NEW BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS.

Press, Volume LXII, Issue 18680, 1 May 1926, Page 13

NEW BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS.

THE NEW TRAVELLERS. It is difficult, in an age in which every second woman is a traveller who writes, to keep paoo with their wanderings even in print. If it were not that they nil tiso a camera, ■which, however skilfully it is handled, lins Quite limited powers of imagination, wo should have to givo up tho attempt to keep our-.-olvcs acquainted with tho new worlds they arc conquering. There is tho ca<o of Lady Dorothy .Mills, for oxample, who 110 sooner showed the world the road to Timbuktu than sho was off again across the watching the Turk trying to adjust himself to peace after war, tho French struggling with Syria, and then tho British Arabs and Jews trying to build a new world in Palestine. Hut "Beyond tbo Besphorus," the sprightly narrative in which that second journey is set down for us, was clearly not her last, or she would not have been arguing during the week with the President ot Liberia about tho existence of cannibals in his forests. It may be accepted as certain that "Back of Beyond in Liberia" is already in the Press, and that long before the first impression reaches New Zealand tho author will be in Mexico City or up the Orinoco. And another fact that contributes to the reviewer's despair is his knowledge that sho is a Walpole, cr rather half a Walpole and half a very modern American. She no£ only takes her own way but says her own say, which means that she cannot be dismissed as a mere chatterer. She would make you tako notice even if she had not written a word, since her twenty-four whole-page illustrations (and eleven others) blend history so dramatically with geography that you cannot escape the effect. For example, facing page 114 you have a desert—Allenby road in 1918. At page 116 you come 011 the same spot again. Allenby road to-day, the main street of a city of more than 20,000 souls, with houses and shady trees trying' which can grow the fastest. And then, in case you should still have doubts, voti turn to page 118 and find the Hertzh'ah, a synagogue about the size of Christchurch Cathedral. (London: Duckworth and Co.).

It can hardly l>e said that Miss (or Mrs) Alice M. Williamson, who writes "The Lure of Vienna," is as entertaining as Lady Dorothy Mills, but she is very enthusiastic, and, like Lady Dorothy, knows how to use a camera. Tho fact that Vienna to her is the ''ancient City of Enchantments" makes her write a little more rhapsodically than she quite succeeds in justifying, but since it is a book of enthusiasms that she offers no one can complain. And those readers whom she does not capture with her praises of tho people, parks, and streets, has a sporting chance of getting with her account of the rejuvenation operations and experiments at the University—a storv she tells with something of the fafth' that moves mountains. (Sands and McT)ou«iH for Mills and Boon, Ltd., London.).

NOVELS. It would have been much easier to rend, and of course review, Mr Christophor Morloy's remarkable novel, "Thunder on the Left,," if there had not been the declaration of the N.Y. "Times" on the cover that "for sheer beauty and poignancy it ranks with anything published on this side of the Atlantic in the memory of our generation,'" and of the "Boston Heraid" that it is "a thing of beauty and a joy forovcr." The book will not enjoy even that limited "for ever" that begins with one generation and stretches dimly to the next, and if tbo memory of America, oven of living America, does not contain more remarkable things, tho literary history of the New World is poorer than anybody imagines, At the same time it is an altogether unusual novel, and places Christopher Morley among the handful of novelists writing in English whose next book will cause some little excitement in advance, Thero are somo very annoying faults—puns, and other smart and cheap sayings, which a writer of such capacity, if he did not avoid them iu the first place,' should certainly have removed from his first proof. Th'ero are also endless fleshly suggestions which aro not explained or justified by the presence of genuino passion. Finally, and of courso worst of all, there aro passages of deliberate or accidental mystification for which there is no excuse either in the general conception or in what serves for plot or theme. But these faults are far more than atoned for by imagination', by tenderness, by a subtle and really delicate understanding of tho tremendous problem of marriage, and by an attitude to life in general which is very near to poetry. That is to say, the book is one which must bo judged by high standards, if not quite by the highest, and the novels of which that can be said are of courso one at most in five hundred. —(Angus and Robertson, Ltd., Sydney.)

If Anthony Lang, the hero of ''South Sea Gold," by Charles Rodda, did not begin with more "lives" than most of the venturesome spirits in hidden treasure narratives, he certainly went out of his way to find trouble. The Btory has all the familiar features: the faded manuscript which contains the clue to the whereabouts of an island in niidocean where the treasure is "planted 1 ; the giant palm and so on; and then a mysterious and l>oautiful girl, who is held by a band of ruffians, who, knowing of Anthony's quest, sec that it is not lacking in incident. (London, Edinburgh, nnd New York: Thomas Nelson and Son*. Ltd.;. "Esau," by Victor MacClure, is a picturesque collection of sketches, in which the main figure is a large-hearted, hairy giant, with a rare faculty for deduction, who busies himself with the affairs of casual people, whom he nicets in all manner of places, and who at< the moment seem at oddß with tho world. The storyettes are full of variety, with m?ny (lashes of humour, and the diners ways in which Esau plays tho Good Samaritan and causes the sun to shine again in the lives of desolato folk are told with charm. (1/ondon: George G. Harrap and Co.) In "Miracle" Clarence Buddington Kelland bas produced a novel which tlie ordinary person will find at onco powerful and pathetic. Donovan Steele becomes so embittered by Fortune s tricks that he loses faith in God and man, and in that black mood leaves Quebec for the backwoods. On his way he meets Nerce Caron, who has also been terribly wronged, but who still retains faith. It can at least be said that tho manner in which the author now weaves the threads of their lives and causes Lc Malcteur to recover a normal viewpoint displays more than ordinary skill. (.London: Hodder and Stoughton.)