback, circa 1880. Its heroes have voices 'scoured flat by decades of bellowing at lazy dogs and roaring orders at aboriginal stockmen' (p. 3). Its Maori cook 'waddles' as comic negro servants do in historical romances of the American South of the 1930s. But let the novel condemn itself in its own words:

 Wiping her hands on her apron Moana went back into the kitchen,
 sighing with annoyance. On the scrubbed table was a tray bearing
 two plates of salad, one as delicately artistic as Moana's limited
 imagination could contrive, the other a rough mound of chopped
 chicken, potato and cold vegetables.... (p. 21).

Lloyd Jones' Gilmore's Dairy (Hodder and Stoughton), a thoroughly enjoyable comic novel, doesn't so much depart from the Sargeson tradition as explode it from within. Jones's novel, with its concentration on small town New Zealand in the 1950s and early '60s, its adolescent boys driven by sexual fantasy, its exuberant sense of the bizarre, comic and extraordinary qualities of ordinary New Zealand life, recalls Ronald Hugh Morrieson. Yet Gilmore has avoided Morrieson's gothic excesses, the predilection his texts display for violent and voyeuristic fantasy (which is to say perhaps that Gilmore's Dairy lacks the disturbing yet fascinating subconscious of Morrieson's fiction). When Jones's adolescent hero finally manages to win the heroine, Deirdre, Jones is less interested in vicarious enjoyment of the conquest than in exposing the hero's pretensions. The eyes of the prose do not fasten on female flesh.

Jones's novel, surprisingly, has something in common with Stead's recent fiction in which history is presented by way of a deliberate playfulness with referentiality. Gilmore's Dairy is a kind of surreal national epic rather like Rushdie's Midnight's Children, though on a much smaller scale. It traces New Zealand post-war history by way of its popular culture and distinctive economic forms from the 1950s of corner dairies (hard jubes, chocolate pineapple chunks, pink coconut-ice bars, toffee milks and pearly white bottle chews) through to the ersatz-Spanish stucco of the '70s nouveau-riche and the space parlour extravagance of the 1980s.

Gilmore's Dairy is not, of course, as sophisticated as All Visitors Ashore, but it is much funnier and has its own distinctive form of literary self-consciousnesss. Some of Jones's wild similes and madcap sentences almost rival P.G. Wodehouse. The scene near the end of the novel where a crowd of poets and bums surge through downtown Wellington recalls in miniature the brilliant, hectic crowd scene at the close of Nathaniel West's Day of the Locust.

V

Sui Generis

James K. Baxter's Horse (Penguin) was written in the 1950s concurrently with his Pig Island Letters poems, but went unpublished until the mid 1980s. One can only be grateful that Penguin has been more adventurous and less moralistic than the publishers who rejected the novel thirty years ago. Horse is a brilliant drunkard's Kunstlerroman as well as an exuberant satire of New Zealand's God-sobered society. Timothy Glass, the novel's hero, is an aimless barfly of a poet and an inventor of a splendidly primitive religion centred on magical sex, who bums and 'bangs' his way through 125 pages of burglary, assault, philosophic reflection and visionary drinking (lots of the latter). He wards off the malign attentions of the wowsers' God and of an amiable bugger, inclines to a melancholy defense of catholicism (much less appealing than his erotic demonism), and practises his own fleshly revolt against the puritan God who, according to all romantically alienated writers of 1950s New Zealand, ruled the hearts of their smug, materialistic compatriots.

Horse is such a good read, so riddled with superb sentences, that my only regret is that Baxter dedicated so much of the 1950s and '60s to poetry. Who can resist a prose that has Dunedin lovers 'frott[ing] among burrs'? And where else in New Zealand fiction will you find passages of a drunkard's expressionism that Malcolm Lowry might have written:

 The shapes of ricketty houses propped themselves against the
 hill as if to avoid sliding into the street. The single slabs of
 concrete that made up the steps of the path were cracked and
 broken, and one or two of them swayed under his tread. A wild moon
 hung over the harbour and the town, inhuman among the hurrying
 clouds, coming from nowhere and going nowhere ... (p. 30).

Conclusion

I note a common theme working through all these novels, frequently not fully realized, but insistently present, a preoccupying core of ideas, not yet stale, around which the novelists nibble. That theme might best be expressed as the demands of reality versus the attractions of fantasy; and if what seems most hopeful is the inventiveness of the mythical and fantastic elements in the fiction, what is most disturbing are the tendencies on the one hand to underestimate the protean nature of reality and on the other to forget the mythical status of myths.

NOTES

(1.) Michael Morrissey, rev. of Long Lives the King, Islands, new ser., III, 37 (August 1986), pp. 82-5.

(2.) The Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield: a Selection, ed. C.K. Stead (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 26.

(3.) Patrick White, 'The Prodigal Son,' Australian Letters, I, 3 (1958), p. 39.

(4.) 'On the Discriminations of Romanticism,' Essays in the History of Ideas, by Arthur O. Lovejoy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1948), pp. 228-53.

(5.) See Lydia Wevers, 'Changing Directions: the Short Story in New Zealand,' Meanjin, XLIV (September 1985), pp. 352-6; and Michael Morrissey, introduction to The New Fiction (Auckland: Lindon, 1985), p. 13, et seq.

(6.) Lawrence Jones, Barbed Wire and Mirrors." Essays on New Zealand Prose (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1987).

(7.) Wevers, p. 353.

(8.) Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), p. 56.

(9.) Alex Calder speaks for the enraptured in his review of the novel in Landfall, XLI, 161 (March 1987), pp. 79-84; C.K. Stead expresses the contrary view in 'War Book,' rev. of The Matriarch, London Review of Books, 18 December 1986, p. 22.

(10.) John Beston, rev. of The Matriarch, Landfall, XLI, 161 (March 1987), p. 86.