Noel Virtue

FROM THE OXFORD COMPANION TO NEW ZEALAND LITERATURE

Virtue, Noel (1947– ), novelist, was born into a Plymouth Brethren family and raised in Lower Hutt, Waikato and Auckland. In 1967 he went to Britain, where he became a zookeeper for the London Zoological Society and eventually head keeper of the Welsh Mountain Zoo.

In the late 1970s Virtue left zookeeping to concentrate on writing. His fourth completed novel, The Redemption of Elsdon Bird, was published in the UK in 1987 and in the USA and New Zealand in 1988. Relating the anguished experiences of a young boy in a Plymouth Brethren family in Wellington and Waikato in the 1950s, the novel created an immediate sensation and was shortlisted for book awards in Britain and New Zealand.

Five more novels followed in rapid succession. The second, Then upon the Evil Season (1988 UK, 1989 NZ), is set in Opononi in 1955–56; it has a lighter tone, with elements of the fantastic. The third, the ironically titled In the Country of Salvation (1990), describing a seriously dysfunctional Plymouth Brethren family in Auckland around 1960s, is his darkest novel yet. The fourth, Always the Islands of Memory (1991), reflects on the effects of the past on the present for two elderly sisters living in 1950s Te Aroha, and encountering most of the calamities of their era, from the Napier earthquake to the Tangiwai railway disaster; it is more like the second in tone. The fifth, The Eye of the Everlasting Angel (1992 UK, 1993 NZ), relating the picaresque adventures of a young man in London in the 1960s, is concerned with personal transformation.

The most recent, Sandspit Crossing (1993 UK, 1994 NZ), is an episodic comedy set in Northland in the mid-twentieth century. Virtue’s first published novels were widely praised for their freshness and originality. His subsequent fiction, however, has been criticised for its lack of development; for its obsession with the *puritanism of the post-war New Zealand of his youth; for its invention of period slang; and for its depiction of bizarre characters and unlikely events, as a New Zealand version of small-town American Gothic.

Virtue has also written two books of autobiography: Among the Animals—A Zookeeper’s Story (1988) and Once a Brethren Boy (1995). The latter makes plain how much of his earlier fiction, especially, was derived from his own family experiences; how much homosexuality, a subtext in his fiction, is central to his life; and why, with ‘haunted memory’, he chose to live for an extended period in London and recreate New Zealand in his writings.

AM

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Virtue's most recent novels are Losing Alice (2000) and Lady Jean (2001).

'Noel Virtue is a master of true comedy, that fine blend of the forlorn and the poignant with the outrageously funny. Lady Jean may well be his best novel to date,' writes Ruth Rendell.