NEW FICTION

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27641, 23 April 1955, Page 3

NEW FICTION

The Law Of Larion. By Peter Freuchen. Evans Bros. 313 pp.

Peter Freuchen is best known as an explorer of the Arctic. He has lived in the far North-West for many years, and so he is able to bring an unusual first hand knowledge to the writing of this novel which is set in Alaska. Larion was the last great Indian chief of Alaska. He lived in the middle of the nineteenth century when the rewards of rich fur trading were drawing Europeans to the region. Both the Russians and the Hudson’s Bay Company were competing for the fruits of the Indians’ trapping, but it was to the Russians that Larion gave his allegiance, maintaining his contract according to his own strong standards of honour until it appeared to him that the Russians had betrayed him. Then his sense of outrage and his natural love of war caused him to take vengance on them, and after a grim massacre he went back to the forest to die a lonely old man. Mr Freuchen has written an outstanding book. It is a fine portrait both of a man and of the impact of one culture upon another. Larion is at the same time a man of almost brutish fierceness and astonishing integrity. The Russians with whom he deals are fair enough men and anxious to understand and treat amicably with the Indians but the inevitable lack of sympathy that their different outlook brings causes them to fail in their aim. Larion sees both himself and his people being weaned from their own loyalties and turned by easy living from the pursuit of what have hitherto been regarded as the only manly virtues. Mr Freuchen’s careful setting of the scene prepares for the final act of the drama, the massacre of Nulato. He writes with great vigour and strength and, conveys most satisfactorily the primitive but complicated minds of his people. Dust is My Pillow. By Phyllis Hastings. Dent. 288 pp. A lonely farm in the Cotswolds is the scene of much melodrama in this rather second-rate novel. A violent and overbearing father, (named Isaac), who fancies himself as a sort of Jehovah and continually thunders Biblical texts, tyrannies over five sons (named Benjamin, Joshua, Samuel, Daniel, and Reuben) and two successive wives, keeping them isolated from the rest of the world. But when he brings home a third wife, younger than his eldest son, forces are released which even this domestic despot cannot entirely control. The story is forceful and the background of country life authentic enough, but the characters* and situations, with their Biblical parallels, fail to convince.

THE PASSIONATE BROOD of Margaret Campbell Barnes’s novel (Macdonald 296 pp.) are the children of Henry Plantagenet and Eleanor of Aquitane, who are pictured here as a jolly, cosy family just like any other, having their little tiffs but all happy with mother laughing and joking in the Tower Room. Mrs Barnes has several new slants on history. Those who have wondered about the identity or even the existence of Robin Hood will be interested to know that he was the foster brother of Richard Coeur de Lion and the good influence behind the Plantagenets. Unfortunately his banishment by Richard in a fit of temper led to a sad decline in the management of home affairs that could have been avoided if Richard had yielded to popular demand and left him as regent when he went to the Crusade. The bitter war between Richard and his elder brother over the French possessions is just another of these ripples on the surface of family life. Richard refuses to honour his marriage treaty with the sister of Philip of France (who is called Ann and not Alice as most historians have thought) for the sake of a romantic love-at-first-sight - triumphing - over - difficulties match with Berengaria of Navarre. Mrs Barnes is wise enough to avoid writing in ‘Olde Englishe’ and keeps to the modern idiom, but the picture of Berengaria “tucking windswept curls under a snowy coif” hardly evokes the atmosphere of the period.