Fresh and new

Meet Sarah. She is a Psych I dropout from Vic. (She was an English I dropout from Auckland before that.) She is an amoral, independent challenge to stuffy conformity in New Zealand life.

She is the heroine of Jean Watson's first novel. Stand In The Rain. Through her eyes we follow her drift through her life, from job to job, from place to place. She loves and lives with Abungus, tolerantly accepting his changing moods, loving him both for and despite the well-intentioned ineptness with which he blunders through the job of earning a living.

She is one of the ever-shifting New Zealanders who use the security of the welfare state to maintain a complete personal independence. She allows no obligations and demands none. She moves in an anarchic world where all are mates and each makes individual rules.

Miss Watson's publishers have boosted her as "the girl behind the good, keen, deer-culling, possum-trapping, pig-hunting, rabbit-shooting, scrub-cutting, hard-case, dinkum-type Kiwi." This promises a Crump-style yarn, which the book is not, and hopefully good sales, which the book deserves.

Sarah is a girl who will shock every "right-thinking New Zealander," which these days means the over-40 women of the No-Mandy variety. It is a shock they need.

But when Miss Watson's book reaches its deserved second edition, she should have the publisher's jacket note rewritten. For Sarah is not just a female Barry Crump. She is a girl of today's New Zealand in a fresh and mature way. Jean Watson has caught in Sarah a new maturity in the spirit of New Zealand lite.

Stand In The Rain, by Jean Watson, published by Pegasus, 1965. 150pp., 17/6. Reviewed by H. B. Rennie.