The great unread New Zealand novel: David Ballantyne’s Sydney Bridge Upside Down

Abstract

David Ballantyne’s novel The Cunninghams (1948) was deemed upon publication to be a “masterly study of working-class family life in a New Zealand town” and it was praised for its “utmost fidelity” to the “minutiae of small-town life”. The novel’s grim tone, Depression-era setting, local referent and critical realism did much to establish Ballantyne as an author with “social interests”, as did his own assertion that a writer is “an investigator of human existence” who “must try to understand the way in which average people live out their time”. Ballantyne was one of several new writers deemed to be the “sons” of Frank Sargeson, capable of developing the line of realism established by the latter’s short stories that appeared between 1935 and 1945. Yet, in spite of his early promise, Ballantyne’s career as a fiction writer failed to take off, partly because of a long period of alcoholism, and partly because of the direction he took in his subsequent fiction. If his first novel answered literary nationalism’s need for an authentic depiction of local life, then Sydney Bridge Upside Down (1968), with its gestures towards the non-realist modes of fairy tale and gothic, was almost guaranteed to remain outside the body of writing understood to constitute “New Zealand literature”. Yet, by combining aspects of realist with non-realist modes, the novel creates a mythologized version of New Zealand society in which threats associated with sexuality take on nightmarish, almost elemental forms that are far more effective in terms of representing the ways in which New Zealand society can damage the individual than social realism.