Dance of the Peacocks: New Zealanders in exile in the time of Hitler and Mao Tse-Tung.

• Author: McLean, Denis

DANCE OF THE PEACOCKS New Zealanders in exile in the time of Hitler and Muo Tse-Tung Author: James McNeish Published by: Vintage, Random House, Auckland, 480pp, $49.95.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, who became a luminary of the United States Supreme Court, served with distinction in the American Civil War and was wounded three times. In later life he observed, 'as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at peril of being judged not to have lived'.

Holmes would have approved of the five New Zealanders whose careers are traced in this intriguing book. James Bertram, Geoffrey Cox, Dan Davin, Ian Milner, and John Mulgan surely shared in the action and passion of their time. In different ways and from diverse directions they threw themselves into the inferno which consumed the middle years of the twentieth century--the confrontations with fascism and communism. James McNeish tells a good story of lives lived to the full and great opportunities grasped with both hands.

All went up to Oxford. All were equally appalled by appeasement of the Nazis before the Second World War and disenchanted with England. Bertram goes to China and gets caught up in the campaigning of the communist armies against the Japanese and becomes a prisoner of war in Japan. Cox, Davin and Mulgan join up when war breaks out; the first two serve with the New Zealanders and Mulgan with the British Army; Milner stays out of the war but finds himself a member of the fledgling Australian Department of External Affairs and later joins the United Nations staff. Their various adventures through to the end of the Second World War make enthralling reading.

Post-war the pace slows. Mulgan is dead and Cox and Davin go on to pursue distinguished, if conventional, careers in England; Bertram, who clearly suffered at the hands of the Japanese, comes home to teach English at Victoria University of Wellington. The radical views of Milner and the even more enigmatic Paddy Costello--another of the 1930s New Zealanders who studied in England, in this case at King's College, Cambridge--lead them into murky waters during the Cold War. McNeish deftly knits in the seemingly inevitable themes of disillusionment and decline as life marches on.

These were remarkable New Zealanders. Their stories are fascinating and their careers--all over now, except that of Geoffrey Cox, surely the most redoubtable (and steadiest) of...