NEW FICTION

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30146, 1 June 1963, Page 3

NEW FICTION

After the Fine Weather. By Michael Gilbert. Hodder and Stoughton. 190 pp.

A new thriller by Michael Gilbert after four years will be hailed joyfully by his many admirers, and it is therefore disappointing to record that, despite his wellknown facility of expression and gift for creating suspense, it is just a little disappointing. The theme is an attempted coup d’etat by a neo-Nazi group in Austria whereby a pocket-Hitler seeks to isolate the South Tyrol and create there an autonomous State. To this end a political assassination of an Austrian Church dignitary is skilfully engineered, and an Italian desperado, recently released from prison, is neatly framed as the murderer. This scheme is confounded by the artless and unexpected intervention of Laura Hart, sister of the British viceconsul. whose sharp eyesight has picked out the real murderer, and, by fortuitous circumstances is able to identify him as a very nasty type of German bully. With such a cat among their pigeons it becomes evident to the conspirators that the lady must be either discredited or eliminated, and to outwit their manoeuvres an American journalist and a British Intelligence Officer have to resort to some quick thinking and even quicker action It is all immensely readable and exciting, but improbabilities and loose ends combine to make it less convincing than it might be.

Occasion For Loving. By Nadine Gordimer. Gollancz. 288 pp.

Nadine Gorduner brings to this book her special gift of insight into race relations The tragedy of a white woman's liasion with a black man is not new. but here there is no bias to bedevil the implicit tragedy. Tom Stilwell, a lecturer in history in Johannesburg, and his wife, Jessie, have made a firm compact to ignore the colour bar, and when Boaz Davis returns home to study certain African musical forms, bringing with him his beautiful English wife, Ann. they ere glad that she shows no embarrassment tn mixed racial company. Her subsequent affair with Gideon Shibalo. a distinguished painter, and a member of the Congress, does not come wholly as a surprise Sexually indiscriminate and without .thought fcr the future. Ann heads happily into their affair. which Shibalo resignedly knows may spell disaster for him, though the girl could escape the unpleasant consequences simply by leaving him. The author avoids overt drama, simply presenting the situation as it affects Boaz and the Stilwells and their reactions to its complexities Boaz, who might well have abandoned his wife to a white lover is doubly anxious to keep her, firstly, because of the legal mess in which she may find herself, and secondly because he wants to appear "civilised” in countenancing his wife’s infidelity with another man regardless of his colour. There is an inevitable flatness in the final solution which is always implicit, because Ann’s irresponsible indifference to the major problem of her situation makes it so As a study in human relationships, including Jessie's with first her toopossessive mother and later with her unloved teen-age son. this novel shows Nadine; Gordimer at her skilful best ' and it makes a brilliant i contribution to the South! African racial question byi one who it. I

The Chest With A Secret. By Yvonne De Bremond D'Ars. Gollancz. 223 pp.

Mlle, de Bremond D’Ars is a skilful weaver of modern fairy tales. Being an antiquedealer in Pans, she must have had many interesting experiences on which to base her pleasant fantasies, and as she writes in the first person her stories have a convincing flavour of autobiographical reminiscence. This one concerns an old marriage-chest which came into her possession in the ordinary coursd of business. In it she found a secret drawer which contained a pink satin gown decorated with rose-petals, obviously designed as some sort of fancy-dress. Close on the heels of this discovery, a charming young lady presented herself at the antique shop and told the author that the chest had belonged to her father, and had been sold with other household furniture at his death. She knew that the dress belonged to her mother, who was “a wonderful woman, beautiful as a fairy . . pious, good and brave,” but who, through mysterious circumstances had gone out of her father’s life shortly after her birth. The girl was just about to go to America for six months, and on the spur of the moment the author promised to try and trace this “fairy mother.” The book explains how, after a long search and with the help of a romantic aristocrat, the Marquise de SaintCyriaque. she achieved her object and effected a reunion between the woman and the daughter she had not seen since infancy Her fascinating quest took the author into some strange corners of Paris, and brought her into contact with a number of human i oddities. Though somewhat overloaded with sentiment, the story is never dull, and will be read with enthralled interest by those who have fallen'under the spell of the narrator’s two earlier books Barbara Lucas has maoe a good job of the translation. Tortoise By Candlelight. By Nina Bawden. Longmans. 239 pp. The tragi-comedy of childhood is admirably portrayed in this book. Emmie Bean is thirteen, and lives in a squalid old house on the edge of a river in a dim suburban environment. She cherishes a fierce and defensive love for her Calvinistic grandmother, her drunken journalist father, her teen-age sister spoiling for sexual experience. and her eight-year-old brother, who combines the charm and beauty of Little Lord Fauntleroy with the habits of a juvenile delinquent. She also loves her brown squirrel, Oliver’s two tortoises, and the old, smelly family dog. Oliver’s only real affection is unfortunately centred upon a retired gaolbird whose knowledge of wild life is a matter to him of the deepest reverence. When Nick Sargent brings his mentally-unbalanced, jealous, and suspicious wife to live in the house next door a new complication arises. Marjorie Sargent falls under the spell of Oliver’s charm and lavishes upon him her thwarted maternal love, which does not prevent him from trying to purloin some unconsidered trifles from the house: and Emmie develops a deep unfathomable adoration for Nick, which Marjorie is all too quick to divine and resent. A climax of emotion builds up. which Oliver’s entanglement with his exconvict serves to intensify The children’s terrified reactions to a dangerous and criminal assignment is of the stuff of life, and the ensuing tragedy is in no way contrived This is an outstandingly good novel which puts its author into the front ••’nk of fiction writers.

Always Go First Class. By Laurence Marks. Longmans. 213 pp.

These pages contain all the fascination of an old lag’s reminiscences, being an account of the under-cover methods of racketeering on the high seas. Ronnie Grant, an uninhibited young man, whose father is not anxious to take him into the family business, employs his seductive charm on a susceptible woman secretary to such profitable effect that she manages to have him taken on as a steward inft that famous liner the “Anne Boleyn,” which plies between New York and Jamesport. Ronnie has had some experience of the work in smaller ships, but the potentialities of acquiring money by dishonest means had been negligible by comparison with the opportunities now presented to him. To assist the comprehension of the dim-witted reader he appends a glossary of argot, much of it being the odd rhyming slang which has been current in East London for more than half a century. He is lucky enough to acquire for his “China” (plate) or mate a very tough guy indeed who is on to the inumerable fiddles such as falsifying store-lists, and the covet ways of acquiring indecent films and postcards) which, properly handled, can make a modest fortune for the simple seaman. From the literally stinking underworld of the crew’s quarters Ronnie learns a thing or two about “blueys,” “bungs” “fruit kings" and their methods, as well as the best way to extract the maximum “dropsy” (tips) from the “bloods,” or first-class passengers. After a few twoway voyages he has amassed modest wealth, but though the> wages of sin prove to be less drastic than death they melt away with alarming speed in a poker-game with a super crook, and Ronnie finds himself obliged to resort to his lady friend once more for her influence in getting him another sea-going job. It is all good, if not exactly clean, fun I Take This Land. By Richard Powell. Hodder and Stoughton. 437 pp. This book competently depicts the growth of one of America’s later pioneer exploits—the opening up of South-West Florida. It covers the six decades between 1895 and the end of the Second World War; and gives an insight into the lives of a tough people who inhabited a land of promise that many of them would have liked to preserve from the inexorable march of progress. In 1895. the year of the Big Freeze, the possibility of starting a citrusfruit industry which would be untouched by climatic conditions became apparent to an ambitious young Philadelphian. Ward Campion, who, having won in a poker game a charter to build a railroad over the territory, persuaded the powerful Henry B. Plant to back his project financially. The ensuing 20 years were to see the steady development of Everglades and the human problems involved, especially those of three men and two women. Campion himself is the dominating figure; then there is the gentle teacher. Anne Beavis, whom he loved but violated so that in revulsion she refused to marry him; Rush Lightburn, the cunning, half-wild hunter, his fierce sister Julie, who became Campion’s wife, and left him with their child when he made a mock of her before his friends; Joel Emmett the steady plodding farmer, whose marriage to Anne led indirectly to iealousies and bloodshed, and the many disastrous conseouences which followed on the reckless conduct of three of the actors tn the human

drama. The hard business world of America, and the struggle for wealth and power are well described in these pages, and the thoughts and actions of a people swayed by strong wills and stronger passions come to life.