Writing a new colonial New Zealand narrative

Abstract

Historical fiction has an increasing attraction for male readers. Violence, realism and fast-paced action and an attention to historical detail has made authors like Bernard Cornwell, Conn Igguldon and others, must-reads for this growing readership. New Zealand’s recent historical fiction serves a largely female audience and books like Jenny Pattrick’s Denniston Trilogy and Maxine Alterio’s Ribbons of Grace have attracted the sort of following their attention to detail and taut narrative deserve. New writers are appearing, and I read them. Some are good. Some seem blighted with the ‘New Zealand Novel’ tag: dour, introspective, bowed down under the weight of ethnic guilt and filled with cloying adherence to the methodology of the past. I want to write for men: stories that tell the nitty-gritty of wartime violence, of the thinking of men in conflict and of tough, flawed people in tough, no-win situations. For this, I want to introduce you to a tall, former member of the 17th lancers who as a 18 year-old charged in the front rank of the Light Brigade at Balaklava. Discharged from his regiment and dispatched on a boat to America by an embarrassed army leadership covering up certain events in the charge, he blundered across the worst excesses of lynch law in Nevada City, emigrated to Victoria where his tangles with the law and desperadoes worsened until he washed up in New Zealand. Encounters with bush-rangers, dishonest officials and his own inner demons all changed when a chance meeting with a crusading Otago judge saw him reluctantly begin afresh as a goldfields policeman. This is Alexander Nelson, the elderly man who narrates the story of his life and times, sitting in his judicial offices in the law courts of Dunedin in 1907.