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

The Backward Sex

The Backward Sex. Second novels are always awaited with some trepidation. Was the first a flash in the pan, or the beginnings of a steady fire? The Backward Sex, 1960, is a book to raise some doubts. For one thing, it is so similar in its material to The God Boy, being the first-person narration of a boy of seventeen. The setting is Albertville, with wharves, lupin-covered sandhills, small town sections, and suburban lives. Its topic is adolescent curiosity about sex, fumbling experiments, and final movement towards maturity. The agent of Robbie's initiation is a red-head divorcee who comes to board in his stepmother's house, distorting thereby the pattern of boy and girl friendships with which he had previously been content.

The marginal material is excellent, as before. Minor characters such as the local constable, the stepmother and the girl friend are accurately observed. The passages between the two boys are particularly good. But is Mrs Rainier, the boarder, credible? As the instrument of Robbie's discovery of himself as a man, she makes the plot tick; but is she anything more than a bit of plot mechanism?

What E. H. McCormick has noted as Ian Cross's "extraordinary page 103 sensitiveness to physical appearances and impressions" is even more noticeable than in The God Boy, partly because this seventeen-year-old narrator, Robbie, though more articulate than Jimmy, is still not one to analyse his feelings in words. Emotions have therefore to be inferred from the many surface details. The book seems in consequence to be one-dimensional, with a disturbing physical emphasis. It is a serious novel, but close to melodrama. (See also chapter eight.)