Conflicts of Love, Loyalty and War: From Autobiography to Fiction in Jack Lasenby’s The Mangrove Summer and Maurice Gee’s The Champion

Abstract

Award-winning New Zealand writers, Jack Lasenby and Maurice Gee, have been described as “children’s writers whose themes, originality, and sheer literariness makes them almost as important and entertaining to adults” (Robinson and Wattie, Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, 1998). Products of a period of New Zealand history when traditional perceptions of masculinity and ties to Great Britain as motherland were challenged by the counterculture's pacifist, feminist, bi-cultural, and nationalist movements, Gee and Lasenby incorporate dichotomous elements into their novels for children. However, their messages are not always simple for, although challenging the old ideologies, they do not necessarily conform to the new. This article examines themes of love, loyalty, and the war in two adventure stories: Lasenby’s The Mangrove Summer and Gee’s The Champion. Set during World War II, these novels depict political battles on personal levels and taboo topics such as racism and death. The article explores first the geographical and historical realism of the stories, their settings in identifiable locations, and the authors’ use of autobiographical material to depict childhood in 1940s New Zealand. The article then considers the shift from realism to fiction, the investment of the landscape and the characters with an emblematic dimension that includes elements of Christian mythology, and the construction of social symmetries involving loyalty and trust as ways of counterbalancing the negativity of war. Taking each novel structurally, and the overall movement of the protagonists from innocence to experience, the article next examines the varying degrees to which myth, symmetries, and friendships hold firm. Finally, the article sets individualism against socialism and questions Lasenby’s and Gee’s subscriptions to these different sets of beliefs.

Keywords: New Zealand, World War II, landscape, social symmetries, death, intertextuality, myth