Peter A. Smith: 1951

Reviewed by MICHELE HEWITSON

Eddie "Tiger" Wilson is a wharfie. His new neighbour Charles Plumley is, according to Eddie, "a bloody Tory pongo shipping boss". The youngest Wilson, Roy, forges an awkward friendship with "pansy" Fraser, the Plumley son. Mum Wilson, Julie, with her varicose veins and homemade frocks, forges an equally awkward friendship with the posh Fiona Plumley.

It's a bad year to be setting out on such relationships. Set against the backdrop of the 1951 waterfront workers' lockout which divided families and the country, the Plumleys and the Wilsons represent the bosses and the workers.

Twenty-five years later, Fraser and Roy meet on a flight from London to Los Angeles. Their memories of that tempestuous year are as far apart as the divide between first class, where Fraser is seated, and economy, where Roy takes his natural place in the social order of this story.

A meeting is engineered by a rather clumsy device: Roy sends the now Sir Fraser a note, Fraser's travelling companion has had an accident, and Fraser arranges for Roy to take the spare seat. The story tumbles backwards from the present into the past.

The problem with the device is that we might reasonably expect to have the truth (or two versions of truth) revealed through the memories of the two boys.

Instead history is revealed through an obviously adult eye - and that of an author who has more feel for historical fact than based-on-fact fiction.

This is a big ask for a first-time novelist. Peter Smith was the chief executive of Southern Cross Healthcare for more than 25 years. He has written one other book, a history of the health care insurer, and died in February this year without seeing a final copy of his new book. Told in language as plain as Mum Wilson's home cooking, 1951 is a brave first novel.

Historically dense and enthusiastically, if not vividly, rendered, 1951 falters in its characterisation. We can feel sympathy for the predicament of the Wilsons and their looming debt is nicely mirrored in the image of the hulking pile of firewood Tiger and his brothers-in-law chop and stack in a sort of desperation to keep themselves working. Nobody wants the firewood, nobody is going to help them keep their home. But we never really get to know the inner lives of these characters. Even Jock Barnes, that larger-than-life character who haunts the lives of the wharfies' families, is reduced to a looming shadow.

The most vivid scenes are those set at Tiger's beloved rugby league club. Here you can almost smell the sweat, the beer, the camaraderie - and the encroaching fear and betrayal as long-held loyalties are set to sever.

1951 is a yarn that has been told and retold. Perhaps the difficulties with Smith's fictional retelling point to the fact that the real characters and emotions still reverberate more than half a century later so strongly that, in the case of the story of 1951, fact is indeed stranger and more riveting than fiction.

David Ling, $24.95