Expatriates

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32880, 1 April 1972, Page 10

Expatriates

The Fly Away People. By Norman Harris. Baynard-Hilller. 180 pp. "The Fly Away People” is a book written out of a very good idea—its sub-title, “A Portrait Gallery of outstanding expatriate New Zealanders,” conveys it succinctly—but not a very good book. For though it deals with a number of very interesting people, such as Garfield Todd, Sir Ronald Syme, John Hutton, John Platts-Mills, and Sir Alexander Ross, it never takes up deep enough into their personalities to provide a fully developed sense of who they are and why, or, indeed, of why they are expatriate. The average length of each portrait (there are 14 of them) is some 10 pages. None is longer than 15. In this narrow compass, Norman Harris can do little more than provide a potted biography and then recount parts of interviews he has had with the expatriates and those who know them. It simply is not enough to enable us to "get inside” the more complex personalities he talks about.

If One of “The Fly Away People’s” major deficiencies is the superficiality of some of its potentially significant portraits, another is the uninteresting nature of some of the other New Zealanders included in it. Bob Charles is a very fine golfer, and Chris Amon likewise a good racing driver, but they do not emerge from this book as people about whom there is much to tell. The same is true of Squadron Leader Raynham Hanna and, dare it be said, of Nyree Dawn Porter. Either Norman Harris has made some bad choices, or else, he has totally missed the deeper and more significant elements in these people’s personalities. Either way, the result damages the book just as much as the superficiality of some of the other pen pictures. “The Fly Away People 1 ’ could have been a highly interesting book. In fact, it is a collection of rather facile portraits which leave one with that most damaging of feelings—that the book has told us nothing we did not already know.