SELECTED STORIES

By Maurice Shadbolt

Reviewed by Mike Crowl

There was an advantage in reading this collection in sequence. It meant I was eventually able to leave the gloomy early stories behind and finish with the warmer, more humorous ones. The last two or three are much more akin to the novels by Shadbolt that I've read, where the difficulties of life are not regarded as insurmountable, and the ugly behaviour of some human beings isn't seen as a reason for despair of the entire race. Nevertheless, even in the gloomier stories (and the first, After the Depression, is the darkest), the characters are striking, interesting and moving, strange though their behaviour may sometimes be. Many of the early stories might be summed up by a speech Diana gives in Neither Profit Nor Salvation. Diana is a woman who leaves the city and builds up an orchard, only to find the city catching up with her. At one point she tells her estranged husband: "But there is a mess. Our lives, for one thing. We, you and I and a lot of others like us, just muddle through. Without a single ideal, without God, without pride in the past or faith in the future, without anything." This is one of Shadbolt's constant themes. Another runs through the stories, almost from beginning to end: if only people could leave the city, get back to the land and make the best use of it, they'd be all right. Some of his characters do manage to make good use of their land when they get away - even if it doesn't always belong to them. Shadbolt plainly hasn't much time for cities, which almost too often represent places of lost souls - as Play the Fife Lowly, or The Room or Voyagers suggest. Others, like Mark in The Wind and the Spray, or Eve in The Homecoming, though they struggle to shake off their city-ness, don't find the land friendly either, and the ends of their respective stories are ambiguous. Does Mark drown in the waves he realises at the last moment are bigger than he expected, or does Eve really take up with the chauvinistic Maori, Muru, who hardly seems likely to treat her well? (And what happens to Diana's husband, if it comes to that?) Another theme relates to the bewildered male, capable men who somehow lack a sensitivity to others around them, or who are always several steps behind the motivations and actions of others. The fathers in Strangers and The People Before are almost wilful in their inability to appreciate other people's behaviour, and the narrator of Figures in Light seems forever on the verge of understanding his artistic sister, but misses the connections. Yet we never lack sympathy for them, and Shadbolt's gift with his male characters is to show humans who struggle gamely with life and with the Kiwi culture as it's often conceived. Only one or two of the stories show signs of dating, and even then the characters transcend their period. These are short stories in the classic sense: literary, but never obscure, and well worth reading.

Published David Ling Publishing Ltd, 1998. Selected and introduced by Ralph Crane.

Back to the Index