George Chamier, A South Sea Siren (University of Auckland/O.U.P., $4.00) and Robin Hyde, The Godwits Fly (University of Auckland/O.U.P., $3.00). Reviewed by John Thomson.

You will be lucky if you have ever seen either of these novels outside of a library. New Zealand fiction disappears even faster than its verse. It is about for a year or two, and then the publisher remainders the edition, or Whitcombe's hold a sale, and you never see the book again. Try and find, for instance, Sargeson's key novel, I Saw In My Dream—and that is only twenty years old. What hope, then, of earlier generations of fiction? Professor J.C. Reid, with an eye on the growing Commonwealth Literature courses overseas, has undertaken the general editing of a series of New Zealand novels, and Oxford University Press, perhaps encouraged by the success of its Oxford English Novels, and certainly with its eyes in line with Professor Reid's, collaborates with Auckland University in publishing the venture.

The first four novels on the list are a shrewd and interesting choice. To be added to the present two are William Satchell's The Land of the Lost, set in the North Auckland gumlands, and Jane Mander's Allen Adair, about a young trader's marriage around the turn of the century on a northern arm of the Hokianga Harbour. All four books are important examples of New Zealand fiction; none is the best-known work of its author yet each is comparable with the best; and I doubt if even one library in the country holds all four of them. (That reflects not the quality of the books but the custom still prevailing in public libraries of regarding fiction as a short-lived consumer product, never a work of art.)

A South Sea Siren (1895) and The Godwits Fly(1938) reflect the immense change in the English novel that took place in those forty years, and that despite the fact that both books present protagonists who are partly—even largely—the novelists themselves when young.

Chemier's book is a novel of ideas—one of that peculiar genre in which an odd variety of types meet in conversation to ride their hobby-horses. Thomas Love Peacock was the most illustrious practitioner in English though others since, like Aldous Huxley, have added new examples. In Peacock's hands, the form allowed for the presence of the grand character, and also for a love story with an unsentimental, quick-witted and highly intelligent heroine. A South Sea Siren shows all these features. It is set in a North Canterbury settlement in the 1860's, and offers a variety of often unconnected sketches of the townspeople and the surrounding lease-holders and squatters. There are also chapters describing the evening discussions in the hero's bachelor quarters where Richard Raleigh invites the educated men of the place to meet and philosophise and talk politics, so offering the author a chance to ride his hobby-horses. The siren of the title is a middle-aged Becky Sharp who shows how even in early New Zealand a married woman could live very well on nothing a year by touching the vanity and then the pockets of the men around her. Her machinations with Richard Raleigh make for a fine comic climax. No novelist now has the confidence to create such a character, but even although Chamier fails with her in the end, there are so many minor successes made possible by the attempt as fully to justify him in trying. Nor, I think, has any recent novelist shown the same confidence in the desirability of simply portaying society. It is done with considerable critical amusement, certainly, but on the assumption that this world is "the place where in the end we find our happiness, or not at all."

Later novelists, no more at odds with their surroundings than Chamier or his younger self Dick Raleigh, choose to opt out, even though they have nowhere to go. Katherine Mansfield describes her young girls, Kezia especially, challenging the falsity of social prejudices and class differences in the name of common humanity; but this only leads as they grow up to an awareness that they are different—and lonely.

Robin Hyde's novel is about just that. Gloria Rawlinson in her introduction recounts the difficulties Robin Hyde experienced in writing the book, but from the very start it was to be about herself under the name of Eliza Hannay. The title, The Godwits Fly, refers to the sense experienced by so many writers in the thirties of dependence on the culture of England. This is never an important theme in the book. It is as though the author discovered in writing it that her own experience of growing up in Wellington was the stuff of which her poetry and books could only be made. She proves to herself that England is unimportant, even if that didn't make life here any more bearable. The early part of the book recounts the life of the young Hannay children growing up in Wellington before and during the first World War. It has genuine charm in its suggestion of the children's excitement in, for example, the constant house-moving that exhausts and exasperates the parents, the petty jealousies amongst the primary school children for the favour of the teacher, or Eliza's envy at College of her self-confident, sexually more mature friend. And Eliza (who "could tell things better" than her elder sister and knew it) is given Robin Hyde's own sensitivity to experience and to words: "The empty houses, when they moved, had a kind of fascination; shells, with sunlight rippling and fawning in oblong patches on their naked floors." There is little beyond the chronological continuity to hold these scenes together. Only in the later part does Eliza finally take over the book and make it not just any family's story, but the story of one lonely artistic temperament in an unsympathetic world. Eliza's crush on Simone, her love for the somewhat too ideal Timothy, and her bearing of a still-born child to a man for whom she feels far less sensually—this is the core of the book, less well done in detail than the earlier part, but of far greater significance, both as a piece of fiction and as an example of that self-imposed social ostracism undergone by New Zealand writers from Katherine Mansfield to Janet Frame.

Both books suffer from lack of structure, and especially The Godwits Fly where not only chapters but even paragraphs are quite unconnected. In such cases, the personality of the author and the prose style count more heavily than in conventional novels. Chamier comes across less sharply than one could wish. His writing is good-humoured and not unintelligent, but it is facetious in an old-fashioned journalistic way. Some such style does seem in accord with the worldly concerns of his small Victorian country town, but it is never more than adequate to the occasion. One reads Chamier with an historical interest. His voice does not speak directly to us. Robin Hyde is more a poet than a philosopher, and as her other books show is in love with words. The Godwits Fly is her best story for in it she puts words to some purpose, to portray the artist as a young girl. But the best passages are those which, like a brief lyric, capture the momentary experience. There is little thought for the place of that experience in the structure of the story; but the many sensuous moments evocatively caught make this a novel which appeals more directly to the common experience of all New Zealanders.