The great unread New Zealand novel: David Ballantyne’s Sydney Bridge Upside Down

Abstract

David Ballantyne’s novel The Cunninghams (1948) was deemed upon publication to be a “masterly study of working-class family life in a New Zealand town” and it was praised for its “utmost fidelity” to the “minutiae of small-town life”. The novel’s grim tone, Depression-era setting, local referent and critical realism did much to establish Ballantyne as an author with “social interests”, as did his own assertion that a writer is “an investigator of human existence” who “must try to understand the way in which average people live out their time”. Ballantyne was one of several new writers deemed to be the “sons” of Frank Sargeson, capable of developing the line of realism established by the latter’s short stories that appeared between 1935 and 1945. Yet, in spite of his early promise, Ballantyne’s career as a fiction writer failed to take off, partly because of a long period of alcoholism, and partly because of the direction he took in his subsequent fiction. If his first novel answered literary nationalism’s need for an authentic depiction of local life, then Sydney Bridge Upside Down (1968), with its gestures towards the non-realist modes of fairy tale and gothic, was almost guaranteed to remain outside the body of writing understood to constitute “New Zealand literature”. Yet, by combining aspects of realist with non-realist modes, the novel creates a mythologized version of New Zealand society in which threats associated with sexuality take on nightmarish, almost elemental forms that are far more effective in terms of representing the ways in which New Zealand society can damage the individual than social realism.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in New Zealand, writers worked across a range of genres and modes, including non-realist forms such as romance, science fiction, gothic, and utopian fantasy. ¹ However, with the emergence during the 1930s of a new generation of writers devoted to the creation of a national literature, non-realist forms became increasingly rare as realism was championed as the most appropriate mode for representing the specificities of local life. Realism has played such a significant role in the development of a body of work recognized as “New Zealand literature” that Lydia Wevers argues, “We don’t have a popular literature. We have no thrillers, almost no detective fiction and no adventure fiction. There are no romances to speak of, […] very little comic writing, and almost no gothic” (2004: 116).

The historical privileging of the realist mode in New Zealand’s literary culture is particularly visible in the career of David Ballantyne, who belongs to a distinctive generation of writers coming of age in the early post-Second World War period in the midst of the literary nationalism established by writers such as Allen Curnow, Denis Glover, and Frank Sargeson. Ballantyne was one of several writers including Maurice Duggan, A. P. Gaskell, G. R. Gilbert, and John Reece Cole deemed to be the “sons” of Sargeson (Sargeson, 1983a: 60) capable of developing the realism that defines his early short stories. Ballantyne’s first novel The Cunninghams (1948) was described by E. H. McCormick as a “masterly study of working-class family life in a New Zealand town” and was praised for its “utmost fidelity” to the “minutiae of small-town life” (1959: 157). The novel’s grim realism, Depression-era setting and local referent did much to establish Ballantyne as an author with “social interests” (1959: 158), as did his own assertion that a writer is “an investigator of human existence” who “must try to understand the way in which average people live out their time” (quoted in Reid, 2004: 106). Yet in spite of Ballantyne’s early promise as a writer capable of continuing Sargesonian-style realism, his career as a fiction writer failed to take off, partly because of a decade-long period of alcoholism, and partly because of the direction he took in his subsequent fiction. If his first novel answered the need of literary nationalism to represent a vision of local life deemed authentic, with Sargeson describing his protégé’s characters as “remarkably true to life and the times” (Sargeson, 1945), then the dizzying array of non-realist modes mixed with aspects of social realism in Sydney Bridge Upside Down (1968) problematized its inclusion in the canon, so much so that it has been called by Patrick Evans “the great, and unread” New Zealand novel (quoted in De Goldi, 2010: x).

Although Janet Frame’s non-realist fiction has been critically well received (as has the work emerging since the 1970s by writers such as Maurice Duggan, Keri Hulme, and Ian Wedde), the decades between the 1930s and the 1960s were defined by what might be termed “the rhetoric of the real”. In 1949, Sargeson argued that one of the characteristics of good writing is that it is “truthful above all things” (1983b: 25) and he commended Dan Davin’s Roads from Home (1949) for the fact that “something very like New Zealand is to be found in astonishing abundance inside the covers of this novel” (1983c: 37). In a talk delivered at the 1951 New Zealand Writer’s Conference and then published in The Press, H. Winston Rhodes declared, “The job of the New Zealand writer is to reveal New Zealand to New Zealanders” (quoted in Murray, 1994: 124). At the same conference, and in an essay developed from his talk, Robert Chapman argued that writers should utilize realism of such accuracy that a genuine vision of society and its problems might be revealed to the reader (1953: 26–58). In 1952, Bill Pearson insisted “we need an art to expose ourselves to ourselves, see ourselves in a perspective of place and time” (1974: 12), and throughout the 1950s and 1960s he was to repeatedly discuss fiction in light of its ability to convey something authentic about New Zealand, criticizing stories and novels that “don’t seem to add up to a recreation of New Zealand” and that fail to “convey the ‘feel’ of New Zealand” (1974: 45; 40).

For Allen Curnow, whose introductions to A Book of New Zealand Verse 1923-45 (1945) and The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1960) are important articulations of the concerns facing New Zealand writers associated with the cultural nationalism of the mid-twentieth century, the large body of writing produced prior to the 1930s did not cohere into a national literature because literary traditions appropriate to Britain were ill-suited to the specificities of local life. Echoing similar sentiments expressed in settler societies such as Australia, Canada, and South Africa, Curnow dismissed what was essentially Victorian romance “indigenized” through the addition of native flora and fauna, and championed those writers who accept “the disciplines of uncompromising fidelity to experience, of an unqualified responsibility to the truths of themselves, in this place, at that time” (1987: 200). The question of how to best express the truth of colonial experience was dealt with as early as 1883 by Olive Schreiner in the preface to her novel The Story of an African Farm, which elucidates a non-idealized realist aesthetic as most appropriate for the colonial frontier. Sargeson gave several radio talks on Schreiner’s novel in 1956, and similarly influential was the realist model provided by American writers, particularly Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson, since, according to Ian Milner, if New Zealanders “are looking for similarities of social atmosphere and temper we are more likely to find them in Hemingway and some of the younger American novelists than among contemporary English writers” (1936: 10). Although many literary forms ultimately derive from the European tradition, realism was generally deemed to be the most suitable for expressing the truth of local realities in settler societies such as South Africa, the United States, and New Zealand. After all, in order to speak truthfully, what better mode than that which attempts “a full and authentic report of human experience”? (Watt, 1957: 32).

The realism employed by Sargeson and John Mulgan saw them commended for being “among the first who, as New Zealanders, accepted the disciplines of uncompromising fidelity to experience, of an unqualified responsibility to the truths of themselves, in this place, at that time” (Curnow, 1987: 200). In Sargeson’s early stories, which appeared from 1935 in Tomorrow and which “made him seem supremely the realist writer, the recorder of rough, down-to-earth, monosyllabic Kiwi verities” (Stead: 2002: 49), he performed a similar function for New Zealand literature to that of Mark Twain and Henry Lawson respectively for American and Australian literatures: “he had given us back our own speech, putting an end to the colonial phase during which literature could only prove a serious intent by imitating the language of the imperial and metropolitan centre” (2002: 57–8). Similarly, when Mulgan’s terse Hemingway-esque novel Man Alone appeared in 1939, its author was lauded for his concern “to show things as they really are” and for his “authentic” depiction of the “New Zealand scene” (Bertram, 1985: 39). James Bertram’s conclusion upon reading what has been described as “New Zealand’s first great novel” (Phillips, 1996: 256) was that “Here, at any rate, is one novel that tells the truth about New Zealand” (1985: 42).

The influence of the writers associated with literary nationalism was so pervasive that in 1976, Cherry Hankin noted that “The constant struggle of the writer to come to terms with his society has caused social realism to figure prominently” in New Zealand literature produced since the 1930s, while “the concomitant struggle of the individual to come to terms with himself has given rise […] to some compelling psychological realism” (1976: viii). Realism, in its variety of guises, whether social, critical, or psychological, has been a significant mode in the development of a body of work recognizable as New Zealand literature and it is only relatively recently that writers have begun to react to this by producing experimental art that questions the version of reality represented by mimetic art. The metafictions produced by contemporary writers such as Charlotte Randall and Mike Johnson are currently an important and growing part of New Zealand literature, but writing produced in earlier decades that displays influence from modes other than realism did not always fare so well. Michael Henderson’s experimental novel The Log of a Superfluous Son (1975) utilizes a variety of prose techniques associated with postmodern fiction rather than traditional realism, a deviation that one reviewer seems ill-equipped to deal with. For L. D. Stayte, the “cluster of techniques” employed by Henderson — “bare speech, flashback of several kinds, character and writer monologue, dream sequences, stacked ‘verbatim’ reports from papers and radio and straight narrative” (1975: 469) — obscures the narrative’s truth since “with his stylized rather than realistic representation of someone’s thoughts Henderson is throwing us off the scent of more sensitive areas of the hero” (1975: 471). M. K. Joseph’s war novel I’ll Soldier No More (1958) earned praise for its presentation of “a vivid picture of army life in something the same way as a documentary film might” (Dalziel, 1958: 283) and the local settings of his A Pound of Saffron (1962) drew praise for being “done with a sharp evocative perception” (Scott, 1962: 306), but the “authentic experience” (Dalziel, 1958: 283) of Joseph’s war novel and the “entirely credible” (Scott, 1962: 307) nature of A Pound of Saffron were nowhere to be found in his 1967 science fiction The Hole in the Zero. H. Winston Rhodes deemed this foray into space travel and alien life forms to be appealing only to a “simple-minded reader” who might be entertained by its speculative fantasy, or to a philosopher who might be intrigued by its dramatization of abstract problems. Like Stayte, Rhodes interprets modes other than realism as a hindrance to a story’s truth, suggesting that the “philosophic science fiction novel becomes suspect as a rendering of human situation when it enters too far into the rarefied atmosphere of myth and allegory with little relation to common experience” (1968: 52). G. R. Gilbert’s allegorical novella Glass-Sharp and Poisonous (1952) was so abstract that it baffled reviewer Blackwood Paul, who observed that if the key to the work is what the blurb describes as “the warning that those who persist in wearing the rose-coloured spectacles of illusion are preparing their own destruction, and that all life is a struggle from illusion towards reality”, then “although there is much about illusion, there is little about reality or the fusion of the two” (Paul, 1952: 247).

Critics appear to have been similarly ill-prepared to respond to Sydney Bridge Upside Down, which received just two reviews on its publication, ² one of which consists mainly of questions. Writing in the New Zealand Listener in April 1969, Dennis McEldowney wonders, “Would such an affectionate outgoing boy […]? Even if […]? Or is one not to take all his reminiscences at face value; is the line between realism and romance not to be drawn precisely where he seems to draw it? And if so?”. The only conclusion McEldowney is able to come to is that “Such questions will have to be discussed by a critic not primarily concerned with readers who do not know the book” (quoted in Reid, 2004: 166). In 1979, C. K. Stead noted that Ballantyne’s work had not been reviewed in Landfall since 1966, nor had it ever been noticed in Islands, meaning it was largely absent from two key New Zealand literary journals. Stead (1979) also pointed out that Ballantyne was not one of the novelists featured in Cherry Hankin’s edited collection, Essays on the New Zealand Novel (1976), and there was no book planned for him in James Bertram’s edited series, New Zealand Writers and Their Work.

Although Sydney Bridge Upside Down was certainly largely ignored upon its publication, it has since been republished twice — first in a Longman Paul edition in 1981 and again in 2010 by Text Press — suggesting a “return” that is symptomatic of a literary culture unable to fully recognize the place and meaning of particular works as they emerge. The 1981 re-issue occurred as part of a larger discussion associated with the reprinting of a number of R. H. Morrieson’s novels from the 1960s, which involved the same narrative of the undeserved neglect of local talent. The championing of Ballantyne’s and Morrieson’s work, which are both marked by modes associated with popular fiction, suggests a new form of cultural nationalism attempting to articulate the absence of an agreed critical–historical narrative capable of recognizing the value of texts upon publication. Since then, through the appearances of various publications, including literary histories such as The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature (Evans, 1990) and The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English (Sturm, 1991), as well as Mark Williams’s Leaving the Highway: Six Contemporary New Zealand Novelists (1990), which explores the methods through which writers such as Frame and Maurice Gee extend the version of reality represented by literary realism, some sort of consensus might be agreed to exist, at least for the area into which Ballantyne’s work “fits”. ³

Hamish Clayton describes Sydney Bridge Upside Down as registering a move away from realism to “more boldly mythologise the local than anyone had before attempted” (2012: n.p.), ⁴ but it is important to point out that other writers associated with Ballantyne’s generation were similarly suspicious of Sargesonian realism and expressed it far earlier than 1968 through various attempts to mythologize the local, such as Gilbert’s Glass-Sharp and Poisonous (1952), Frame’s Owls Do Cry (1957) and Morrieson’s The Scarecrow (1963). The desire to turn away from realism through differing means, including allegory, impressionism, and gothicism, is precisely what unites the “sons and daughters” of Sargeson as a distinctive tradition. Furthermore, Sargeson himself abandoned the style of his early realist stories, with I for One (1954) representing such a departure from his previous work that one reviewer claimed that “it hardly seems to be the ‘real Sargeson’ at all” (Stockwell, 1957: 76). Like Ballantyne, these writers all explored non-realist modes better suited to rendering their experience of the postwar world; what makes Sydney Bridge Upside Down distinctive is that it combines so many non-realist modes simultaneously while maintaining elements of social realism. By combining details that conform to the social realist norm with aspects of fairytale, gothic, comedy, and thriller, the novel creates a version of New Zealand life that is both recognizably real and mythologized. The effect of this genre-mixing is a reading experience that encompasses social critique, whimsy, dread, humour, and excitement. Ballantyne might not have been the first or only New Zealand writer to use non-realist modes in an attempt to mythologize the local, but given the fact that Sydney Bridge Upside Down has been published by three separate publishers, he might very well be one of the most successful.

Told from the limited first-person perspective of the young Harry Baird, Sydney Bridge Upside Down takes place over the course of a summer during which Harry’s mother is out of town and his older, attractive and much more experienced cousin Caroline comes to stay. Harry’s blossoming sexuality and his mother’s prolonged absence provoke increasing anxiety for a boy who has suffered from depression and violent urges in the past, and the novel culminates in a series of murders that are attributable to the narrator. Harry seemingly not only disposes of the butcher who has designs on Caroline, but also lures his young neighbour to her death in the deserted slaughterhouse. Clayton describes the “gothic menace” of the novel as “subdued, elusive and sophisticated”, with the sense of terror evoked in the novel’s opening “expertly held” (2012: n.p.), yet the anxiety provoked by the novel’s gothic elements is also accompanied by mirth, such as in a section that represents Harry’s nightmares about the local slaughterhouse:

Or say he sees a battle between an angry animal and some killers armed with all sorts of weapons, because this is the room they keep for the animals that won’t give in even after they have been bashed with sledgehammers and stabbed with knives, where any animal that won’t give in is taught a real lesson, by the time it has been shot at and slashed and whacked in here it wishes it had given in quickly like the other animals, no animal has a chance in here, this is where it must end. Or say he sees something sweet, like the men who are not strong enough to be killers making sausages, long strings of them, hanging them round their necks, making skirts of them, turning them into fancy costumes, dancing and singing in this special part of the killing-floor, maybe the only happy ones in the place. (Ballantyne, 2010: 100–1) ⁵

In their correspondence, Sargeson describes Ballantyne’s idea of “using the meat works as a kind of Mrs Radcliffe’s castle” as “brilliant”, to which Ballantyne responded by explaining that the novel was meant as “a Gothic joke” (quoted in Reid, 2004: 165). This melding of gothic and comedy was noted in a review by Geoff Lee Martin in the New Zealand Herald, which observes that Sydney Bridge Upside Down is “a macabre novel in the Gothic sense, but David Ballantyne’s lightness of touch and his casual humour raise it to the level of a sort of Gothic farce” (quoted in Reid, 2004: 167).

Yet in spite of these observations, the “Gothic joke” of Sydney Bridge Upside Down is generally neglected by critics in favour of the realism associated with Ballantyne’s role as a “son of Sargeson”. The novel’s narrator is a young boy growing up in a provincial society who responds to familial discord with acts of violence, an identical focus to novels such as Ian Cross’s The God Boy (1957) that take a critical stance exploring the “danger of growing up puritan” (Jones, 1991: 150), generally in the realist mode. Ballantyne’s text is certainly part of the trend in the middle decades of the twentieth century in New Zealand to pit the individual against society, frequently through using parents as representatives of social values that their child is alienated from, but it does this via non-realist as well as realist modes. Furthermore, novels such as The God Boy commonly make use of a narrative perspective limited to the knowledge and understanding of a child in order to criticize the values associated with their parents and society at large, whereas Ballantyne utilizes an older, more experienced and, importantly, unreliable narrator who represents the events of his childhood through a limited perspective he no longer shares. The first person narrative voice is that of a mature Harry Baird essentially manipulating the limited perspective of his younger self, which allows him to skip over and omit events in an often confusing and troubling fashion. Veering between social critique, horror and mirth, and unable to fully trust Harry’s representation of events, the reader of Sydney Bridge Upside Down is profoundly destabilized.

An additional complication to the novel’s critical reception arises through the way it mixes social critique and comedic gothic with something approaching folkloric fantasy. The novel’s opening is deemed by Stead to be “impeccable”, with the prose “economically tailored to the limits of the statement made”, but the simple announcement that there will be “terrible happenings” (1), signalling realism (which Stead points out “is as far as Ballantyne’s critics have looked”), is accompanied by “a suggestion of fairy tale” (2002: 256). The novel’s first sentence is “There was an old man who lived on the edge of the world, and he had a horse called Sydney Bridge Upside Down” (1), a clear echo of the opening lines of Grimm’s fairy tales such as “The Golden Goose”, which begins with “There was an old man who had three sons” and “The Old Man and his Grandson”, which starts with “There was once a very old man, whose eyes had become dim”. Exactly what genre Sydney Bridge Upside Down belongs to is unclear, leading Kate De Goldi to describe it as “a coming-of-age story, a gothic anti-romance, a ruined-pastoral thriller, a family tragedy”. Variously assessed as “proletarian fiction, young adult fiction, post-provincial fiction”, it is, De Goldi concludes, “all those things” (2010: ix).

The novel’s setting is a key site in which the realist mode meets the mythical. Calliope Bay is a fictionalized version of Hicks Bay, an isolated town on the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand. The main features of the settlement are the wharf and the derelict freezing works, both built to take advantage of technological advances enabling meat to be refrigerated and transported to Britain. The building of the Hicks Bay freezing works in 1920 created employment for many locals who were required to supply the wood that the work’s boilers were fired by, but when the Hicks Bay wharf opened in 1925 it allowed easy delivery of freight via ship and the works became coal fired. Employment had also been created by the necessity of all goods being taken by horse and dray to a surf boat which then transported them to ships in the bay, but the construction of the wharf allowed this to be mechanized by a small locomotive running from the works directly to the steamer. Thus the promise of a “boom town” built on the products of New Zealand’s agricultural plenty did not eventuate. Developments in technology meant fewer employment opportunities, and because road access to the area was so primitive, stock arrived at the works by foot, often in poor condition. Eventually the supply of suitable livestock was so inadequate that the freezing works was forced to close in 1926.

The novel’s setting thus undercuts representations of New Zealand as a pastoral paradise that originated in the propaganda of the New Zealand Company aimed at persuading nineteenth-century Britons to leave their homes for the colony, and that then found expression in fictional and non-fictional representations in which concepts of New Zealand were based primarily upon representations of “a limited number of locations and specific subjects, especially mountains, lakes, glaciers, fiords and forests (or ‘bush’), presented as ‘beautiful’” (Gibbons, 2002: 10). Exhortations such as that made in the Labourers’ Union Chronicle in 1873 — “Not a farm labourer in England but should rush from the old doomed country to such a paradise as New Zealand — A GOOD LAND […] A LAND OF OIL, OLIVES AND HONEY; — A LAND WHERE IN THOU MAY’ST EAT BREAD WITHOUT SCARCENESS […] Away, then, farm labourers, away! New Zealand is the promised land for you” (1873: 1) — developed into representations of New Zealand exemplified by the following passage from Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872):

The beauty of the scene cannot be conveyed in language. The one side of the evening valley was blue with evening shadow, through which loomed forest and precipice, hillside and mountain top; and the other was still brilliant with the sunset gold. The wide and wasteful river with its ceaseless rushing — the beautiful water — birds, too, which abounded upon the islets and were so tame that we could come close up to them — the ineffable purity of the air — the solemn peacefulness of the untrodden region — could there be a more delightful and stimulating combination? (1927: 16)

The Utopianism prevalent in much of New Zealand’s colonial writing figured the land “as the raw material for the creation of a Pastoral Paradise that would be a paying proposition” (Jones, 1991: 117), but in Sydney Bridge Upside Down the freezing works has long been closed and is in a dangerous state of disrepair. Harry highlights the depressed state of his hometown when he notes that his house is one of five houses left “out of all the houses from the old days, the days when the works had plenty of jobs and there were plenty of men to take them” (34). The result of the town’s economic failure is isolation; it is “on the edge of the world” (1), and Mrs Kelly reveals that what troubled people most when they first came to Calliope Bay was loneliness because “They seemed so far, far away from everything. No part of the country, of the world even, seems so faraway as this” (10). Calliope Bay is so much on the edge of the world that Harry’s teacher Mr Dalloway insists that “it’s a wonder we don’t fall off” (12).

Ballantyne’s representation of Calliope Bay involves more than a corrective of New Zealand as an economically successful pastoral paradise since the freezing works also acts as a local version of a haunted gothic castle. Harry muses on his father’s description of the works when it was operational:

Dad said there was seldom much noise on the ground floor because the animals didn’t know what they were in for when they arrived, and by the time they were downstairs again they were carcasses, ready for the cold chambers that are now like spooky dungeons. Up on the other floors, the killing-floors, was where you heard the squealing and groaning, where you saw the pools of blood. Even now, when you walk across those concrete floors, you can imagine stains, and some days on the top floor I’ve heard squeals and groans below me and I’ve thought it is not the wind I can hear. (94–5)

The furnace-house is also figured as a dungeon, with Harry noting that in order to enter it, “you drop through a hole in the top, down to the black bricks on the floor, and unless you have dangled a rope there is no way of getting out”. This dungeon is so effective that if trapped without a rope, “it wouldn’t be much use shouting for help because the brick walls are so thick and the hole at the top is so small. You could die in there” (95). When Harry abandons his friend Dibs inside the furnace-house, the young boy describes his experience as “awful” (96). It was “chilly and quiet and creepy in there” and Dibs “had the feeling he was buried, he said he had felt like shouting but when he tried to shout nothing happened because his voice seemed to have dried up, he said he would never go in there again” (96).

The abandoned freezing works is a site of trauma, violent death, live burial and haunting, which Harry’s nightmares repeatedly incorporate:

Then far away a small sound then I hear the hooves and I am running again and the noise of the hooves is louder Sydney Bridge Upside Down must be near the furnace-house now galloping closer while I try to reach the next floor and suddenly I am there I am lying on the floor face in a stain fingers scratching the cement dust choking still hearing the hooves (And this, dear Caroline, is the killing-floor with the interesting room. It must have been the room where they did special things, because it has an iron door with large bolts, strong enough to keep out anybody while they did the cutting-up. It also has a peep-hole. I found it one day. Well, why make a peep-hole unless what went on in the room was something special? You can imagine all the big killers busy with their knives and sledgehammers, then one of them looks at the others and says he wonders what is happening in the special room today, and how about he takes a peep, and the others tell him to go ahead but to be careful because it’s against the rules to peep, so he strolls over very carefully, makes sure nobody in charge is looking, then he reaches up like this and takes out this brick, then he reaches in like this and takes out another brick — and there! He can look into the room. What does he see? Say he sees a body stretched on a table and a man with a knife bending over it, making fancy twirls with the knife before he sticks it into the body, you can hear him humming as he twirls the knife, chuckling as he sticks it in. (99–100)

The lack of punctuation in this passage creates a sense of feverish excitement appropriate to Harry’s disturbed state of mind, which is further demonstrated through the images of pursuit, imprisonment, and violent torture. Particularly disturbing is the way that Harry’s panic at being pursued develops into voyeuristic pleasure, with the oddly coy tone of the description of the peephole suggesting his titillation at the sight of a body being stabbed with a knife. Furthermore, the use of the word “body” rather than “carcass” suggests that Harry’s fantasy might have more to do with human torture than animal slaughter. The slaughterhouse may highlight fractures in the pastoral paradise vision of New Zealand, both by exposing the failure to successfully exploit the land for economic gain, and by emphasizing the cruelty that underpins agriculture, but Harry’s experience of it is registered in gothic rather than realist terms. For him, the works is a place of fear and fascination, where violence occurs that is increasingly associated with sexuality as well as with death.

Harry’s mother has left town, supposedly for a holiday in the city, but there are increasing intimations that her trip and that of Mr Dalloway (whose name recalls the unhappily married protagonist of Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway) are connected. Near the end of the novel, a letter finally arrives that announces her intention to abandon the family for Harry’s teacher. Harry is only dimly aware of the nature of his mother’s dissatisfactions, but the fact that his father has only one leg calls out for phallic interpretation. Harry’s father is domestically minded, making supper and doing chores, and his apparent lack of virility is contrasted with the traditionally masculine butcher, Mr Wiggins, who had been “at the works in the old days, one of the powerful fellows who killed animals with sledgehammers” (15). He is described by Harry’s father as a “lady’s man” (42) and is spotted out driving with Mrs Kelly and the young Susan Prosser, leading Harry to muse that “Mr Wiggins certainly must have something”, to which his younger brother Cal replies, “good sausages” (28). When Harry’s cousin Caroline arrives for a vacation, his awareness of sexuality increases until finally he witnesses Caroline having sex with her boyfriend in the freezing works. “They’re no different”, Harry thinks, “The squeals and groans are the same, like the cries of dying animals. Hit by hammers, stabbed” (259). The violent penetrations of slaughter and intercourse are made explicit in Harry’s dream of the horse Sydney Bridge Upside Down and Mr Wiggins in the freezing works: “I watch Mr Wiggins run with a knife to Sydney Bridge Upside Down and stab and slash until blood spouts everywhere. Caroline!” (104).

The novel is particularly concerned with, and ambivalent about, sexuality and repression. Mrs Kelly suggests that “the way Mrs Prosser hides is because she lives in such a faraway place. She is lonely, so she holds back. Even the rest of us, popping into one another’s homes and chatting, can see and hear only so much. I know I hold back when I go visiting. I know the others do too” (10–1). Harry similarly “holds back” when he discovers himself sexually aroused at the thought of being caught naked by an unexpected visitor: “I got so excited I couldn’t do anything for a while, not until I’d made myself think of the river on a cold day” (8). When Caroline kisses Harry, he deems it “pretty good” but wants to “sit up or twist away” before Caroline notices his erection. When she laughs and refers to “Harry’s naughty dingdong”, he does what he usually does when this happens; “thought of the river on a cold day” (80). Harry explains that, “much as I liked what Caroline said, it did make me feel trembly, as if I was doing wrong” (80). At Mrs Kelly’s picnic, Caroline’s habit of sitting with her legs open is apparently censured. Harry and Dibs discuss the fact that they both know Caroline is wearing her swimsuit from the way she sits and Dibs notes that “she’ll be changing her way of sitting after this” (81). When Harry asks why, Dibs replies, “Because Mum’s noticed, and I bet that’s what she’s telling her about now […] Mum notices that kind of thing, she’s always telling my sisters not to show their bloomers. And another thing — she reckons Caroline wears too much lipstick” (81–2).

Caroline’s sexuality is active and on display, leading to Mrs Kelly’s attempts to rein it in, and Mr Wiggins’s to exploit it. Mrs Kelly provides a cautionary tale addressed to the adults at the picnic, but overheard by Harry, about a young woman called Tilly who discovers her flatmate “joined to a young man on the lounge rug and was thereupon invited by the young man to await her turn” (89). Tilly locks herself in the bedroom, only to be tormented by heavy blows upon the door by the threatening visitor, and is forced to flee down the fire-escape. Tilly’s trials continue when she discovers that the seemingly motherly landlady of the boarding-house she moves into is actually far from respectable. Mrs Kelly explains, “I don’t suppose the landlady was unmotherly, more that her depravity did not show — extraordinary visitors — drawn curtains — furtive footsteps and creaking doors at all hours — terrifying for poor Tilly — nobody to turn to — ” (89–90). This critique of sexual behaviour becomes explicitly gothic when Mrs Kelly likens the decadence of city life to “walking from sunshine into a dark cobwebby room — brush them off but they keep clinging” (91). Remembering Tilly, Mrs Kelly is reminded of

old tales about pure maidens pursued by black-hearted rascals, usually a castle, bats flapping in corridors, weird happenings at midnight. No telling if anybody will arrive to help the heroine escape. Indeed, I believe Tilly did have an employer who pursued her one day in and out of offices, around desks and filing cabinets, very much in the old manner. Of course, we have no castles, and such things as black magic and mad monks are scarcely commonplace nowadays — our terrors are different. (92)

Mrs Kelly’s speech highlights the difficulty of transplanting “old tales” to an environment devoid of the trappings traditionally associated with genres such as gothic and fairy tales. It also suggests that such tales are outmoded since they do not express the terrors associated with modern life, but as the narrative amply demonstrates, there are certain fears that remain constant.

For Harry, the threats associated with sexuality are potent and he becomes obsessed with shielding the flirtatious Caroline from the “black-hearted rascals” who pose a similar threat as the anonymous young man and the employer did to Tilly. As Harry listens to Mrs Kelly’s gothic tale of sexual predation, he observes Caroline riding Sydney Bridge Upside Down along the beach, and then spots Mr Wiggins’s van move past the horse’s owner Sam Phelps “and move on till it was near that dune where Caroline and Sydney Bridge Upside Down were. I saw Mr Wiggins leave the van and cross to the bottom of the dune. I saw him looking up at Caroline” (93). The chapter following this incident is Harry’s nightmare of Mr Wiggins stabbing Sydney Bridge Upside Down in the slaughterhouse, which causes the boy to call out “Caroline!” (104).

As suggested by the novel’s title, the horse Sydney Bridge Upside Down provides a key motif in the text. Harry begins his narrative with the “old man who lived on the edge of the world”, whose horse is “a slow-moving bag of bones”, noting that “I start with this man and his horse because they were there for all the terrible happenings up the coast that summer, always somewhere around” (1). When the horse is present, it is usually associated with Caroline, who enjoys riding in the wagon it pulls and who is even allowed to ride the horse itself, a special allowance made to her by Sam Phelps. Yet Sydney Bridge Upside Down is not just a potential victim of violence, as suggested by Mr Wiggins’s dream attack and his association with Caroline; the horse is also figured as a haunting threat. Harry is pursued in his nightmares by the horse, whose frailty and age in reality is transformed in dreams to inescapable speed and looming size. When Harry begins to commit the acts of violence he feels are necessary to protect Caroline and himself, he notices the horse’s eyes looking at him “sadly and knowingly”, concluding that “He must recognise me” (132). The horse’s eyes make Harry “nervous” (133) and, as his crimes escalate, the threat posed by Sydney Bridge Upside Down increases. Harry is convinced that the horse is

waiting up there on the hill for me, the way Sam Phelps waits on the road outside our house, staring at our front door, staring at the curtains while I stare back at him, not speaking, not moving, just staring […] Sam Phelps watches me in the day, his horse watches me in the night. (223)

Harry “can imagine Sam Phelps along there on the road, staring, waiting, or doing now what his horse is doing — coming to find me. They are moving towards me out there in the dark” (228). As Harry grows increasingly disturbed after luring Susan Prosser to her death in the slaughterhouse, he screams at the swamp and

Sam Phelps screams back. He screams that he is on his way, he is coming for me, he is right behind me, he will lift me onto his horse and carry me off to the sea. You will never escape, he screams. You will never catch me, I scream back. I am too strong for you, I scream. (239)

The question here is why a creature so associated with Caroline, whom Harry professes to love and want to protect, should become so threatening. The answer is twofold: first, Sydney Bridge Upside Down is responsible for hauling the freight wagon along the line between the wharf and the works, and is thus associated with the transportation of slaughtered animals, which explains why the sight of Caroline riding the horse as Mr Wiggins moves nearer to her is so disturbing for Harry since this aligns her with the animals he killed in the works; and second, Caroline herself poses a threat to Harry, although he cannot consciously articulate it. The sexual encounters that Caroline initiates with her younger cousin seem to be welcomed by him consciously, but in dreams Harry expresses unwillingness by asking,

What do you want me to do? Do you want to grab my hand and do what you did when we were running the other morning? You know, when you held it down there between your legs and wouldn’t let me take it away. I can’t, dear Caroline, I can’t, I can’t. (104)

Here, Caroline is figured not as a potential victim of sexual violence but as a perpetrator of it. Thus, although the novel seems to critique repression through Mrs Kelly’s rather petty attempts to hide bloomers and ban lipstick, the fact that Harry is rendered insane largely through his sexual experiences suggests that female sexuality is a danger if not reined in.

Caroline’s arrival in Calliope Bay effectively means she is a replacement of sorts for Harry’s absent mother, who is similarly unchaste. Just as Caroline is seemingly involved with a range of men, including her cousin, a sailor on the boat that brings her to Calliope Bay, and her more steady beau Buster, it is suggested that Harry’s mother’s infidelity with the schoolteacher is not her only dalliance. Harry remembers a previous visit to the city with his family, which ended with him and his father returning home alone. Harry overhears his father wondering, “talking to something out there in the awful night”, “Why didn’t she come? Why does she do it?” (229). Harry later overhears his father talking with his friends and the word “bitch” is used. Although Harry does not explicitly acknowledge that this pejorative refers to his absent mother, the fact that he repeats over and over to himself as he falls asleep the phrase “bitch bitch bitch” (231) suggests a subconscious recognition. The connections between Caroline and Harry’s mother explain why the text frequently registers sympathy for the attractive, politely spoken, and sexually uninhibited young woman, while also figuring her in terms that are disquieting, if not misogynistic. When Harry finally witnesses sexual intercourse, it is between Caroline and Buster, and it occurs in a voyeuristic manner as the young boy uses a peephole in the slaughterhouse to observe the pair “like one animal wriggling and sweating on the rug” (257). Harry’s view not only recalls the Shakespearean idea of sexual intercourse as the “beast with two backs” (Shakespeare, 1989/1604: 10), but also his nightmare about the peephole, thus equating Buster with the knife-wielding man and Caroline with what is described only as a “body”. Caroline is shown in a series of fragmented views, first of her legs waving, then her face with her tongue “out and going from one side of her mouth to the other” (257), then her fingers scratching Buster’s back. Harry admits to imagining Caroline “lying still and soft” during the sexual act, “not kicking, not scratching, not yelling” as she does in reality, and he is even more shocked to witness his cousin initiate intercourse with Buster behind her as she crouches on her hands and knees. Caroline’s sexuality is thus figured as bestial rather than natural, rendering her a gothic monstrosity to a young boy who cannot deal with his mother’s betrayal. As Harry’s father suggests, “it had been a disturbing time and I might be affected in ways I was not myself aware of, deep-down ways that only showed themselves in nightmares” (227).

Sydney Bridge Upside Down’s focus on a young boy’s involvement in his parents’ domestic crisis, who narrates those past events only half aware of their implications, aligns it with realist novels such as Cross’s The God Boy, but there is an important element of Ballantyne’s text that marks it out as quite different from Cross’s text. Jimmy Sullivan, the narrator of The God Boy, is profoundly affected by his parents’ hatred for each other and he experiences an array of symptoms (such as plunging his hands into scalding water) that attest to his psychic disarray. Jimmy may act out violently, but as Joan Stevens points out, he is “a normal enough kid” whose reaction to his family situation presents a realistic “case history of juvenile delinquency, and a tragic personal story” (1972: 8). Cross’s narrative is “Recognizably real”, with its details of New Zealand life contributing to the novel’s “recognizable truth” (1972: 11), which is hardly the effect created by Ballantyne’s hallucinatory mix of realist and non-realist modes. Furthermore, although the young narrator of Sydney Bridge Upside Down is initially represented as suffering from psychological disturbance, admitting that “Off and on, maybe twice a year, I had black times; these had gone on for as long as I could remember”, the descriptions of Harry wanting to “bop everybody I saw” and repeating “dirty words over and over to myself” (89) eventually develop into murder, making Ballantyne’s version of the representation of childhood experience that has preoccupied New Zealand writers since Katherine Mansfield closer to a thriller than social critique.

The disturbing effect of Ballantyne’s novel relies in large part on its narrative technique. Cross’s novel similarly employs a first person narrative voice that represents retrospectively with limited perspective, but Ballantyne complicates this strategy by making his narrator unreliable and by calling attention to his textual manipulations. Harry does not tell his story in chronological order, but moves backwards and forwards in time, frequently omitting certain events or rendering some in dream-like imagery that makes it difficult to tell what is real or imaginary. The end of the novel suggests that Harry is an apparently insane serial murderer who is in complete control of the story available to the reader. After opening his tale with Sam Phelps and his horse, Harry makes explicit that “now I go to a cliff-top on a January day, a sunny afternoon, mid-afternoon. I was there with Dibs Kelly” (1). After pushing Dibs off the cliff, Harry then uses another analepsis, noting that “I go back now to the beginning of that day, my brother and myself in pyjamas for breakfast with our father” (3), and the reader never fully learns what happens following Dibs’s fall off the cliff. This technique creates narrative suspense and a disturbing lack of clear causality. When Harry leads Susan Prosser to her death, he makes the reasons for this unclear by starting “with Sam Phelps and Sydney Bridge Upside Down and the body of Susan Prosser, but now I go to our wash-house on the morning of that day. I was there with Caroline” (105). Again, Harry notes that “I go now to the morning of the day before. This, of course, was when Susan Prosser was still alive, still snooping” (112), followed later with, “I go now to the afternoon of the following day. I was back in Caroline’s room” (125). Why does Harry narrate events in this way? Is it simply evidence of the lack of control he has over his own thought processes, or is it a purposeful manipulation of the representation of events?

The final chapters of the novel take place in the city where Harry now lives and where he still searches for his mother. As he walks the street with a friend, he raves to him about the events in his past using the language that Caroline uses in her own attempt at autobiography, which she was engaged with while staying at Calliope Bay. In the section she reads aloud to Harry, she relates an uncle whose speech as a young girl she could not understand: “I’ll mumble mumble you to the big parade, declared Uncle Pember. Mumble mumble he added. I was very little and did not always hear what he said. Mumble mumble is what I often thought he said” (111). The chapter which occurs in Harry’s present in the city begins, “Would you believe me, I ask, if I mumble mumble mumble?” (270). His friend’s response is “No” (270), but Harry continues to tell him things despite his awareness that his friend thinks they are fictions created “because I lived so long in a place where nothing happened […] I make up things, he thinks, so I won’t feel bad about missing all the things that went on in the city while I was a kid” (271). Harry represents the supposedly factual events of his childhood through tropes associated with fiction:

Do you know, I say, that there was a castle near where I lived? There are no castles in this country, he says. Do you know, I say, that I once saved a beautiful short-sighted girl from being captured by a hairy monster? You must have read too many fairy-tales, he says. Do you know, I say, that I slew the hairy monster and a skinny witch? No doubt, he says. Do you know, I say, that I was once the strongest hero, inch for inch and pound for pound, in the world? Of course, he says. (271)

Harry’s repeated question “Would you believe me” (275) and his lapses into “mumble mumble mumble” (276) cast the veracity of the entire narrative in doubt. Whose phrase is “mumble mumble”? Did Harry appropriate it from his cousin’s autobiography? Or did he as narrator gift it to her? The novel’s conclusion denies the reader a closed interpretation, but chillingly suggests Harry’s continuing murders, whether real or imaginary. “Later in the story of my life”, Harry writes, “I will tell what happened when I met Mr Dalloway on the fifteenth floor of a city tower”, which casts Sam Phelps’s earlier comment following Harry’s brother’s near-drowning in an ominous light: “‘It was an accident,’ I said. ‘I didn’t do it.’ ‘There’ll always be accidents with you about,’ he said” (137).

Harry Baird is arguably the most disturbing fictional protagonist in New Zealand literature to date, which is perhaps what makes Sydney Bridge Upside Down special enough for several publishers decades apart to support it, rather than the novels of other writers more obviously belonging to the New Zealand literary mainstream. Furthermore, Ballantyne’s use of non-realist modes creates a mythologized version of local life that is essentially timeless and placeless, hence potentially appealing to readers across a range of cultural contexts. Sydney Bridge Upside Down may not be a bestseller, but this is true of much New Zealand literature; in fact, Janet Frame referred to herself as the country’s greatest unread writer. When Ballantyne’s novel appeared in the late 1960s, it was not, as Patrick Evans points out, an adequate readership that was missing, but “an adequate critical response from those of us whose task it is to nurture the writing of fiction in this country” (1981: 39). The 1981 reissue of Sydney Bridge Upside Down is symptomatic of the lack of an established critical–historical narrative capable of appreciating its place and meaning in the late 1960s. With the development of local literary criticism and the appearance of histories such as The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature (Robinson and Wattie, 1998), which acknowledges Sydney Bridge Upside Down as one of the best local novels about growing up, Ballantyne’s work is recognizable as part of his generation’s attempt to develop New Zealand literature not by continuing the line of realism as established by their “father” Sargeson, but by breaking with it, as so many “sons and daughters” do.