GIRL’S NOVEL CAUSES BUZZ

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30558, 29 September 1964, Page 2

GIRL’S NOVEL CAUSES BUZZ

(N Z P A -Reuter—Copyright) LONDON, Sept. 28. Susan Lund, a petite 19-year-old blonde from the north-eastern seaport of Hull, has just hit the English literary scene with a novel using most of the four-letter words that were “out” until the courts gave the allclear to D. H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” four years ago.

Her young London publisher, Anthony Blond, predicts ' best-seller sales for “The Red Army.” The title has nothing to do with Russia or politics, but refers to a pink fish called the bergylt. Large landings of these are known on the Hull fish dock as a “red army.” The fish dock area is Miss Lund's own background and her subject. She is the daughter of a foreman sailmaker, as is her heroine.

She has not put the book into the hands of her father and mother—still less her 14-year-old sister Barbara —but realises they will soon know the worst.

“1 think they’re going to get an awful shock when they read it—it’s too blunt for them,” she said. They will probably not be the only readers to get “an awful shock.” More hair-rais-ing books have appeared in print, from those of Zola onwards; the shock will come from the fact that this is the work of a teen-age girl. Miss Lund certainly knows the dialect of her home town at its crudest, and records it unflinchingly. She is at her best in the detailed and concrete descriptions of the trawlers, the slippery and stinking quayside, the fish auctions and the truculent talk of the men.

With sly humour, she has given the name “Lady Chatterley” to the trawler most concerned in her story. Miss Lund, brought up in a semi-detached house among the trawler community, says that since leaving grammar school she has spent more time on the dole than employed. She has had four clerical jobs and at 17 went to London and worked in a store. Her previous literary ventures were a play accepted for television, which earned her £5O sterling—but was never produced because of a television strike—-and a broadcast short story.