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The Novel In New Zealand

A Brief Survey

The New Zealand novel, having passed through a prolonged and sickly childhood, may now be reckoned to have reached the critical stage of adolesence. It is not surprising that the last century contributed few books to the number of New Zealand novels—obviously the time and effort required to write a three-hundred-page novel can be ill spared by the people of a pioneering country; those with literary aspirations relieved their spirits by composing poetry or writing short stories. Until recent years few novels had been written which aimed at anything more than the beguilement of a few vacant hours. There had been published several tales of adventure, utilising the Maori, the thermal regions, the mountains, and the possibilities of the many unexplored regions of the time—Hodder's "Daughter of the Dawn," a fantastic romance modelled on Sir Rider Haggard; "The Web of the Spider," by H. B. Marriott Watson; and "Haromi," by Bannerman Kaye, being the best examples of the class. In the early days there was in the colourful and varied life of pioneering an abundance of material for fiction, which proved to be embarrassing and unmanageable in the hands of writers. That life was too restless and complex, there was insufficient stability for it to be comprehended at all points, and rendered into artistic form. And so it is with all periods of unrest, the nearest instance being the Great War, which, after more than a decade, is only now being treated successfully in prose fiction.

When novelists of the present century began to depict the life of their own country through the medium of prose fiction, they were confronted by difficulties which, though not peculiar to their literary form, weighed on it very heavily. Firstly, there were no established works on which to model their own. A novelist like Hardy, though the nature of his work was largely influenced by his own temperament and environment, had forerunners like the Brontes, George Eliot and Meredith, who not only provided models for his work, but also, to some extent, created the taste for such writing. New Zealand novelists had few literary ancestors, and these were not altogether salutary models for their work. They had not, like modern English novelists, the consciousness that they were following a long line of great writers; they had none of the inspiration of an old and illustrious ancestry. It might be claimed that New Zealanders are indeed in the direct line of descent from Richardson and Fielding, that, save in matters of "local colour," they have brilliant models before them in the masterpieces of English fiction. In regard to form and expression, this is certainly true; a disciplined study of Fielding, Thackeray, George Eliot, Stevenson must be of great benefit to any aspiring novelist. But the architecture of a novel, however admirable, cannot compensate for an anaemic imitation of the characters and ideas of an English work. A New Zealand farmer is very far removed from a Wessex countryman by more important matters than his dialect; page 18 his attitude towards life, his surroundings, the nature of his farming, his social status are all peculiar to him. Town life, too, though superficially almost identical with that of other countries, has many features that would not appear outside New Zealand. The failure to appreciate the full significance of this fact, and perhaps the hope that a novel in the traditional manner would attract a wider public, produced several ambitious New Zealand novels, which so far from creating a taste for New Zealand fiction rather induced a prejudice against anything colonial. An intimate and first-hand knowledge of the subject, important though it is for a poem, is infinitely more so for the more sustained effort of a novel. The roots must go deep down into the soil from which such literature is derived.

Given a knowledge of some particular place and a resolve to deal only with life as he knows it, a novelist may still fail through an imperfection that is not confined to New Zealand writers, but is one to which they, and writers in similarly isolated places, are peculiarly prone. This is a lack of sympathetic understanding on the subject, which may be the result of individual characteristics, but which is aggravated by a certain lack of perspective among people who are bound to the scenes and people they are qualified to depict. Many a person whose intimate knowledge of a locality would be of great value, could he use it as the background of a novel, has his sensibility to his environment blunted by the petty round of mundane pursuits and the very nearness of "those ordinary people" who are most delightfully extraordinary to the unprejudiced observer from without.

In the significant novels that have been, written in this century, particularly in the last decade—a time which, speaking comparatively, might be called the "golden age" of the New Zealand novel—there has been a preponderating feminine element, the most eminent writers all being women. In that class of fiction which requires sympathy, subtle analysis, a fine regard for detail, women writers are eminently fitted to excel; but New Zealand is a more suitable environment for stories of masculine endeavour, and of pioneering conflicts, a fact which women writers have recognised, though they have seldom been able to treat such themes with necessary vigour and power. Some—the wiser, it would seem—have preferred treating themes of pioneering purely from the woman's viewpoint, to rendering such aspects as only a man can treat adequately. These writers have made the leading characters of their works farmers' wives or children, their themes have often been the tragedies of these women—the loss of beauty, their ceaseless, unrewarded toil, their unappreciated heroism, in some cases, their degradation. The pursuits of the menfolk have been introduced incidentally, in the proportions they would appear to the women, who would naturally have some knowledge of the men's work, but would have no great interest in it. One characteristic that links together our more ambitious novelists is their dissatisfaction with the existing order of things, varying in degree from the thoughtful discontent of Katherine Mansfield's heroine in "The Garden Party" to the militant outpourings of Mrs. Devanney's didactic socialists.

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It is with Jane Mander, as being the most finished and powerful novelist, that a study of a few individual writers may fittingly begin. Athene-like in the maturity of her first novel, Jane Mander launched her literary career in 1920 with "The Story of a New Zealand River." She has not since equalled this novel of New Zealand life—equalled, indeed, by no other writer—and because of the cold reception given to this, and later New Zealand novels, by New Zealanders, she has placed the scene of her recent books in other countries. The plot of the book is comparatively insignificant, being largely the reaction of a cold English woman to the environment of a New Zealand milling settlement, and the gradual development and expansion of her character under the combined tutelage of an English "remittance man," her neighbour, and the irrepressible Asia, her daughter.

The greatness of the book lies in its complete picture of life in an Auckland timber-milling settlement, in its pictures of river and bush, and in its finished character-drawing. The life of the settlement is traced from the early days, when it was merely a sparsely-settled farming community, until the time when the vandal, Tom Roland, by the sacrifice of the majestic kauri forests which clothed the river-valley, had transformed it into a busy milling town, prosperous and humming with activity. Incidentally, there are introduced many unobtrusive glimpses of life in the settlement—school treats, the rough bachelor life in bush-huts, the boundless hospitality of the sawmill kitchen, the hardships of delicately nurtured women. And the tragedies of milling settlements, where accidents and sickness are frequent, and a doctor is perhaps thirty miles distant, are not passed over. Her word-painting of forest scenery is saved from mere cataloguing by felicitous phrasing and a touch of poetry, as in these phrases: "There was a riotous spring colour in the forest, voluptuous gold and red in the clumps of yellow kowhai and the crimson rata, masses of greeny-white clematis and bowers of pale tree-ferns to rest the satiated eye . . . everywhere a vibrating silence, a terrible, lonely silence, but rarely broken by the note of a singing bird."

Her character-drawing is never laboured; she achieves her finest effects by implication rather than by studied elaboration. The child, Asia, with her sensitiveness, her zest for life, and her childish imaginativeness, is the most living figure in the book; Mrs. Brayton, tolerant, cultured, very wise with the wisdom of a well-spent life, is another figure that lingers in the memory. Perhaps the most subtly-drawn figure is that of Alice Brayton, whose struggle to eradicate her own lack of sympathy and understanding forms a leading motif in the book. The other figures—David Bruce, Tom Rowland, Bob Jones—are less elaborate studies, yet they, too, stand out with distinctness, and are at all times consistent. The book, following the tradition of most modern novels, touches at times on dangerous territory, yet all such themes are handled with a delicacy and restraint which precludes the possibility of offence. Her style is always adequate for the demands of the book, rising in the description of Tom Rowland's death to chastened eloquence. The book, one feels, had been lived and brooded over and composed long before it was written. It is perhaps the one book that each of us has page 20 in his life, for no later work of the writer's has approached it in achievement. "The Passionate Puritan," her next novel, gives a more intimate picture of life in a timber-milling settlement, as seen through the eyes of a country teacher. It is interesting in continuing the picture of the former book to the time when the settlement had attained prosperity and bourgeois respectability; but it is slighter and apparently more hurried. This may be said, also, of "The Strange Attraction" and "Alan Adair," which deal with other portions of North Auckland life, but do not add to the writer's reputation.

Though Mrs. Jean Devanney is considered by many people to be unworthy of serious consideration, I have included her work in the survey for the best of it is a deliberate and conscientious attempt to give a serious picture of some phases of Colonial life. She is, indeed, at times, melodramatic, often unnecessarily crude, frequently the most arid of propagandists; her style, save on occasions, is loose and too often colloquial; but none can deny her the virtue of sincerity, and her power of portraying the humbler classes of New Zealanders, not reached, perhaps not desired, by any previous writer. "The Butcher Shop," her first novel, is a lurid work, giving a highly-coloured picture of New Zealand sheep-station life, but disfigured by unnecessary coarseness. While one does not expect a writer to exclude what are euphemistically known as "unpleasant matters," in a novel they should bear that proportion to the whole which they do in life. In the earlier chapters of "'Dawn Beloved," a later novel, Mrs. Devanney has given a very sympathetic and telling description of humble country life some thirty years ago. Characteristically, she stresses the dark side of the picture, the hypocrisy and evasion of Dawn Halliday's mother, the dread monotony of the Sabbath and the degradation of men and women by unremitting toil. The conditions in the mining township which is the background of the latter portion of the book are, one fears, not exaggerated. The author here descends to depths of melodrama and didacticism, which bring the book as a whole down from the high level attained by the dignified simplicity of its opening chapters. Mrs. Devanney's latest book, "Riven," shows a notable advance in technique; the story flows smoothly, the characters are more varied and delicately drawn, and the writing is at times eloquent. But, with a growing power over her medium of expression, the writer has lost her grip on reality; her theme is trifling, and she is dealing with a life with which she is unfamiliar. Her early exuberance has been regulated, but if this has been at the cost of sincerity, very little has been gained.

The novels of G. B. Lancaster are at times powerful and exhilarating, but only her early books are in a New Zealand setting, and, as they seldom rise above mediocrity, they have little or no part in the movement towards establishing the New Zealand novel. Hector Bolitho, a writer whose ability has been variously estimated, used the same locality as Jane Mander has celebrated, in his novel, "Solemn Boy." This, the story of a young journalist, erected its scenes on an autobiographical foundation, is patently the work of a 'prentice hand. The setting of small-town life is amusing when it is not laboured; there are passages page 21 and phrases that show powers of observation, and a refined sense of humour. Its psychological and pretentious passages largely nullify this book, which would have been more successful had Hector Bolitho realised more clearly his own limitations and immaturity.

The future of New Zealand fiction now seems infinitely brighter than it was ten years ago. We have at least four living writers who have achieved English publication and some measure of fame, while, from personal observation and inference, it seems that there are at least one thousand masterpieces of New Zealand fiction either awaiting publication or in course of production, or as yet evolving in the brains of sanguine literary enthusiasts. Few, if any, will achieve to which they will aspire, many will never progress farther than dream-books, yet from this outpouring of human thought and human energy, there may, in the course of years, be produced that rare spark of genius which, embodied in some writer, enables him to sum up and transcend the thought and effort of all his predecessors.

—E.H.M.