Berta Ruck's ancestral voices

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33141, 3 February 1973, Page 10

Berta Ruck's ancestral voices

Ancestral Voices. By Berta Ruck. Hutchinson. 283 pp. “No” writes Berta Ruck in her foreword, “Not the ‘ancestral voices prophesying war’” and it is only too obvious that there is none of the compelling quality of Coleridge’s voices in this book. Berta Ruck’s ancestral voices are those of some members of her own family — real voices, most of which spoke in Regency or Victorian times. These voices are heard today in letters which the author’s sister discovered in her attic, and less authen-

tically in conversations which the author invents to fit known situations. There is no doubt that some of the extracts from the letters make fascinating reading and one cannot help wishing that Berta Ruck had used more letters and given a simple connecting narrative to fill in the gaps. She has chosen, however, to present them in a curiously complicated manner. In the foreword she writes, "How strange the echoes of pompously stylised speech must sound interspersed with our own casual gabble.” Probably with the intention of underlining the strangeness of these letters from the past this is exactly the juxtaposition she makes. The extracts from the letters are continually interrupted by scraps of dialogue between the author and sister discussing the writer, the topics or anything else which springs to mind. This makes the narrative hard to follow and gives the book an extremely scrappy and episodic feel. Nevertheless there is considerable interest and enjoyment to be found in this latest publication by a prolific writer whose zest for living ; , seems undimmed by the fact that she celebrated her ninety-third birthday shortly before "Ancestral Voices” appeared.