All This by Chance

Vincent O'Sullivan gave me a copy of his new novel, All This by Chance and very kindly inscribed it for me. Vincent and I go back to the 1960s when I worked for the New Zealand office of the Oxford University Press and Vincent was an up and coming young scholar. Oxford published a successful anthology of New Zealand Short Stories in the World's Classics series in 1953. That was edited by Dan Davin, a prolific New Zealand writer, then Assistant Secretary to the Delegated of the Oxford University Press, a mouthful of a title, but in fact, in charge of the Clarendon Press and academic publishing.  Ten years on Davin suggested that that it was time for a second collection of New Zealand short stories. A lot had happened to New Zealand writing in the intervening years. Davin suggested that we approach Ian Gordon, the respected professor of English at Victoria University, a scholar with international reputation, who wrote about early Scottish literature as well as about Katherine Mansfield and New Zealand writers in general. Ian Gordon said that he was too busy to take this task on, but there is a young man who had just joined his staff, Vincent O'Sullivan who would do justice to this project. Vincent would visit our show room and editorial cubyhole in the now demolished Empire Building in Willis Street and I suppose we must have chatted about this and that. It was only many years later that Vincent told me that he found me then a forbidding presence. 

     And this leads me to his new novel, All This by Chance. It is a rich, complex books, with vivid narrative and set pieces, but the theme I related to was, near the beginning of the book, that we can't see ourselves as others see us. Stephen, the young pharmacist from Auckland in London on his OE, meets Eva, a young woman, brought up by a kindly Quaker couple in England. Stephen thinks that he left a dull uninteresting place behind, while Eva thinks of Stephen's New Zealand as a vibrant, exciting world. 

      Perhaps people who knew me when I was at school, university, Teachers' College, when I was young, thought of me as a European, at home in a rich European culture, someone who knew a lot about a culture New Zealanders who grew up here only struggled to grasp, while I thought that my New Zealand contemporaries knew a lot I didn't know, could shoot pigs and goats, fix things with No 8 fencing wire, pour concrete, and yes, some of them read widely and knew more about European literature and art than I ever hoped to learn. However, they might have sensed the difference between applying yourself to serious study and accumulating knowledge about culture, and growing up with this culture, breathing it living it, no matter how superficially. The books around my home were by Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Arthur Koestler. I was ignorant of the popular music of the time, but could whistle entire Haydn or Beethoven symphonies. 

     In Vincent O'Sullivan's book, a damaged survivor of the Holocaust, a forgotten aunt of Eva, joins the household and her silent presence impacted on the children and even the grandchildren. Similarly my wife's Judy's aunt. Lisa, damaged by her Holocaust experiences, lived with her family, I knew any number of people who were damaged by the Holocaust. I also knew people made of asbestos like my parents, whom no fire could touch, because having survived the Holocaust, they were impervious to whatever threats others imagined. But my children, like those in the novel, grew up with stories of danger, of betrayal, of starvation, and of people disappearing, and these impacted on their view of the world.