Fishing for a policy?

Press, 21 April 1984, Page 20

Fishing for a policy?

The Permit. By Bob Jones. Coffins, 1984. 151 pp. $12.95. (Reviewed by Naylor Hillary) When someone who is trying to break into national politics decides to write a novel, they run the risk of having the work treated more as a political manifesto than as a work of art or an entertainment. Jones’s intention in “The Permit” is unashamedly polemical. His little tale is intended to point a moral about the excesses of bureaucratic regulation. Whether it succeeds will depend on the predilection of the reader, more than on any inherent quality in the book. In spite of an opening quotation from Kafka, this is no New Zealand version of “The Trial.” Considered as a political manifesto in election year, “The Permit” does much better: It is a fantasy, it is a slight little story, dressed up in an attractive package; and it is expensive for what it contains. Jones has written a longish short story (reading time well under an hour) and packed it out to a book by using largish type on small pages. He manages an engaging caricature of a Cabinet meeting, with not totally unfamiliar figures on hand.

His hero has a touch of the Hemingways in his resolute pursuit of a giant trout. The particular regulations that give rise to the hero’s resistance to bureauracy are plain silly. They do not exist. Two themes redeem the story. “• Jones manages to send up, with ~ succinct verve, the pretentions of television journalists. And he urges in an introduction what he calls “the ultimate truth” that “people do know best how to run their lives and no matter how wrong their decisions may be perceived to be by others, in the final analysis it is not the business of those others.” Bob Jones’s New Zealand Party, as it emerged originally, looked like an ’ attempt to build political policies on that theme. That made the party worth ‘ a second glance. More recently, attempts to define the party’s policy by - conference and committee had led to the kind of watering down of policies ■ that the older parties know only too well. Jones’s little book had the best of intentions; they are being pushed aside by some of his political colleagues even as “The Permit” goes on sale.