"GOVERNMENT."

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 307, 28 December 1935, Page 2 (Supplement)

"GOVERNMENT."

OPPBESSION IN MEXICO

It is generally no recommendation to say of a novel that it is a piece of deliberate propaganda—and yet many of the best sellers of past years have been such. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "Bleak House" are only two instances chosen at random. In the company of the great propagandist novelists it must shortly be 'debated whether Mr. B. Traven has now won a place. He first came before the English public when his sea-story, "The Death Ship," was translated from the German. This was succeeded by "The Treasure of the Sierra Maclre," in which the autnor introduced his readers to the Central American scenes in which he has set his subsequent novels. This was a good story, but more —it was also a sermon on the madness that seizes men who find a new gold-mine. it showed the author to be a preacher as well as a novelist. Then came (this year) "The Carreta," a novel of the Mexican peons, quite openly and unashamedly propagandist, and a bitter attack on the Church and State of Mexico. This attack is now carried on with equal vigour in Mr. Traven's latest novel, "Government, (Chatto and Windus), another story of the Mexican Indians. As was the ease in "The Treasure" and "The Carreta," the technique of this novel is peculiarly Mr. Traven's own —it lias no hero, but is rather a series of episodes, in different Indian communities, revolving very loosely round Don Gabriel, a Government official. But while Mr. Traven's hook has no hero and no very definitely connected sequence of events in the narrative, there is no doubt that the unity of the work is entirely preserved by its consistent adherence to its main theme — the patience, honesty and simple nobility of the Indian character and the tyranny of the Mexican Government (and incidentally of the Church). These powers, according to. Mr. Traven, deliberately keep the Indian ignorant and helpless, and encourage a system of bribery and cruelty by which ho is treated as worse than cattle in order to keep the Spanish Mexican population in comparative luxury. One wonders how Mr. Traven's books are received in Mexico. Certainly if this one were written of a British possession it would rouse the fiercest indignation, not to say anger, from one end of the Empire to the other. "Government" is propaganda, but it is not merely propaganda. Its episodes have the interest, aiid its characters and scenery have the charm, that one has now come to associate habitually with Mr. Traven's work. It will enhance the reputation which he has already established for himself, and many a reader who peruses it for the interest of the story will ponder over the thoughts it arouses long after he has set it down.