Short Stories

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29366, 19 November 1960, Page 3

Short Stories

Ring Delirium 123. By Gwyn Thomas. Goilancz. 192 pp.

Gwyn Thomas is a conscious virtuoso. The words pour out on the page complete with beautiful Welsh inflections, and the result is a prose humorous and fascinating to read. After four or five pages, Mr Thomas pauses, and the spell-bound reader agrees that he has read a story. Sometimes there really has been a plot to develop, sometimes not. It never really matters, for in “Ring Delirium 123” it is the idiom that counts. The setting is the village of Meadow Prospect, a comer of Wales where apparently eccentricity is the norm.

Spring Song and Other Stories. By Joyce Cary: 285 pp.

Spring Song' and ' Other Stories” will probably be the last from Joyce Cary’s' pen. Coming from so notable a writer, they all have their interest, although some are very slight, the merest sketches. “A Hot Day" and “You’re Only Young Once” are examples. They both belong to 1956, and would perhaps have been expanded if the author had lived. The African stories will probably make the strongest appeal to Cary’s admirers. Irish Short Stories. Edited by Valentin Iremonger. Faber-288 PP.

The ' selection of Irish short stories opens with an uncharacteristic piece of bitter-sweet romanticism from George Moore (1852-1933), and closes with a sharply observed incident quite in the modern manner, by John Montague, who was bom in 1929. Several of the stories will be familiar to many readers already. Perhaps the story from “Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.,” and “The Dead,” from James Joyce’s “Dubliners,” could have been taken for granted. It was, however, an inspiration to rescue Edward Sheehy’s “Protholamion” from the files of “Horizon.” This, with James Plunket’s “The Eagles and the Trumpets,” will be thought to be the most distinguished work in Mr Iremonger's selection. A lighter note is struck in Maurice Kennedy’s “Vladlvostock,” a sophisticated study of youthful awkwardness.