Maurice Shadbolt's novel appeared mid-way through his career and marked a new departure. Until then his fiction had engaged with contemporary New Zealand, although with backward glances as part of the interaction between generations. "The Lovelock Version" is the first to deal directly with the pioneer years of the 19th century and their aftermath. The Gallipoli Campaign episode, in which sons of his main characters are engaged towards the end of the novel, is later taken up in his play "Once on Chunuk Bair" (1982). Though the accounts in this later section of Hillary Lovelock's attempted hippy commune on the Porangi River and of Frank Lovelock's withdrawal there to escape police pursuit hark back to Shadbolt's earlier fiction, the Maori Wars episodes near the start of "The Lovelock Version" were to become the subject of his later trilogy, "Season of the Jew" (1986), "Monday's Warriors" (1990) and "The House of Strife" (1993).