SOURCE: King, Chris Savage. “Urban Jungle.” New Statesman and Society 5, no. 210 (10 July 1992): 34.

In the following review, King draws comparisons between Dunedin and the work of Charles Dickens.

When the dust has settled on the millennium and readers want to find out how people lived in our age, they will discover all they need to know in the work of Shena Mackay. In Dunedin, the Mackenzies, a Scottish Presbyterian family who landed in New Zealand in 1909, are tracked down to their dispersed scions in the chaotic mess of 1980s South London. The suspended, ominous drift of middle-class Edwardian life is harshly contrasted with the more precarious present: a world of dishevelled corner shops, cackling street life, battered parks and end-of-the-line public services. General pathology is stoked until it explodes in random and irrevocable acts.

Olive, a shopkeeper with a heart full to bursting, snatches a black baby in an...