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The New Zealand Novel 1860-1965
Short Story to Novel
Short Story to Novel. Several of our novelists began with the short story. Frank Sargeson comes to mind, Davin, Courage, and Janet Frame. This may or may not be an advantage, because skill in the shorter length is not always transferable. Perhaps this difficulty explains why we have not yet had novels from two of our finest story writers, O. E. Middleton and Maurice Duggan. The question arises in connection with Maurice Shadbolt's Among the Cinders, 1965, which is not without dull patches between its episodes. Shadbolt's Nick Flinders relates his own story of the "fire" of trouble that leaves him, if not seared, at least "among the cinders" in the last chapter.
Nick is that familiar (too familiar?) New Zealand figure, the disturbed teenager, and he takes to the bush, as perhaps readers will guess. Grandfather Ben—another familiar figure—goes with him, a cantankerous old romantic in search of his lost youth in goldfields, gumdiggings and milling camps. Nick is driven to flight by his unanalysed sense of guilt, which has been brought to the fore by contact with a notorious local murder of parents by sons, and by his own accidental killing of his Maori "blood-brother", Sam. This is the fire, we take it. Nick's subsequent rejection of his parents and real brother, his throwback to the primitive rituals of manhood with Ben, and his initiatory escapades with sex and drink, bring him full circle to a more mature attitude to society.
Nick's reiterated phrase is "to tell the truth": but what is the truth? "There's truth and there's real truth, if you know what I mean." The reader is given only the facts, and has to establish the "real truth" for himself, a point underlined by the surprising twist given to it all in chapter twenty-eight.
Among the Cinders has fine qualities, but raises niggling doubts; neither its central conception nor its picaresque sequences are new, the style is sometimes uncertain, and the book is longer than its content really warrants. As a short-story man Shadbolt has been deservedly successful, and his second attempt at a novel will be welcomed.