Q&A C K Stead Steady on


Tom Tivnan talks to New Zealand author, poet and critic C K Stead about culture and controversy and what it means to be a ‘grand old man’ of letters


Is it difficult for NZ writers to carve out a distinct identity with a larger country nearby which has a similar culture and language? Our literary relations with Australia are very strange. In the 19th century they were quite close, but in the past half-century or more we have each looked first to our own writers, then second to the major English-language writers in Britain and America, and only third to one another. Insofar as it is true that we New


Zealanders are somewhat overborne by English-speaking cultures larger than our own, it is the sense of our insignificance in relation to Britain and Europe that affects us far more than any sense of being dominated by, or outclassed by, or less interesting than, Australia. In a way this is a pity, especially for us, because there is a big market in Australia that is largely untapped by New Zealand publishers.


You have said that when you started out it was “risky, even controversial” to try to be writer and cultural commentator and stay in NZ. Do NZ authors need to go to bigger markets if they want to become “global”? It is still difficult to be a serious critic—social or literary—in New Zealand. Not as difficult as when I was young, but we are still a small community that tends to bridle at, and resent criticism and not to like people who “rock the boat”. All communities have their pieties


that it is risky to challenge, but I think we are worse than most, and that it is simply a factor of size. On the other hand, because this is the case, and because, consequently, there are few outspoken critics, the few who dare are often honoured for their courage. If you want to live solely by your


writing in NZ you must find publishers overseas. Te market is still too small to sustain a writer who has no publication beyond our


thebookseller.com


shores. Tere can also be a feeling of security in knowing that, whatever your own country decides about you, “there is, as Shakespeare’s Coriolanus says when he turns his back on Rome, a world elsewhere”.


Tere was once an article in the cultural magazine North and South partly entitled “Why do the literati hate Karl Stead?” Do you see yourself as a polarising figure? I became known as a person of leftist views who was always willing to state them clearly and forcefully; and when I went through a period where I grew weary of the predictability and shallowness of a lot of left-wing thought, and said so, I was treated as an apostate to the cause. I rejected some parts of the liberal


package, and the fact that I chose to speak for the Pakeha (European) New Zealander against what was being


advanced as the Maori cause was especially resented. I was branded as a “racist”—which anyone who has read my work closely will know I am not, and never have been. Most of this is pretty much forgotten, however, and I think I have established my right to speak my mind with clarity and to be listened to. I’m pleased and proud it was a Labour government that gave me New Zealand’s highest honour, the Order of New Zealand.


What can you tell us about your newest novel, Risk? Te principal character is a divorced New Zealander in his mid-40s who has left his ex-wife and two sons in New Zealand, and returned to London where he had spent a couple of years as a young man. He discovers a daughter he didn’t know about, born to a French woman with whom he had an affair in his youth. He finds


new work as a banking lawyer. Te years the novel covers are the post-9/11 years—the build-up to the invasion of Iraq and the banking meltdown of 2008. All these large events are the background to the life of the main character, and affect him in various ways. In other words, this was a way of presenting a picture of the first decade of the new century as I have observed it, coloured by my own personal beliefs and values.


Christian Karlson Stead was born in Auckland in 1932 and has published more than 35 books of criticism, fiction and poetry. He is perhaps best known internationally for the novels All Visitors Ashore, Te Singing Whakapapa and Smith’s Dream, which was made into the film “Sleeping Dogs”, starring Sam Neil, in 1977. Risk (Quercus) was published on 27th September.


10 OCTOBER 2012 | THE BOOKSELLER DAILY AT FRANKFURT 11


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