Title: The New Zealand Novel 1860-1965

Author: Joan Stevens

Publication details: Reed Publishing (NZ) Ltd, 1966

Digital publication kindly authorised by: Sylvia Johnston

Part of: New Zealand Texts Collection

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The New Zealand Novel 1860-1965

Recognitions

Recognitions. From its opening sentence, Noel Hilliard's Power of Joy, 1965, brings many delights of recognition. We all of us remember some creek, pool, tree or flaxbush which represented in childhood our escape from the hostile or puzzling world; we remember books which brought merciful oblivion, Chums or Huckleberry Finn. In later life, too, most of us have encountered writers who tried to get on to paper "the moments of vision" which these experiences gave, Dylan Thomas recorded them in "Fern Hill", and Wordsworth in his Ode; They appear in the work of Forrest Reid, and William Golding. It is these elements which we recognise in Power of Joy.

This is not to suggest that Hilliard is imitating; on the contrary, he is presenting a significant experience, shared with others in the context of this time and country; it is in New Zealand that the "moments of vision" have come, and it is in terms of a New Zealand boyhood that he expresses them.

The story is of Paul, a solitary five-year-old, son of a complaining slattern and her on-the-dole husband, in one of the abandoned railway camps of the Depression years. Paul is a "loner". His approach to people alternates with retreat from them, retreat into a private world page 123 he has discovered in the bush. This withdrawal is the problem and the process of his growth. The sense of order and balance in life which he derives from his secret world becomes concentrated in the image of a tree, manuka, puriri, willow, or macrocarpa, something climbable that offers a private lookout over time and space. As he moves to maturity, his secret tree becomes his refuge, symbol of "a natural reality . . . readiness simply to be". Nevertheless, it restricts his full humanity, and not until he can resolve the split between his "spiritual individuality" and the need to be "one of the many" can he move maturely out into the world of work and love.

This choice of a tree symbol is excellent. The trees, river and hills in Power of Joy are as actual and as deeply observed as Hilliard's accurate bush lore can make them, but in addition, the tree is a brilliant image of that "Heaven (which) lies about us in our infancy". William Golding once wrote about his own experience: "There is something about a tree which appeals not to a vestigial instinct but to the most human, if you like the highest, in a child . . . Everything else has been shaped, touched, used and understood, plumbed, by powerful adults. But a tree lifts its fork above them, ramifies in secret. There is in a tree only a yard or two above your head, that which is most precious to a small boy; an unvisited place, never seen before, never touched by the hand of man. This chestnut tree was my escape." Young Paul's "escape", then, is the focal point of a fine novel.

Power of Joy has the structural discipline of its narrow range; trivial but formative incidents acquire resonance as time passes, providing a texture of reality within which moves a very believable boy. The lyric mood is well sustained, and is no aery-faery stuff, but rooted in specific and salty actualities. The prose is modulated skilfully to keep us at the boy's viewpoint, and has many felicities of observation and style. There are weaknesses; the school dance, for instance is only ordinary, and that too-perfect classroom run by Mr Simmons; but these are balanced by the grim conviction of the Stonehurst brutalities. In his next novel perhaps Hilliard will tackle a wider subject; meanwhile, Power of Joy has greatly advanced his reputation.