Man Alone

History Fiction Biography New Zealand

Man Alone has become a classic of New Zealand fiction. It is a set text in most New Zealand courses in universities, and is often grossly misrepresented as a kind of celebration of the Kiwi bloke going it alone, getting offside with the law and women, and making a fist of it on his own terms. It also has been glibly accused of misogyny and racism. For all its local emphases and colour, the novel must be read in the context of post-war Europe, as it takes a hard look at the reality of ‘ordinary’ life, without the self-congratulatory assurances common to both British and New Zealand conservatism. The starkness of the novel is also a philosophical one. Such values as emerge are what the individual manages to put together as the historical moment allows—fiction as existentialism, before such a term became modish. At the same time as he was working on the novel, Mulgan edited for Victor Gollancz Poems of Freedom, an anthology of poets who ‘were unafraid’, and whom W.H. Auden, in his Introduction, valued not for their wisdom, but for raising their voices against oppression.

“Man Alone by John Mulgan was definitely one of the few books I have read which focused so intensely on the typically masculine qualities men are said to acquire. In the beginning of the novel we are introduced to Johnson, an English soldier who has survived WW1 and has now settled into Auckland, NZ in midst of the depression. He takes up farming in Waikato and later in the centre of the North island and is also involved in riots over the country’s economic situation.”