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 Home Front

The Home Front. Where do old soldiers go in peace time? The period of readjustment after a war is legitimately to be thought of as the field of a war novelist. Davin followed For the Rest of Our Lives with The Sullen Bell; Robin Hyde wrote Nor the Years Condemn as a logical sequel to Passport to Hell. Only one novel has appeared so far which concentrates on the experience of a World War II serviceman after his return to New Zealand, Gordon Slatter's A Gun in My Hand, 1959.

This first novel has all the uninhibited vigour of John Lee's stories, without their propaganda. Like Frank Sargeson, too, although without his scrupulously selective art, Slatter produces a sense of reality by a rush of words colloquially ordered. A Gun in My Hand has a genuine Kiwi gusto.

It covers twenty-four hours in the life of Sefton, who has brought back from his war a gun and a grudge; he sets off to a battalion reunion in Christchurch determined to use the gun on the girl he had left behind him and on the man who married her. Sefton's neurotic state is an opportunity to canvass every aspect of New Zealand life since the war. Like Wilson's hero in Brave Company, and like the cobbers of Sargeson's many stories, he prefers the uninvolved comradeship of war to the domestic cosiness of home and women. As he boozes his way round, he meets and rejects all the compensations which New Zealand since 1945 has offered to a man tired of adventure.

With lively satiric distaste, Gordon Slatter looks at the different levels of our activities, whether the level of races, pubs, football, and R.S.A. dinners, or that of "quarter-acre sections neatly fenced", concrete mixers, seaside baches, and devotion to Mum, the kids, and the vegetable garden. Our life in this land is evoked with exasperated, affectionate accuracy. English reviewers commented on this "strong rich flavour of New Zealand".

Is A Gun in My Hand a good novel? A question difficult to answer, because one's judgment at present is liable to be distorted by arguments page 83 about its documentary accuracy. How much of it all is the author's own onslaught, how much is Sefton's? Is the New Zealand flavour relevant to Sefton's dissatisfactions, or would he have been as futile as this wherever he had ended up, in a foreign land of some sort, for instance? What, in the end, is the novel really about? The protagonist's neurosis is less convincing than the background of the action and the incidental descriptions. The book is almost too full of good things!