Novel
Sydney Bridge Upside Down
David Ballantyne · 1968
Synopsis
At Calliope Bay, a small isolated coastal town, Harry Baird spends the long summer holidays with his younger brother Cal and his friend Dibs Kelly, while his mother has gone to town. The boys hang around the wharf and an abandoned meat-processing plant, a forbidden place where Harry believes he hears the cries of animals slaughtered long ago. The arrival by boat of his cousin Caroline, older than he is, changes everything: he tries to impress her and wants to protect her from the butcher Wiggins, a womaniser.
Context
The novel appeared in 1968, from Whitcombe & Tombs in Christchurch and Robert Hale in London. It tells of a young boy's initiation into an adult world marked by the absence of a mother and by sexuality; the narrative moves back and forth in time, and the narrator's reliability remains open. Critics read it as a modern fairy tale, in a Gothic vein, rather than as a realist novel. Out of print since 1981, it was reissued in 2010 by Text Publishing, with an introduction by Kate De Goldi, and the Taki Rua company brought it to the stage in 2013.
Who it is for
A short novel, never translated into French, whose narrator does not tell everything; the reader must accept remaining in doubt.
Prizes and reception
Little noticed in his lifetime, rediscovered as a classic in 2010; Patrick Evans sees in it the great New Zealand novel that nobody has read.
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