Vigorous Native Growth

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 902, 16 November 1956, Page 12

Vigorous Native Growth

SWEET WHITE WINE, by Guthrie Wilson; Robert Hale, English price 12/6. MOONSHINE, by Helen Wilson; Paul’s Book Arcade, Hamilton, 10/6.

(Reviewed by

G. C. A.

Wall

three novels showed what is patronisingly called "promise." In. Sweet White Wine that promise is fulfilled, generously. To this reader, at least, it is by a wide margin the best New Zealand novel of the post-war era. Simon Gregg, the narrator, a.successful novelist at 51, reviews his lifelong friendship with the ambitious Paul Mundy. Rivalry, companionship, estrangement, reconciliation, and a final betrayal with Jean, Simon’s wife. At 51 Simon can shrug the last breach away, ruefully and honestly, with a tolerant humanity for the follies of his friend, his wife, and himself. It is a novel with a limited objective and Mr. Wilson achieves it with a cool subtlety, a sureness, that make most satisfying reading. The flaws in the successful Paul are revealed obliquely through the narrator’s unwilling admiration for him; the wife condemns herself not’ in Simon’s eye, but in the reader’s. Simon’s bewilderment at his own thoughts and actions, and his coming-to-terms with them are delicately and skilfully done. The few minor characters are lightly sketched in, but so surely that one could do with more-of themthe horrific mother-in-law especially. Moonshine was written by Helen Wilson when she was 60, and was published ten years later when book circulation was restricted by the war. Its reappearance now is very welcome, for it is good reading. A pity, perhaps, that Mrs. Wilson elected to write it in the first person masculine, since writing in the first person of the opposite six never seems to come off. (Emily Bronté’s Mr. Lockwood and Wilkie Collins’s Miss Clack are devices, not characters, after all.) Despite this, it’s a good story, well told. The guileless young schoolmaster, landed in a savage Irish community in South Canterbury, is unwillingly initiated into the communal industry of illicit whisky distillation. Innocently he antagonises the dangerous, enigmatic distributor of the local product (one wonders what it was like) and a settler’s daughter risks her life in warning him to escape before it is too late. It’s melodramatic, especially in the closing chapters. The pitiful squalor of the settlers, their charm and treachery, could easily be dismissed as exaggerated, but we have Mrs. Wilson’s autobiography to support their accuracy. A final regret is that the preoccupations of her hardworking life have given us only these two or three late-autumn flowers-we have so few. Both Sweet White Wine and Moonshine are New Zealand books. Both are inspired and shaped by the country, vigorous native growth, Neither Wilson stoops to affectation, nor to the whimpering self-pity that has characterised so much of New Zealand writing. Both books are written by adults for adults, and both are first-class of their kind, CF no WILSON’S | first