The Greenstone Door by William Satchell. 1937, first edition

The Greenstone Door by William Satchell.

Publisher: Whitcombe & Tombs, Auckland, New Zealand, 1937, first edition, 5th impression.

Very good hardback. Green cloth boards have some rubbing, chipping and marks, spine is heavily foxed with a slight lean. Inscription to ffep, binding firm, pages lightly tanned with foxing to edges and end-papers. 400 pages.

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 recollect

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