AMONG NEW NOVELS

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 165, 15 July 1939, Page 10 (Supplement)

AMONG NEW NOVELS

The publishers of Mazo de la Roche's new novel, "Growth of a Man" (Macniillan), toll us that readers of the manuscript of it were so absorbed in it that they could not lay it down. And one is not surprised. It gives full proof of the author's power of making her dramatic personae extraordinarily real and vivid, and in clear, strong, unlaboured English. The scene is in Canada, where the story opens towards the close of last century witli Shaw Manifold, the only child of his widowed mother, a small boy, whom circumstances oblige her to leave in the care of her people. The author's description of their harshness and their blindness to his potentialities may be exaggerated, like, as one thinks, her description of the harshness and want of imagination of his future father-in-law. Whether or no, their treatment of him might well have broken his spirit, but, on the contrary, it sent him to make friends of the books they never read, and to invent a secret life of thought for himself. It wa* thus, along with his hard work at school and college and the love he had for trees, that Shaw's character unfolded and developed, and that he ro«e to be the head of the Department of Forestry in tlie West. It was a hard struggle, hut his stubborn determination, and the love of his mother, and of the girl he ultimately married made him even more than the man he ho|>ed to be when he was a child. Many characters figure in the story Two of them, linger in one's memory— Shaw's heavy-bearded, solid, imperturbable grandfather, whose mind moved in a routine of crops, ploughing, sowing and reaping, of felling trcee and fattening cattle, and the doctor, who vm the oddity and the pride of the village. Equally memorable are the author's pictures of the wild AVest in winter, with everything smothered in snow, and of life in sanatoriums. ♦'♦ ♦ + It. is not usual Jo find at the commencement of a novel an account of the death of its chief character. That, however, is what we find on opening a novel by an Australian writer, Mary Kelaher. It is called "Apron Strings," and ie published by the Xew Century Press, Sydney. The account is flippant, and callous. Take this reference to the wife and two daughters of the dying man. "It was a lengthy business this dying. Joan would be bored, and Emily weary from her cramped position, and. Monica—but no, Monica was enjoying it; quite sorrowfully and respectfully, of couree, but etill enjoying it. Administration was one of her roles." The story is about thwi man from his childhood onward, and the point of it is that he is the victim of his mother's overpowering affection for him. It is a very ordinary etory, told with too much detail.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ A novel written on lines suggestive of "Oulliver's Travels" is "Over the Mountain." by Ttuthven Todd (Harrap). Tt is a strange tale, purporting to be the adventures of a young man who climbs and crosses a mountain over 2i>,oooft high to discover what is on the other side. Nnnr the top he comes on the frozen body of another man, who had set out on a similar quest some time before. He takes liis ice axe with him as a talisman. With great difficulty, and, after much suffering aad loss of memory, he reaches the unknown country, where he has some astonishing experiences. Or, does he imagine he had them? One gets the impression that it is all an hallucination and is intended as a satire on the state of things in Central Europe. Tt is clever in its way, if vague. Especially well done i<s the graphic description of the difficulties he met with both in climbing and descending the mountain, hie hair-breadth escapes, his ; atense suffer*, ings and his emotions.