SUBURBAN PICTURE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 139, 13 June 1936, Page 2 (Supplement)

SUBURBAN PICTURE.

ERNEST RAYMOND'S NEW NOVEL. "Pon John's Mountain TTome" is the picturesque, and entirely misleading, title of Mr. Ernest Raymond's new novel (C'assell). The scene is laid in Avonsmead. a mushroom suburb of a large English town on the South Coast, ami the "mountain home" is a castle 111 Spain to which an eccentric inhabitant of this suburb occasionally retires, and whither the author never follows him. All excellent, if unpleasant, picture is drawn of Avonsmead, a type of place which is becoming increasingly common in England, and which, though neither attractive nor picturesque, is of great interest to the student of social conditions. A hundred years ago a railway dropped a station amidst a group of workers' cottages; the prosperous citizens of the neighbouring town built elaborately ugly houses there, and tradesmen followed them, to live in pseudo-Tudor villas. In the community that grew up there was lacking both the independence of a more compact suburb and the spiritual unity of a country town. Pride in material progress is accompanied by a reactionary self-com-placency which makes DOll John, the one radical in the district, stand out in vivid contrast to the rector, the schoolmaster, and the other local celebrities.

Even if the story Mr. Raymond tells is hardly equal to the background he has provided for it, the book has no dull patches, and his unsophisticated heroine is a particularly charming figure.