First published 1975. Fontana paperback, 1976, pp 253, c.96,000 words.
Bagley wrote thrillers in the second half of the twentieth century of a type that was common then: with an everyman hero who is placed in some unfamiliar situation and set in an exotic (to most readers) and harsh environment. This is one of his best.
The story is structured around a court scene – an often used, but excellent device for a thriller, with its in-built drama and room for multiple reversals of fortune. Here it is a court of enquiry into a disaster resulting from an avalanche. The setting for the action is a remote valley in New Zealand’s South Island. The protagonist, Ballard, is a man in his mid-thirties, a scion of a successful mining family, but who has been largely kept apart from the family business and has spent a lot of time in universities leaning the theory of mining and business. He is seen as being weak by the aggressive standards of the main branches of the family, but now is given a chance to show his mettle by the family patriarch, his aging grandfather, who asks him to take over management of a small gold mine. Interestingly, there is a second main character, McGill, who comes across as a bit of a father figure to Ballard, although is described as being of ‘the same age’ [p7]. McGill is the outsider, not particularly emotionally engaged, being on his way to Antarctica, and portrayed as much stronger and more confident than Ballard. Although he too is a theoretician – this time an expert on snow – he is also decisive and action oriented. Apart from fighting his own duplicitous family, Ballard also has to face his childhood nemesis, the Peterson family, who effectively control the community in the small town that has grown up around the gold mine. Ballard spent his childhood in the valley and, after his father’s death, became a protected mummy’s boy, and she eventually took him back to England when he was a teenager.
The construct of the story is well done with the interleaving of scenes of the court of enquiry with accounts of the events surrounding the disaster. This sort of thing can cause the flow of a novel to become disrupted, but Bagley makes astute cutting choices, allowing his story to build smoothly in a flowing narrative.
There is some weak writing. Ballard’s background is filled in unnaturally as a list of degrees and universities recited by his grandfather [p15]. Some character development is also clunky: ‘He approved.’ (of mine management taking an interest in municipal affairs) [p30] and ‘He believed that white lies to be the social oil that allows the machinery of society to work smoothly.’ [p31]. The book is also very much written from the male perspective. Men are the drivers of action, and the one significant exception is introduced by the male gaze: ‘Liz Peterson was a rarity – a really beautiful girl [she’s about thirty] whose loveliness didn’t depend on the adventitious aid of cosmetics… She was beautiful in the way a healthy young animal is beautiful and she had the unconscious arrogance that can be seen in a thoroughbred racehorse or a fine hunting dog.’ [p86]. No author could get away with that today. In counterbalance, Liz Peterson is shown to be intelligent and self-willed. Several of the other women are heroic, although mostly in ‘traditional’ women’s roles. None of the enquiry principles are female. The old Māori man, who holds crucial historical knowledge, is very sympathetically drawn.
If one can ignore the little clunks and forgive the fact that this was written in another age, this is a first-class thriller. It is very well plotted and written in an easily read, flowing style. The setting descriptions come alive: one can feel the small enclosed community and the pressures the individuals are under to ignore the looming threat to their way of life. Bagley’s foreword suggests that he did, as is usual for him, extensive research to give the sequence of events and the players real verisimilitude. This may not tax the brain much, but it does deliver excellent escapist entertainment.
© William John Graham, March 2023