Written by: Maurice Shadbolt
Submitted By: Roger
"Shadbolt returned to the historical novel with the New Zealand Wars trilogy, a triptych of revisionist-historical novels: Season of the Jew (1986), Mondays Warriors (1990) and The House of Strife (1993). They form perhaps the most important work of historical fiction yet produced by a New Zealand writer. The first focuses on *Te Kootis Poverty Bay campaigns of the 1860s (and invites comparison with The Song of Te Kooti section in Witi *Ihimaeras The *Matriarch, also published in 1986). Mondays Warriors moves to Taranaki, also in the 1860s, and the stories of Titokowaru and the rebel American Kimball Bent. Here Shadbolt is mining ground already cleared in The Lovelock Version where Titokowaru, Kimball Bent and Von Tempsky all appear. The House of Strife moves back in time to the 184546 rebellion of Hone Heke, who cut down the flagpole above what is now Russell in the Bay of Islands on four occasions. Common to each novel is a central Pakeha figureGeorge Fairweather, Kimball Bent and the Ferdinand Wildblood/ Henry Youngman doppelgangerwhose sympathies lie more with the Maori side than with the colonisers, and who provide Shadbolt with a detached narrative position. Together the three volumes offer a revised version of the New Zealand *Wars. More importantly, they remind us that history is above all else story, and that there are many versions of it. Shadbolts work to date now presents a distinctive version of the whole of postcolonisation New Zealand history."
