Ian Middleton

FROM THE OXFORD COMPANION TO NEW ZEALAND LITERATURE

Middleton, Ian (1928– ), is a novelist who has made a particular mark with fiction about post-war *Japan. Brother of O.E. *Middleton, born in New Plymouth and brought up in Taranaki, Te Kuiti and wartime Auckland, his work experience included periods as a merchant seaman and as an English teacher in Japan, 1974–82. He now lives in Auckland and has been a full-time writer since 1982.

His first novel, Pet Shop (1979, rpt. 1990), dealt with a small-town New Zealand childhood, Auckland wartime adolescence and experience on board a Norwegian tanker, and with a fervid sexuality rendered in lavishly metaphoric and descriptive prose. Kevin *Ireland praised it on republication as ‘an absorbing picture of the repressions that passed for a moral code’. The fourth, Mr Ponsonby (1989), vividly recreates the atmosphere and characters of an Auckland suburb threatened by reconstruction. In the ‘Japanese trilogy’, comprising Faces of Hachiko (1984), Sunflower (1986) and Reiko (1990), a personal dimension focuses the convincingly complex portrayals of the society and psychology of modern Japan and its conflicts of understanding with foreigners. The sense of inwardness with Japanese culture and thought is a rare attribute in Western writing. The strong metaphoric colour, sensual—often erotic—quality and lush verbal richness of his writing have been attributed to Middleton’s blindness, which he himself describes as giving a special perspective but ‘without limitation’.

RR

MEDIA LINKS AND CLIPS

• Ian Middleton’s bibliography in the Auckland University Library's New Zealand Literature File