Novel
Man Alone
John Mulgan · 1939
Synopsis
Johnson, an Englishman who survived the Great War, with no known first name, has come to New Zealand to look for a new life. The slump of the thirties throws him into the soup-kitchen queues of Auckland, onto the relief work gangs of the Waitākere, then into the midst of the riots. He goes off to work on farms, from the northern Waikato to the centre of the North Island, where he becomes involved with Rua, the Māori wife of his employer, Stenning. A narrator reports his story as Johnson told it to him years later.
Context
Published in London in 1939 by Selwyn and Blount, the novel owes its title to a sentence by Hemingway, to whose spare prose it has often been compared. Most copies were destroyed in the Blitz, and the book remained almost unknown in New Zealand at the author's death; it was a postwar New Zealand reprint that made it a classic, set in secondary schools. It gave its name to the "man alone" type, the loner of New Zealand and Australian fiction, and has been compared to Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.
Who it is for
For a short and spare novel about the years of hardship between the wars, which founded a major figure of New Zealand fiction.
Prizes and reception
A classic of the country, it is often misread as praise of the loner, whereas its strength lies in its picture of the slump.