Books
The 50 best New Zealand books
by Steve Braunias
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“Drawn along by a powerful under-current of mid-20th-century anxiety when our nation’s authoritarian tendencies were at their most monolithic, Owls Do Cry, penned by possibly our greatest visionary writer, is the touchstone emblematic novel of childhood itself as a time of primal turbulence. All intense lyricism and metaphorical implication, it’s a demonstration of language operating as sensitively as a finely tuned instrument to register the gap between outer social realism and the inner world of the poetic imagination.” – David Eggleton
“Frame’s first novel still has the power to move and disturb. Reading it again recently, I was most startled by its ghastly hilarity, as in the scene where Daphne at the asylum Christmas party rejects Santa’s gift of Ye Olde English Lavender soap and throws it at him, causing him to sneeze ‘at the sharp, cheap perfume’, and is dragged off by the nurses to be locked up. Of the later novels, only Faces in the Water and Living in the Maniototo measure up to this precociously brilliant performance.” – Peter Simpson
2. TO THE IS-LAND, Janet Frame (1982).
“Frame is another reminder that it is the language, and only the language, that imparts literary distinction, and that literary talent is innate, cannot be taught or tamed or tidied.” – C K Stead
“Although deemed an autobiography, it is as much fiction as anything else. It’s wacky, exotic, vivid.” – Brian Turner
3. THE GARDEN PARTY, Katherine Mansfield (1922).
“Her last collection, published after she died, is utterly perfect.” – Lydia Wevers
“She became famous in New Zealand first because she was famous ‘overseas’. But her quality is beyond all that, and the range of her talent shows in the letters and journal-notebooks. She died at 34, too young to have achieved anything like her full potential in fiction. Still the quality, precision, sensibility, wit are all there in the best of the stories – and not necessarily (as convention has it) the New Zealand ones.” – C K Stead
4. BLISS, Katherine Mansfield (1920).
Includes the classic “Prelude”, and a Wellington story written at Acacia Road, “The Wind Blows”. A contemporary critic, H M Tomlinson, in the Nation, wrote this: “Miss Mansfield’s stories are like life reflected in a round mirror. Everything is exquisitely bright, exquisitely distinct, and just a little queer – excitingly queer; we can see round corners and into alcoves that are usually hidden from our sight.”
5. THE LAGOON, Janet Frame (1951).
“Wonderful short stories. Given that many of them were written in a madhouse, they are even more astonishing.” – Chris Else
6. PLUMB, Maurice Gee (1978).
“Any novel by Maurice Gee, any time, gets my vote, book unseen. But Plumb is number one.” – Christine Cole Catley
“Gee’s greatest novel, and one of the country’s most powerful pieces of literature. Plumb casts its own penumbra of reality that is in part a reflection of a perfect match between the author’s know-ledge and his informed imagination. It is one of our truly mythic stories that tells us far more effectively than history alone can what kind of people we are and what kind of society we inhabit.” – Michael King
“An exploration of the dark night of the soul of George Plumb, a Presbyterian minister at the beginning of the 20th century, Plumb is one of New Zealand’s finest novels of ideas. A plum pudding of a book, it possesses a mellow sweetness of tone along with a richness of historical reference that seems to encapsulate an era when a titanic battle to define New Zealand’s psyche was under way – an encapsulation that might be summed up as the struggle between conformity and non-conformity.” – David Eggleton
7. AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE, Janet Frame (1984).
Her second volume of autobiography.
8. IN A GERMAN PENSION, Katherine Mansfield (1911).
Mansfield’s first book brought her – for better or worse – to the attention of John Middleton Murry. It “seemed to express”, wrote the poor devil, “with a power I envied, my own revulsion from life”.
9. TUTIRA: The Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station, Herbert Guthrie-Smith (1921).
“Lip-service is often paid to this book as a New Zealand classic, but if you take the trouble to read it (it runs to 450 large pages), you’ll be amazed; it’s beautifully written, completely absorbing and (especially in its later editions when the consequences of short-sighted farming practices have become evident) deeply prophetic.” – Peter Simpson
“Our first ecological book, and still our best example of this genre. The transformation of New Zealand from bushlands to grasslands farming is anatomised in this close examination of the effects of plant and animal introductions on one piece of Hawke’s Bay. Added values are the author’s quiet erudition and self-deprecating sense of humour.” – Michael King
10. THE BONE PEOPLE, Keri Hulme (1983).
“Sprawling, eclectic and audacious, this ‘shining scrawl’ is the story of Kerewin Holmes, ‘balanced on the saltstain rim’ of the country, the mute boy, Simon Peter, and troubled Joe Gillayley. It’s a rewarding, provocative and unapologetic mess. Any book that inspires such a ferocious backlash in its own country deserves a place high in the top 50.” – Paula Morris
