The pattern of experience in Maurice Shadbolt's fiction

Abstract

This thesis primarily explores the central pattern of experience that emanates from the fiction of Maurice Shadbolt. It explores the old pioneering characters - principally Ned Livingstone and Bill Freeman in Strangers and journeys - who came to New Zealand searching for Utopian dreams which they had been unable to fulfil anywhere else, the absolute defeat of these dreams somewhere around the time of the 1930s depression and the inevitable failure of later generations - principally Tim Livingstone in Strangers and journeys, Frank Firth in An ear of the dragon and Paul Pike in A touch of clay - to extricate themselves from this defeat. These later generations attempt to escape by various means but all of them discover that they are inevitably and irretrievably bound to the failure that their forefathers created. In fact the landscape is the only constant reality that they can discover. Hence this thesis explores in some detail the pattern of dreams and hopes superseded by disappointments and defeats that Shadbolt establishes in his fiction. But it also explores various comments that Shadbolt makes about New Zealand society via this pattern. For rarely does he write without bringing his native environment to the forefront of his thinking. As he once stated in the Listener, "Certainly the fact of my being a New Zealander was central to the discontent which led me to begin writing. I hoped to make some sense of myself, and of the world around me" "We've had it too easy, too long ..." Listener 27 September 1971, p.12. Through the pattern of experience that he establishes, Shadbolt suggests something of the experience of twentieth-century New Zealand society. At the conclusion of this thesis is a comprehensive bibliography of writings by and about Shadbolt 1956-1980.