NEW NOVELS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 2, 3 January 1931, Page 2 (Supplement)

NEW NOVELS.

CHILDREN AND ERRING PARENTS. Constance Smedley must have very closely watched some of oar more advanced young people to have been so thorough in her analysis of the almost terrible disadvantages of companionship on equal terms between parents and child. In "The Woman in the Wilderness" (Methuen), an adulterous woman is able to discuss her fault witll her seventeen-year-old daughter, who, having overheard a harmless but suggestive conversation between her father and her governess, goes to her room and weeps because she suspects the worst. Her early knowledge of such is attributed by the authoress to training in the "New Theology" at school, where a ruthless dissection of Old and New Testament is part of the course, and explanatory essays are demanded. Ex-! perience. in most families, shows that innocence is a surer guard to virtue than, full knowledge of evil, and if daughters are now house detectives, spying upon erring parents, it is doubtful if to-day's domestic conditions favour marriage. Birth control may be easier than child control. The woman is forgiven, the home is reformed, the sophisticated children again enbrace their parents, father, because he lias always been good, mother because she is extremely sorry for her slip, an finally because father has heaps of money, and home is, after all, the be placed Selfishness to the nth d.S™ >» demonstrated throughout the story, which is unusually absorbing and a pungent condemnation of loose sMiallife. ° One-third in italics and' thoroughly o-irlish, is Berta Ruck s Offer of Mar-°-arro» rCassell), all about the middleas S s "S young" who have taken their Sew liberty 7 in dccent and scns.Me way and are, as was the pre-war middleclass, the backbone of the nation. From the cockney girl who speaks with a nasal twang and plays a typewriter m the city, to the trim daughters of well-to-do business men, professional men, and undistinguished army and navy men, the "middle" girls seem to have kept their heads and avoided the excesses of classes above and below them. This is a lively, cheerful little semidomestic story of people who live in the suburbs, rush for town each morning, crowd into trains and trams at evening and play and work with equal zest, but who hold themselves and the English world together by always remembering what is and what is riot done by self-respecting persons. The headmaster of Eton writes light novels in his holidays. It would be diverting to have the candid opinion of some of his pupils on "The Abbot's Cup" (Herbert Jenkins). This might be that Dr. Alington had achieved nothing more than Wodehouse and Edgar Wallace and much water, only the verdict would be expressed rather more racily. A slight book.