NEW FICTION

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27018, 18 April 1953, Page 3

NEW FICTION

A Daughter’s a Daughter. By Mary Westmacott. Heinemann. .200 pp. “Mary Westmacott” is the pseudonym adopted by Agatha Christie for her novels which are not detective stories; this is the third of her “straight” novels (its predecessors were “Absent in the Spring” and “Giant’s Bread”). It is a subtle psychological study of -a mother and daughter, immensely readable and full of enlightened understanding of the feminine heart. The opening passages, presenting''an attractive widow verging on 40, who wants to marry again and her only daughter of 18 who is instinctively opposed to the marriage, seem conventional enough, but the novel develops into a drama of selfdeception. frustration and unhappiness which is far from conventional. It has moments of true pathos, relieved by a gentle ironic humour and the concluding reconciliation between mother and daughter reached in the light of final self-knowledge is thoroughly satisfying. In the clear characterisation and capable writing readers will recognise the “Mary Westmacott” they know from less ambitious works.

The Winged Horse. By Pamela Frankau. Heinemann. 416 pp.

The bright wit of Pamela Frankau’s dialogue alone makes her novels worth reading but this is only one of the many qualities of her new novel. It contains a devastating study of a British newspaper magnate, an absorbing struggle between good and evil in the relationship of two very dissimilar men —one an American political cartoonist and the other a British sculptor—and two delightful pox-traits of charming women. There is much shrewd comment on life on both sides of the Atlantic too. It is a novel of high technical accomplishment, whose sophistication and gaiety do not exclude considerable passion and a rare understanding. Only rarely is a novel so amusing and at the same time so moving.

SIX FOR HEAVEN (Hodder and Stoughton. 256 pp.) is a warm-hearted and lively story about the early life of an Australian girl by Dorothy Lucie Sanders. Theodora is one of five daughters of an Irish parson and his Australian wife; the story extends from their happy childhood before the 1914-18 war, through the troubled, but still gay period of the mother’s struggles to support the family after the father’s death, up to Theodora’s final happy marriage. It is told with considerable verve and frequent insight. The portrait of the Irish father is particularly good; the Irish character, in fact, constitutes a recurring theme in the novel. If the later scenes are more conventional, the early (probably autobiographical) chapters have some genuine distinction.

THE IRRESISTIBLE (Macdonald. 286 pp.) is a delightful historical novel by Alexandra Dick about the life of the beautiful Madame de Montespan who was for 11 years the mistress of Louis XIV. There is plenty of dramatic material here—in the splendour of the Court of the Roi Soleil and the building of Versailles, in the furious unforgiving rage of Mme. de Montespan’s abandoned lawful husband, in the rivalry between the frivolous and charming Madame . de Montespan and the pious and boring Madame de Maintenon (who started her rise in life as governess to the children of Mme. de Montespan and the King); and in the eventual decline of the heroine’s fortunes and the accusations of dabbling in black magic brought against *her by her enemies. Mrs Dick presents Mme. de Montespan as a very human and engaging personality, gifted with a sometimes biting wit, dignified and thoroughly aristocratic, by no means the- ‘wanton witch’ that she is sometimes represented. Her book is written with a conscientious approach to historical fact but it is continuously lively, colourful and entertaining. TISA (Museum Press. 317 pp.) by Helga Moray is a flamboyant and melodramatic tale of harems, intrigue and violence set in Stamboul in 1560. Tisa is a beautiful Christian girl who,

when her young brother is carried off by the Janissaries as tribute to the infidel Sultan Suleimen, vows to devote her life to fighting the Turks. Abducted by the Sultan’s commander, Kerebin Barbarossa, she becomes a member of his harem but uses her power over him to spy on the Turks and send out information to the Christians. The. story ends with the battle of Malta.

A TOUCH OF THE SUN (Quality Press. 204 pp.) by H. B. Kaye, is a novel about Kenya, romantic and improbable, but of some interest for its account of life among the British settlers in East Africa 30 or 40 years ago. The central character is far from plausibly presented: she begins as a pleasant young woman, emerges as a sadistic fiend who beats a native houseboy to death, and finishes as a sentimental elderly lady trying indirectly to repair the errors of her earlier life and express her faith in the future of Kenya and “the right kind” of settler. As a whole, the novel is not impressive, but isolated scenes are effectively described.