Nicholas Reid
Max Gunn’s Pay Book by Graham Lindsay (99% Press, 2024), 261pp, $57.99
Max Gunn’s Pay Book could be the basis of a puzzle. Is it a novel? Is it a memoir? Is it documentary? Or is it all these things? In his Acknowledgments, Graham Lindsay tells us that the book is ‘based on stories and references my father, William Lindsay, made to his experiences in the 1940s and on research’. In other words, while much of it draws on his father’s experience, some of it is grounded in other people’s experiences. Wisely, therefore, the main character is given the fictitious name Max Gunn.
This novel (or memoir, or blend of fiction and non-fiction) gives a vivid account of New Zealanders in World War II, astutely putting it in context. Utilising what can only be called a ‘slow burn’ technique in his telling of the central tale, Graham Lindsay does not immediately plunge into war. He begins with Max Gunn in his old age, somewhere in the 1970s or 1980s. Max was once a Communist and despised Prime Minister Peter Fraser for what he perceived as a betrayal of the true Socialist cause. However, he broke with Communism in the 1950s, like many others. He’s not a man of great culture. He is seen enjoying rugby test matches on TV, and he has to contend with his adult son’s ideas. So here is the context—World War II as it is recalled by an elderly veteran. At first, when we are taken back to the 1940s, we are still far from the war. There are sequences on the habits of Kiwi soldiers in that era, and training and drilling and saying goodbye to girlfriends before the soldiers are put on a troop ship. Then there is a long account of life on the troop ship, and what food they were given, and putting up with lectures on avoiding ‘VD’ (along with the soldiers’ ribaldry about those caught out in ‘short arm parades’).
At last, we reach the battlefront. Frankly, and indeed truthfully, most of it is a disaster. After experiencing Egypt with its heat and brothels, Max Gunn and his mates are defeated in Libya by Rommel’s Afrika Corps and then dragged off as prisoners of war. As POWs, they’re taken across the Mediterranean to Greece, but not before suffering a major shipwreck. The camp they are trapped in means filthy surroundings and meagre rations. Later, they are transferred to a camp in Italy, placed in cramped quarters, where they endure lice, severe cold and more revolting rations. Some die of malnutrition. The Italian (Fascist) prison guards disappear when Mussolini is overthrown. For a brief time, the prisoners are free and plan to escape. But the Nazis now occupy Italy, treating Italians as enemies and rounding up Max and his comrades. This time they are shunted to a Stalag in Germany—again facing starvation rations, filth and extreme brutality, with Max noticing that the Russian prisoners are treated even more sadistically than other prisoners. Before liberation, there is the final danger of Allied planes dropping bombs perilously close to where the prisoners are held.
Is this tale merely an account of defeat? Far from it. For all the deprivations he endures, Max finds great humanity in the Greek peasants and partisans who attempt to give shelter to escaped Allied soldiers, even at the risk of being massacred by Nazi patrols. The same is true in Italy where decent Italians, throwing Fascists off the scent, do their best to hide Kiwi soldiers and they point out the best ways to reunite with Allied forces. Very occasionally, German officers behave humanely. Max gives great credit to the German officer who works hard to save prisoners when their ship is wrecked on the Greek coast. Even in the cruel business of war, there are people who resist inhumanity and affirm dignity and decency and give hope.
As Max Gunn’s Pay Book has begun, so it ends, back home in New Zealand with the ‘slow burn’ of a shellshocked Max trying to rehabilitate himself. He becomes an orchardist in Grasmere, and faces up to ageing. He’s still on the Left in his politics and resigns from the Returned Services Association, when they vote in favour of the apartheid-era Springboks team coming to New Zealand. But it is from other RSA veterans that he learns in detail about the tragically-failed defence of Crete—although he took no part in those events—so the reason for its inclusion in the narrative has to be to widen the scope of the theatre of the War, and the involvement of New Zealanders. But, looking back, he also curses the able-bodied wharfies and trade-unionists who made excuses for not going to the war. He ends up watching on TV a test match, the All Blacks versus France; this particular match is told in great detail, thereby giving the impression that rugby is another form of war, with its skill, its daring, its ruses, its violence.
This is the central stem of the narrative. But there is another interest in Max Gunn’s Pay Book. How are women part of the story? In the desperation of war, men and women can make hasty decisions about whom they choose as a life-long partner; and such decisions are often regretted. Max Gunn ponders on this in relation to his own experience. At this point, there is reference made to an obscure Italian novel Sette Uomini Sotto Le Stelle (Seven Men Under the Stars). But this digression, and the nature of this Italian novel, are somewhat baffling and unclear.
Also, while most of what Max Gunn’s Pay Book describes rings true, there are, unfortunately, some lapses into what could be called pedantry. Lindsay often stops his narrative with detailed explanations that are not really necessary. He wants to make a point about Louis J. Steele’s and Charles Goldie’s now-much-contested painting ‘The Arrival of the Maoris [sic] in New Zealand’, which was in part inspired by Théodore Géricault’s painting ‘The Raft of the Medusa’. He proceeds to give us fully two-and-a-half pages explaining the history of the ship Medusa and its disaster.
The Bren Gun and the Valentine Tank are each described in some detail, perhaps rather more than needed. And it is possible that soldiers were interested in discussing how Iron Age homes were built in ancient Italy, but the way it is presented sounds a lot like an academic lecture. When, looking at caves, a soldier asks, ‘Who were these people?’ He is told: ‘They could have been Minoans from Crete or Arcadians from Achaia or Illyrians from Yugoslavia or Albania. They crossed the Adriatic some twelve centuries ago. Since that time others have come and gone—Samnites, Romans, Byzantines, Normans, Africans—each adding their grist to the mill. Gravina was established by the Greeks 1000 years ago. This whole region then was known as Magna Graecia. The Baroque church across the road is recent, perhaps only two or three centuries ago …’, and so on.
Then, very laboriously, we have explained to us the procedure whereby ballots were held at Grasmere, located between Hastings and Havelock North, for aspiring orchardists. This includes a long quotation from the local newspaper and an historical account of how the original Grasmere was set up. It is at moments like these that Max Gunn’s Pay Book becomes less novel (or memoir) and more flat reportage.
That said, the book still bears witness to one man’s life in war and in peace, without unnecessary heroics. The detailed research is intended to back up a plainly-told personal story, a Kiwi everyman story perhaps, and to provide a strong and immediate sense of how New Zealand soldiers fared in punishing circumstances.
NICHOLAS REID is a writer, reviewer and historian who lives in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau.
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