Satchell, William. The Greenstone Door. Auckland and others, Whitcombe & Tombs Limited, 1957. 18.5cm x 12.5cm. viii, 400 pages. Original Hardcover. Very good condition with only minor signs of external wear.

Satchell’s fame rests ultimately upon his last book published in the unlucky year of 1914. The Greenstone Door is a historical novel, set in 1830-60, and involving not experience recalled and transmuted, but a past reconstructed. It is more carefully organised, more thoroughly prepared than the earlier three stories.

In the previous chapter it was suggested that serious Maori novels set in the past tend to sink under the weight of necessary information. Satchell chose most skilfully to focus his story through the mind of an adult remembering his childhood. The reader is in this way taken naturally into the hero’s confidence. To some extent, the reader learns as Cedric Tregarthen learns; where needed, and quite acceptably, Satchell exercises the storyteller’s usual privilege of supplementing with extra material, but this does not spoil the illusion, for the teller is still Cedric himself. Thus, in chapter 1, Satchell begins evocatively with Cedric’s earliest vivid memories, slips in the further details which the grown man knows though the child did not (″I have no actual recollection of the moment when these two intrepid white men . . . “) and fills out the picture from a later point of view with such phrases as “at the moment of which I write …” or, “At this period the practice of cannibalism . . .” It all falls together naturally; the recollections of childhood blend with the later wisdom of the man who writes them down. It is a simple technique, handled artlessly, but it works well enough for its purpose, at least in the first half of the novel. Many New Zealanders know The Greenstone Door. Cedric’s father page 34 is killed by the Maoris, the child is protected by Trader Purcell, the Thumb of Te Waharoa, and adopted by that chief as his Little Finger. He grows up among the Maori people, with his foster sister Puhi-Huia, and his friend Rangiora.

Together the three young people penetrate to a secret limestone cave, where in their fancy the stalagmites take the shapes of men and women in some drama of the future; Rangiora and Cedric end the racial hostility of their boyhood with an oath of peace, the compact of the Tatau Pounamu, that the Greenstone Door be closed.

Events then move on in history, through the troubles that followed Waitangi. In his teens, Cedric is sent to Auckland, to be initiated into the white man’s world; this enables Satchell to give us our dose of Pakeha facts in their turn. The boy grows up into an eligible young man who meets Sir George Grey and falls in love with a heroine improbably called Helenora. When the wars break out, sympathies and loyalties are divided; we are shown both sides. Purcell, who joins the Maori people, is executed as a traitor. Satchell contrives in Scott’s manner to involve his fictitious persons in historical events where they can play noted parts. Cedric goes, for instance, with General Cameron to the siege of Orakau Pa in April 1864, and accompanies Major Mair to the edge of the redoubt to make that famous offer of surrender terms the resounding rejection of which has been so well remembered. It is Rangiora who is made to speak the Maori defiance “E hoa, ka whawhai tonu ahau ki a koe, ake, ake!” (Friend, I shall fight against you for ever, for ever!) Puhi-Huia is among the slain. With all his companions dead, shattered by his experience of conflicting loyalties, Cedric lies desperately ill, but is nursed back—alas, in the best Victorian sentiment—by the repentant Helenora. (NZL)

William Arthur Satchell was born on 1 February 1861 in London, England. He was the son of Hannah Mordey and her husband, Thomas Satchell, a civil servant who became surveyor general of the Inland Revenue. Thomas Satchell maintained an ample house in Hampstead, and kept up an acquaintance among people of the arts such as Alfred Tennyson and Wilkie Collins. He was a bibliophile, interested in Egyptology, and a contributor to what became the Oxford English dictionary. He wrote and published a little himself, brought out an edition of Izaak Walton’s The compleat angler, and edited an angling journal. (Teara – Encyclopedia of New Zealand)

• Keywords: Literature · Modern Literature
• Language: English
• Inventory Number: 41491AB

Our price: EUR 28,--