THE FICTION SHELF.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 260, 2 November 1929, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE FICTION SHELF.

IRISH MADNESS

There is nothing restful about L. ©'Flaherty's "The House of Gold" (Jonathan Cape). It is said to be a study of modern Irish life. If so, there is a bad outlook for the country. To us the story is an Irish nightmare, for all the chief characters are mad, quite mad, from start to finish. It is a story of love and hate —mostly "hate—full of wild actions and wilder speech, of blasphemy, of murder, of robbery and violence. There is a mad moneylender with a beautiful wife who has no self-control The husband blames the wife for their unhappiness; the wife is unfaithful and blames a priest; and the family doctor is madly in love with the erring wife and lives in terror of her husband and the priest and his own mental weakness. The doctor is the only one in the story aware of his own lunacies, or has a'suspicion that most of his neighbours are "dilly" or "dotty" or raging. The tale is" told in one long breathless act, in one scene, and on one note, and is indeed the maddest thing we have read for many years; a treasure for alienists and mental experts.

Thoughtful, elaborate, and somewhat everworded is *Mons. L. E. Gielgud's ''The Wise Child" (Chapman and Hall). It is the ( biography of an illegitimate French child who is not for many years permitted to know her father, "though he acts throughout as a sort of fairy godfather to his daughter. Told in solid blocks 6f description with an occasional relief of stilted conversation, this novel "takes some reading," and one feels a desire to recast this interesting storv in lighter and more easily assimilated form.

i Twelve short fairy stories for grown- : ups are included in Erica Fay's "A Road to Fairyland" (Putnam). " There is a moral lesson hidden in each story - ette, but too deeply concealed to -be found except by those readers who have lived and suffered and hoped. To read one of these stories and then have to explain its purpose destroys the charm and the poetry, which are evident throughout. Xone of us are too old to learn-such fairy lessons as these. We have received from Messrs. Putnam a volume of stories. "Come and Listen," by E. Temple Thurston, and although they are written for children (there is an illustration on nearly every page) we have enjoyed them heartily ourselves. The literature of the world, both old and new, has provided the material for these stories, and in modern dress they shine as they did when first written. The line drawings by F. C Twort are clever effects in black and white and add greatly to the beauty and interest of the volume.

Most readers will b4 immensely interested in the adventures of six EnglishWest Indian children, who chanced to be taken on board the last of the old pirate ships sailing from Santa Lucia. "A High Wind in Jamaica," by Richard Hughes (Chatto and Windus) contains one of the best word pictures of a tropical storm, only second in vividness to that contained in "Porgy" of a storm in New Orleans. The author has a liking for exaggeration and his wonderful imagination needs curbing, because in the exuberance of his verbosity he oversteps the limits of credibility, not with obvious intention, but in his'desire to force his readers to realise the reality. The children are quite exceptional in character. With its unfamiliar background of the West Indies, and the extraordinary conduct of the pirate seai men, this is an exceptional story. There are two things in "The" Square Mark," by Grace M. White and H. L. Deakin (Methuen) that put it out of the ruck of detective stories. The murder is committed in the grounds of a girls' school in England, and the story is told from the point of view of two of the women teachers. The atmosphere of school life gives this "shocker" quite a novel taste. The mystery is. mysterious above the average, and in the working out of the plot there is some pleasant characterisation. Our chief criticism is that the attitude of these women towards the crime is rather too light hearted. Despite the fact that, the "head" is arrested for the crime, they regard the whole affair as rather a game.