.jpg)
The New Zealand Novel 1860-1965
Love Makes the World Go Round
Love Makes the World Go Round. Writing in the New Statesman Pamela Hansford Johnson makes the following comment as a preamble to her review of a bunch of new novels:
"In England at present [1958], we are publishing far more novels per annum than any other country. This means, of course, that we are publishing an enormous amount of muck; and that, in the dead seasons, a reviewer may be landed with a batch of novels that might never have been published at all, for all the good or the harm they do to anybody. Now, I have an idea that this is not altogether a bad thing. It seems to me probable that really good literature needs a great weight of other literature, or written words, beneath it, for it to have any real strength; and I suspect that if a country publishes page 84 very few novels, the number floating to the top is likely to be less impressive than the top level of a country which publishes too much. In short, it is better to read any old rubbish than not to read at all. It is better to read the modern equivalent of Sexton Blake or Varney the Vampire, whatever that equivalent may be, than to gawp at comic strips. It is better to have a large reading public, no matter what it reads, than no reading public."18
Today's writers of light fiction have built up, both in New Zealand and overseas, a public willing to read New Zealand stories, and a body of work large enough for standards of criticism to come to definition. It is a commonplace to say that the bad or the average illuminates the good, but it is true. Both in supplying readers at all levels of literary taste with fictional pictures of New Zealand life, and in making the treatment of ourselves in novels quite a normal affair (as it is to Englishmen to find English life described), our entertainers have done us a service.