"Many readers want to discuss stories as if they were factual narratives. Holcroft writes in an editorial in the New Zealand Listener: In fiction, too, the artist who transcends reality in the search of a richer truth may meet with violent opposition M. Van Gogh would have had short shrift with us. In the visual arts, New Zealanders are dogged by a sullen prejudice in favour of the directly representational we prefer the landscape, snow scene, beach, town, or street which we can recognise. Readers who accept the imaginative transformation of reality in novels of the European or the American tradition, may tend to react sharply against it when the setting is local. There is of course another side to this New Zealandness. How does she know? What other New Zealand novels has she read? Would you agree with her? The English reviewer of James Courage's The Young Have Secrets (it was Pamela Hansford Johnson) spoke glowingly of the background as "excellently done". Pritchett complained of Katherine Mansfield's At the Bay that there was in it no sense of there being anybody about-exactly! We may swallow Hollywood's versions of Java, or Sweden-but do you remember what you have thought of its notion of New Zealand? Overseas critics are often astray, naturally enough, with fiction set in this country. But we can at least make a good attempt at judging the novel set in New Zealand.
It is often difficult to judge the truthfulness, balance, vividness or imaginative perception of a novel set in, say, South Africa, Canada, or India.
This may seem too narrow a definition, but it will give us a measurable topic, and one within which we have unusual qualifications as critics. Holcroft, Jean Devanny, Ruth Park, James Courage. By such a definition we would include Dan Davin's For the Rest of Our Lives, and Guthrie Wilson's Brave Company, both set overseas, but having our citizens for subject we would include all the others who have written of us at any stage in our history, and we would exclude the purely non-New Zealand fiction even of New Zealanders, the overseas stories of Ngaio Marsh, M. It is not enough for the purposes of this book that a novelist lives here a "New Zealand novel" will be taken to be one which is related to this country, or to its people, or to the experience of life as human beings meet it in these islands. It is worth while deciding upon a definition because this makes us consider what we hope to find in a New Zealand novel. Henty? What about Ngaio Marsh, Dan Davin, Hector Bolitho? The first question is, what exactly are we to regard as a "New Zealand novel"? Is it a novel set in New Zealand, no matter what it is about? Is it a novel published in New Zealand? For instance, how are we to classify Hugh Walpole, who was born here, as were the thriller writers Norman Berrow and Andrew Mackenzie? What about Will Lawson, Samuel Butler, G.
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