Memoirs of a Peon is a frank and a literary re-creation of the traditional picaresque novel….

Frank Sargeson lives in and writes about New Zealand, and perhaps this in part explains the strange sense of survival one has in reading this carefully structured narrative of a young innocent who sets out on intellectual and sexual adventures, covering a fair amount of his society in the process. Sargeson, in his earlier work in English periodicals, has shown himself a sharp social commentator and a sophisticated literary craftsman; and his adaptation of the eighteenth-century picaresque manner, of the Tom Jones and Candide conventions, to presentday New Zealand is done with the greatest literary assurance, as if this were the ideal form for an essentially provincial and raw society. And so it works out. The old principle of procrastinated rape sustains the main structural interest, which is appropriate enough in a...