Back to ‘hulies’ and a risk of ‘dingbats’

Press, 13 February 1982, Page 17

Back to ‘hulies’ and a risk of ‘dingbats’

The Scarecrow. Came a Hot Friday. Both by Ronald Hugh Morrieson. Penguin, 1981. 211 pp and 234 pp. $6.95 each (paperback). (Reviewed by Naylor Hillary) . Morrieson is having a belated rediscovery by his countrymen, too late to help or please the unassuming author from Hawera who died, aged 50. in 1972. But soon enough to remind New Zealanders that fragments of a humorous literary tradition, about a real New Zealand, can still be uncovered. Gordon McLauchlan, in his anthology of New Zealand humorous writing “The Acid Test.” published late last year, described Morrieson as: "the most individual and probably best New Zealand humorous writer”. The two books reviewed here McLauchlan called "darkly hilarious”. The "dark” qualification is necessary. Both ’ tales concern fires, murder, and other dreadful incidents in New Zealand small towns. Readers familiar with the central North Island and its west coast might just about name the towns. Morrieson for most of his life was a music teacher and musician in a dance band in Taranaki. When Angus and Robertson first published these novels in the early 1960 s they were little noticed, perhaps for the very reason which now makes them a delight to read. They deal with familiar New Zealand figures, following familiar New Zealand pastimes. These are not characters who reflect on their remote displacement from Europe and its culture, nor introspective misfits. Morrieson’s people are the psychopaths

next door. They are engrossed in cars, and horse races, and illegal gambling, and drinking and sex. All these they pursue in the clumsy, semi-successful manner of the great majority of New Zealanders, and in the process they speak a splendid slang that seems to have been lost, at least in the cities, in the last generation. Back in the days of six o'clock closing these people go to "hulies,” where they end up “shickered", and risk coming ‘a gutser," or waking up with a dose of “the dingbats.” Then hangovers and remorse bring vows such as: “I’m gonna get myself a coupla nice steady dames arid settle down." There is a dash of Bonnie and Clyde, a touch of the American Deep South, and a sadness never far below the surface. Would a 14-year-old boy today spend his total savings on 28 ham sandwiches in a milk bar to cheer up a 16-year-old girl who has lost her first job? An old man, alone in a sleepless night and aware he is the last Anzac, the last veteran of the First World War left in his village, reflects: “Boyhood can seem a long way off and so can breakfast.” Anzac Day was still a matter of respect when Morrieson wrote. Uncle Athol, in "Scarecrow," is deemed a prize bludger: “Consider a man, who has never been closer to the army than a secondhand overcoat, attending a sacred ceremony

like an Anzac Day parade just for the booze he can get out of it.” Some of Morrieson’s humour comes from a gentle repetition. Throughout "Scarecrow” the sight of more than one bottle of beer is enough to have Charlie Dabney, the undertaker, announce a party and declare, with varying degrees of slurring. “Lights won’t go out all night”. In “Hot Friday" almost every living room has on the wall a picture (which can still be seen in some New Zealand houses) of a black horse and a white horse frightened in a storm. In Mrs Poindexter (“Scarecrow”), Morrieson has a worthy rival to Mrs Malaprop. When the police are investigating a mysterious poultry theft she insists the whole family stay together to make their statements “until the whole shameful business is brought to a satisfactory collusion.” In both books Morrieson has a good story to tell, and he tells it with a refreshing lack of pretension. Even a man in real menial agony has a “soul which shuddered as if its clutch plates were worn." Here is one author who does not need explanation, who writes as though people were responsible for the consequences of their actions, who uses coincidence shamelessly and to good effect, and who lets his gamblers and drinkers stumble along with never a social worker in sight.