KEY POINTS:
Well, what a surprise this has been. I had not read O.E. Middleton's stories for a couple of decades and while I admired them then, I half-expected they would be passe by now, especially since they have been dismissed by some critics over the past 20 years or so as not surviving their milieu or their once common social realism style.
I remember some of the 26 stories collected here - the best of the 63 he wrote, according to editor Lawrence Jones - for example, The Greaser's Story, A Walk on the Beach, the much- anthologised The Loners, and some others. But The Will to Win, a surprisingly modern tale; A Means of Soaring; The Sunfish and the others written in the late 1990s are new to me and I found them tales well told.
Those who may never have read Middleton stories before but have transited the time and place in which most of the early ones are set, will enjoy immediate recognition of a New Zealand long gone. But the best writers transcend the circumstances of their time and consciously or otherwise strike universal themes that carry their work some distance into the future; whereas stories that merely charm tend to quietly expire.
The question hanging in the air is, where does Middleton fit? According to Jones, he has been a victim of changing critical fashions since the late 1980s and accused of being "masculinist" and "stylistically unadventurous", among other things.
The stories are mostly masculinist because that is the world he so often writes about. You might as well condemn Jane Austen for writing only about the social life of the 18th century middle class. And stylistic adventures by many contemporary writers too often end incomprehensibly.
I guess the tempo of the tales may take some adjusting to by readers used to the racy prose of most modern fiction writers, and occasionally Middleton does reach too far for the she'll-be-right vernacular but, almost always, the casual, unostentatious descriptions of mood and background are beautifully wrought.
So the reading was a surprise to me because I found the best of them - mostly those set in this country - effectively written, sincere and with absorbing characters. I am grateful to Otago University Press for prompting me to go back to Middleton. I would urge readers of fiction to try these stories and enjoy such splendidly entertaining pieces as A Married Man, The Greaser's Story, The Doss-House and the Duchess, The Lesson and others.
Beyond the Breakwater: Stories 1948-1998
By O. E. Middleton (Otago University Press $49.95)
* Gordon McLauchlan is an Auckland writer.
