The Rainbirds, first published in 1968, presents a familiar impression of New Zealanders. People in Dunedin where the novel is set are perceived as shallow, materialistic, puritanical and philistine: 'Everything here caters for you if you live like everyone else, enjoying a healthy outdoor life, getting a good wage, having plenty to eat, owning your own home'. (1) Imagination is frowned upon: 'Herbaceous borders are more precious than a display of bright ideas in the head' (p. 59). Behaving like the country's 'pampered sheep wriggling their fat rumps against the view' (p. 59), people seek to confine their experience to the superficial and to 'be pampered into believing that they're never going to die' (p. 158). At Easter, 'resurrection ... could be fittingly celebrated only by Trots at Forbury and in every park the Michelin-caricatures getting in trim for the football season. In one of the local churches the Chord Society performed a Bach passion but few people had the courage and agility to ascend the thin rungs to heaven; only giants climb beanstalks while Jacks cut them down; any ascent is a risk' (p. 160). The central character, Godfrey Rainbird, is ostracised because he has visited the region that the ordinary shallow New Zealander denies exists. He has, as it were, come back from the dead, having been wrongly diagnosed after an accident, and while recovering from the ordeal he resolves not to shun the death-like region to which he was inadvertently introduced, but to confront it in all its terrors. 'Physically he had gone where every man goes in the end but where many pretend they do not and in their pretence build a pleasant green powerful camouflage above the pit' (p. 168). So determined is their pretence, their conformity burgeons into malevolence directed against the Rainbirds for daring to remind them of the fact of death:
