Colin Gibson

The Pepper Leaf

First published by Chatto & Windus Ltd, London, 1971. No paperback publication known.

All I know about Colin Gibson is the brief biographical summary on the book's dustjacket: "Colin Gibson was born in Invercargill, New Zealand. Since then he has (in his own words) survived by varied and devious means - including journalism, medical underwriting, teaching English, and as a copywriter for New York and London advertising agencies." He had published poetry, and an earlier novel The Love-Keeper, but I think on the strength of The Pepper Leaf he perhaps decided to concentrate on the day job.

The situation explored in the book is promising, even if variations had been used in several previous novels by other authors. An oddly assorted small group is forced to live off its wits and the land, with new mores and rituals evolving as the relationships shift and develop. The background is a patch of coast in New Zealand, where conventional smallholding exists side-by-side with an ecological New-Age commune, part of the grandly-titled Decontamination Farms Society. This organisation is a pre-emptive venture aimed at providing a sustainable life-support system (and a suitably select human gene pool) in the event of global catastrophe. The book was published in 1971, and claims to be set "in the near future" - with the text showing this to be the late 1980s. At the time, global warming featured only in science fiction, with most alarmist predictive fiction being based on accidental or deliberate nuclear devastation. This particular commune used to be a mainstream naturist club, and most of the book's characters are naked throughout. As in Wells's Men Like Gods, this nudity is rarely mentioned - you can read most of the mentions in the extracts.

Come the catastrophe, comes plot and character development. At least, that's what one would expect. Instead, things muddle along in a somewhat haphazard way towards a rather unsatisfactory conclusion. The publisher's blurb, which is a slightly extended re-write of a "Frontispiece" presumably produced by the author himself, suggests readers will be reminded of Lord Of The Flies, and there are certainly many echoes of that book. Unfortunately, all comparisons with Golding's work are very much to Gibson's disadvantage, and I think he would have been well advised to re-write the story so as to make it much more distinct. Instead, he seems drawn to distorted reflections of Ralph and Piggy, and fails to produce any significant insights or examinations of human behaviour and relationships. I also found myself distracted by some major inconsistencies in the effects wrought by the cataclysm which throws the four main characters into their social melting pot. I think Gibson threw in the descriptions of geography to reinforce the believeability of the stage his actors inhabit, but, because they don't convince, one is left with an impression of artificiality, reducing the interest in the personal interactions.

A minor point about the writing, particularly in the early chapters, is Gibson's love of brackets - he even manages to nest brackets a couple of times. The parenthetical predeliction shows up clearly in the extracts.

There seem to be very few copies of this book in circulation, but I wouldn't advise making any particular effort to hunt one down. Of significant interest only to the obsessive collector of all things naturist!

Ratings:

Nudity	Naturist nudity	A good read?

Last updated 2004 April 28.
 
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