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New Zealand Fiction

The house of fiction in New Zealand, neither a large not crowded dwelling at the best of times, has emptied somewhat dismayingly over the past year or two with the deaths in rapid succession of four highly respected long-term tenants: Ngaio Marsh, John A. Lee, Frank Sargeson, and M.K. Joseph, the first three of whom have been in residence for almost fifty years.

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After being published to acclaim in Aotearoa by Victoria University Press in 2021, Sue Orr’s Loop Tracks was picked up by Terri-ann White, formerly of UWA Publishing, now at Upswell Publishing. A second-time novelist, Orr is represented by agent Martin Shaw, who has also supported authors such as Pip Adam and Ingrid Horrocks to be published across the Tasman.

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The Train to Paris by Sebastian Hampson

by
April 2014, no. 360

Lawrence Williams is a twenty-year-old New Zealander about to commence studying art history at the Sorbonne. Stranded at a deserted train station in the French town of Hendaye after a less-than-perfect holiday in Madrid with his girlfriend, he is suddenly arrested by the sight of a woman twice his age who saunters past him in a white leopard-print dress. A few pages later, the unlikely pair are having drinks at a nearby cafe.

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This novel comes to us some forty years after it was written. Janet Frame (1924–2004) did not allow it to be published during her lifetime. Very probably she was anxious not to be seen as savaging the hands that had fed her: and it is indeed a gleeful, glorious savaging.

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While the reading of a book has become a solitary matter, its interpretation remains a convivial task which must be performed anew for each new reader, new age, and new country. The business of criticism is to help us in this task, and from a multitude of judgements to further our understanding of an author’s words for our time.  The critic is therefore involved not only with books, but through them with the cultural problems of his society. Critical debates thus become debates about major social issues.

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