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The New Zealand Novel 1860-1965
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The line that divides "light" from "serious" in fiction is difficult to draw firmly. Some of our recent novelists appear now on one side, now on the other. Margaret Jeffery, E. H. Audley, Charles Frances, Pat Booth, Phillip Wilson may be cited.
Margaret Jeffery's Mairangi, 1964, for instance, is clearly to be taken seriously, both for its carefully modulated handling of emotion and eccentricity and for its evocation of atmosphere. Young Judith the heroine and her great-aunt Eulalie are a triumph. Only the over-dramatic stress of the second half of the novel recalls the much lighter fiction with which the author began ten years ago.
Charles Frances's first New Zealand novel, Ask the River, 1964, is a murder mystery. His Johnny Rapana, 1964, on the other hand, is a study of youthful rebellion complicated by racial issues. Johnny, great-grandson of a tohunga of chiefly line, is doubly rootless, for the ancient Maori tradition to which he was born cannot hold him, while the Pakeha world equally fails to offer him a valid image of himself. He cannot find his pride as a man in physical skill, as Dinny Tuhoe the axeman has done. So Johnny leaves the pa for the city, where his tensions as a teenager fuse with those he inherits as a Maori; his tragic decline is well documented and convincing. This is a very uneven novel, but the picture of Johnny's downhill career in Auckland is vigorous and honest.