Graham Billing: The Blue Lion

By GORDON MCLAUCHLAN

When Graham Billing died at the end of last year, many writers and readers waited for obituaries to note his death and his remarkable contribution to the New Zealand novel. And waited. And waited.

Billing, who lived in Australia for many years, had apparently been forgotten.

He was a television reporter in Wellington when I first knew him, tall, good-looking and clever, but also vain, difficult and often seriously disagreeable.

His first novel, Forbush and the Penguins, was published in the United States and Britain when he was 30. But the novel I remember best was his fourth, The Slipway, published in the US and Britain in the early 70s.

It was a remarkable, moving story of a drunk. I wrote a review in superlatives for the New Zealand Herald. Later, in London, the Times Literary Supplement I think it was, described The Slipway as one of the two finest novels on alcoholism written last century.

Billing had a long, lean period after that but a creative renaissance followed his return to New Zealand some years ago, first with the extraordinary tour de force, The Chambered Nautilus, then The Lifeboat, in 1997, and now his last book, The Blue Lion. When he died, he had received a grant from Creative New Zealand and had started another novel.

The Blue Lion is a historical romance set in Otago in the 1860s and 1870s. An English immigrant, Albion Duffy, is employed by the Otago Acclimatisation Society to establish a salmon hatchery with eggs shipped in from Britain.

He lives alone in a cottage by the remote headwaters of a stream on the estate of the wealthy and influential Dr McIvor, whose daughter, Mary, falls for him. At first her father seems to acquiesce to a marriage, but then dismisses him from his job.

Duffy returns to the small community of the boarding-house in Dunedin where he stayed when he first arrived. He has a brief liaison with Jean, an especially easy-going young woman for that time, but Charlotte, who runs the boarding-house, remains his special friend. They go into business together and make their fortune.

This novel doesn't have the human tensions, the emotional volatility, of most of Billing's work but it's a readable and credible story of the early days of his home province. The writing vibrates with sensuality when Duffy's with the three women he courts, and when he's alone relishing the countryside.

More than anything else, Billing conveys to an extraordinary degree a vivid sense of the living landscape.

"The country was steeper now and he knew that he must be close to the stream confluence. In the end there seemed to be no way but to go down to the cool bed of it. There was high, shadowy bush there and he stumbled over rocks and logs covered with moss and lichen until he came to a clearer space. In the middle of it stood the spiralled trunk of an old dead tree with hanging vines and a shower of white orchids like stars hanging. Then along a still reach of water, he passed through a grove of pepper trees that were scarlet as if drawing their colour from the earth. He picked a leaf and it tingled in his mouth in the silence which had fallen as he walked around the dead tree ... "

If this sort of scene was just wallpaper for the actions of the hero it would not work, but what it does is beautifully heighten the sense of Duffy's solitariness as he moves about tending and guarding his tiny fish and drinking in the wonders of his life. As always, Billing's writing is in thrall to nature.

* Gordon McLauchlan is a Herald columnist.

Cape Catley Ltd
$24.95