Sex And Murder In Nz

Good New Zealand novelists seem to have been swamped in the last few years in the upsurge of Australian fiction writers, but New Zealander Ronald Hugh Morrieson this month strikes a telling blow for the Kiwis.

MORRIESON’S novel, The Scare crow, his first, is the re freshingest thing to have crossed the Tasman for many a year, and his next will be awaited with more than ordinary interest.

The Scarecrow is an account of how a sex fiend, with one murder to his credit, arrives in a small New Zealand town, Klynham, and of what follows. This seems a simple enough story, but Morrieson’s method of handling the plot is quite remarkable in its skill. There is macabre drama in the account, as one would expect, yet there are also a large helping of comedy, a clever look at small town life, a compassionate account of the day-to-day life of the madcap Poindexter family, and a frank survey of the frequently uproarious sex life of the town’s adolescents, and particu larly of the sex life of young Neddy Poindexter, through whose pen the story unfolds.

How the author manages to mix all this together and still produce a novel which flows smoothly to its inevitable end, is not easy to see. But he does it.

The general mood of The Scare crow is established at the beginning by Neddy Poindexter, who says that “the trouble with the Poindexters was ready cash and Athol Cudby. We had no ready cash to speak of, but

we had stacks of Athol Claude Cudby. It has long been my con tention that the constant presence of that man had a more degrading effect on our household than any other factor. Apparently while the slump v/as playing fortissimo and I was playing cowboys and Indians, we became locally celebrated for not paying the rent, chopping up partitions for fuel against the wintry blasts, boozy parties, and the girls getting into the time honoured spot of bother. Both Winifred and Constance got married the bumpy way and these things take living down in a place the size of Klynham Uncle Athol, explains Neddy, is a bludger, “a prize bludger, the soft voiced ‘thank-yuh-kindly’ hat-touching type whose answer to flood, famine and plague is a mackintosh. If Athol C. Cudby ever whipped up a bead of honest sweat in his whole life I would appreciate finding out just where and when, so I could send it to Ripley”.

Everybody comes to life in this book—Pa Poindexter, who is a junk man but prefers to call himself an antique dealer and valuer; big hearted Ma, a mixture of compassion, commonsense, blasphemy and worry about where the next meal is com ing from; pretty sister Prudence, caught between the pressures of growing up and the almost impossible task of attempting to keep pure in Klynham; Charley Dabney, the weird undertaker.

Larger than life are young Neddy and his mate, Les, who most of the time are completely confused by the sex life in the woodshed, which they refer to uncertainly as “a feel up” or a “you-know-what”.

The sex life of the Lynch Gang and other assorted Klynham adolescents is easiest the funniest part of the novel, and at the same time the part which most provides the authenticity which labels Morrieson

as a most promising writer.-

SI.

(THE SCARECROW. Angus and 2l/-.)