First there is the list of McNeish's previous books - 25 of them, including seven novels, three plays and 15 varied books of non-fiction, at least five of which can be considered biographies or biographical essays.
Others are more difficult to classify.
The list is in chronological order but without dates, spanning a career of more than 50 years, and in most cases each book has little obviously in common with the one preceding it or the one following it.
Subjects range from the great snow of 1895 to the Gandhian social action of Danilo Dolci in Sicily in the mid-20th century to the Bain murder case or to Lovelock in the 1936 Olympics, and the genres include novels, plays, non-fiction and, some of his best books, "creative non-fiction" hybrids.
Then there is the epigraph, Mark Twain's prefatory warning to the reader of Huckleberry Finn not to expect a motive or moral or plot in the narrative. Finally there is the "Author's Note", informing us that these "are not orthodox memoirs, nor are they complete", for while they cover about half his adult life they necessarily omit important experiences in Berlin, Jerusalem, Moscow, Papua New Guinea and other places. We have been warned, then, that this is an idiosyncratic book by the most versatile and unpredictable of our major writers. But he does promise, "however unfinished", a "relevant character sketch".
The first section, "People", delivers on that promise. There is no detailed chronology and there are chronological and causal gaps, but we get a sense of the development of James McNeish the writer through a series of formative encounters with people and places met in an almost haphazard and quite colourful journey through a series of jobs: arts editor of the New Zealand Herald, while he was writing his first book, Tavern in the Town, an anecdotal history of New Zealand pubs; deck-hand working his way to England on a Norwegian freighter; lamplighter in Joan Littlewood's Theatre Royal in London; travelling in 21 European countries recording indigenous music for the BBC; teaching English in Sicily while writing his second book, Fire Under the Ashes, a biography of Danilo Dolci; producing programmes for BBC Features in London; returning briefly to New Zealand in 1964 and getting material for more programmes; returning to London and making BBC programmes and producing folk records while beginning to write what finally became his first novel, Mackenzie; in late 1966 returning to New Zealand to stay.
There is a "plot" of sorts in that first section, but the focus is on the people and their influence on McNeish: Ted Dalton, the night editor at the Herald, who tells him it is 'time to go" and inspires him to want to see Sicily; Joan Littlewood, who teaches him to accept his limitations as a playwright; Dolci, who shows him that writing could have a social purpose, that orthodox beliefs could be questioned, that one could follow an idea, working alone, until a pattern emerges, and who in his writing provided a model of the nonfiction novel; several other Sicilians who show him the importance of differing cultural assumptions and mores; Jack Dillon at the BBC, who shows him how to work with radio; his father, a closet writer who keeps pushing him to give up his writing dream and get a "real job"; most important is Helen, his second wife to whom the book is dedicated, who supports his writing and comes to make a life with him. Conspicuous by their relative absence and lack of influence on McNeish are his first wife, Felicity, and his daughter, Kate.
In retrospect McNeish sees that Dolci's witness that a book "can become a motive force or an instrument for action", can provide "a sense of mission" but that it also can be "capable of wrecking a marriage", which is perhaps what his commitment to Fire Under the Ashes did to his first marriage. He reports his "sense of vacuity and helplessness" when Felicity took their daughter Kate and left him, but also his "overwhelming sense of relief, as if [he'd] woken from a bad dream" when the divorce papers arrived. "Now the biography began to write itself".
The first section ends with his journey back to New Zealand in late 1966. It had its origin in a visit in 1964 to his "Maori aunt", Jean, his father's sister who had lived much of her life among Maori, and had created a "small empire" at Te Maika, the isolated sandspit near Kawhia which he was to depict as "Godwit Bay" in As for the Godwits (1977) and An Albatross Too Many (1998). She had promised then to leave to him a house in which he could write.
After her death, he acquired her house and, haunted by a dream of her and of "a white house on a cliff jutting into the ocean", feeling "suffocated" because his busy life in London seemed to leave no time for his great project, his novel on Mackenzie, the New Zealand sheep stealer and folk hero, he returned alone to New Zealand and took up residence at Te Maika.
Readers expecting this account of the making of a writer to continue in the second section, "Place", will be initially disappointed but finally satisfied. Graham Beattie on his book blog quotes McNeish as saying "It was meant to be a character sketch told through the eyes of others, but it turned into something else: an exploration of my Maori background with strange echoes of an unremembered past. Everything else I'd intended to include got left out".
In a radio interview McNeish said that he wrote "seven or eight books" during the Te Maika years, but after an account of how he had to learn to write facing a blank wall rather than the view out the window if he was to concentrate, he mentions the books only in passing, not even giving the titles of most. Instead he writes of Helen joining him, their marriage in 1968, their making a life together, a "liberation from the pressures of modern living" in this isolated place with no roads, no electricity, no public amenities other than a telephone box, a life so attuned to the place that he could say "I sometimes felt that Te Maika was writing my books for me".
There was a lot of travelling and an extended stay abroad in 1973 when he was Katherine Mansfield Fellow at Menton (one result being the book Helen put together about Mansfield), but always a welcome return to Te Maika as home.
That life at home was lived among the small local Maori community with its extended families, and the "plot" that takes over this section has to do with the McNeishes making a place as accepted outsiders.
McNeish's Aunt Jean, quarter-caste Maori like his father, had told him that some of the land that he would inherit was given her by the Maori King to compensate for some land that had been "stolen" from her and that it should remain in the family; thus he thought that in a sense this was his family's Maori patrimony that he should hold in trust.
However, he finally discovers that that was her myth-making and that the land came to her in payment for a debt, so that his holding on to it was if anything an obstacle to his acceptance by the local Maori community. But the same older Maori woman, Josephine King, who told him the truth about his "patrimony" also told Helen, "Tell him, please, to go on writing. We are so few. We are", and Helen told him "I think it means they've finally understood and accepted what you do. You write."
That last sentence could be the epigraph to the book: his place in the local Maori community was like his place in the larger New Zealand community, the writer's place, far enough outside to see and affirm what is there, close enough to try to understand and to follow a story where it leads him and take the reader with him.
In a radio interview, McNeish, who turns 81 this spring, said he still had the ideas for six books or so within him: we can hope for more from him while looking back gratefully at the 25 books that precede this one, the work for which he received the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in Non-fiction in 2010 and a knighthood in 2011.
For those who have not yet read any of his work, this book would be a good starting place; for those who are familiar with at least some of his books, it is an essential text with which to continue.
• Lawrence Jones is an emeritus professor of English.
