Title: The New Zealand Novel 1860-1965

Author: Joan Stevens

Publication details: Reed Publishing (NZ) Ltd, 1966

Digital publication kindly authorised by: Sylvia Johnston

Part of: New Zealand Texts Collection

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The New Zealand Novel 1860-1965

Ruth France— The Race

Ruth France— The Race. Ruth France first became known when she won the prize for a Royal Ode for the proposed visit of King George VI. For her poetry she uses the pseudonym of Paul Henderson. She is the wife of an experienced yachtsman, lives at Sumner, and has two sons.

The Race, 1958, is an exploration of moral and emotional stresses in men and in women at a time of crisis. For the men, the revealing test is a stormy passage from Wellington to Lyttelton in the yacht Shadow. For the women, it is the anxious hours of waiting in expectation of disaster, as Shadow is lost from radio contact, and the Pacific winds howl over in a January fury. New Zealanders will recall the actual race on which the story is founded.

Like Spinster, The Race is a book to cause argument. Most reviewers—masculine ones—admire the taut sea drama aboard Shadow as the personalities of skipper Alan, of Bob, Laurie, Con, and Pete clash and expose their lines of strength and weakness. Most, too, admire the rightness of the descriptions of the sea, the technicalities of navigation and sailing so confidently handled. Few of them like the scenes among the womenfolk at home. These have been variously dismissed as "sentimental", "padding", "tiresome interruptions in the flow of an exciting narrative", "flat transcription of irrelevant incidents and commonplace conversations". The present writer—not masculine—ventures to differ, and to assert that these scenes are quite strong enough to complete the balance of the book, quite convincing in their own modest, quiet way, and astonishingly real in their use of domestic detail to suggest emotional strain.

I am reminded of a passage in Katherine Mansfield's At the Bay, where the father of the family, Stanley Burnell, has to be organised page 109 off to the office, and cherished importantly until the last moment. As he drives away he sees young Beryl give a skip and run back to the house:

Into the living-room she ran and called "He's gone!" Linda cried from her room: "Beryl! Has Stanley gone?" Old Mrs Fairfield appeared, carrying the boy in his little flannel coatee.

"Gone?"

"Gone!"

Oh, the relief, the difference it made to have the man out of the house. Their very voices were changed as they called to one another; they sounded warm and loving and as if they shared a secret. Beryl went over to the table. "Have another cup of tea, mother, it's still hot." She wanted, somehow, to celebrate the fact that they could do what they liked now. There was no man to disturb them; the whole perfect day was theirs.

Nothing as good as this appears in The Race, where the writing has not this subtlety. But the observation is as acute; maybe the men are not the best judges of that? The behaviour of the women under strain in The Race seems to me to be finely portrayed; what one reviewer has called "the tea and worry sessions with which the women distract themselves while waiting for their husbands" are just exactly that, relevant, real, truthful in their implications. Ruth France is making artistic use of excellent material. It is never dramatic, this stay-at-home business, and therefore is less easy to conjure up in fiction. The temptation to make it interesting by colouring it brilliantly in the romantic manner has been resisted.

What of the scenes at sea, first printed in Landfall some years earlier? Probably it is true to say that the contrast between old Con, who "loses" himself, and young Laurie, who finds in himself an unexpected strength of will, has not been thought out to its depths; there is something cloudy in the philosophical issues raised by the Shadow's experience, a residue of unexpressed ideas which should have been embodied in more concrete form. Moreover, some passages, delightful in their realistic detail, are of doubtful relevance, the trip on the interisland ferry, for instance. In spite of these flaws, The Race is one of the fine novels of the 1950s. (See also chapter eight.)