AN OLD MASTER’S STORIES

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33929, 23 August 1975, Page 10

AN OLD MASTER’S STORIES

The Carfitt Crisis and Two Other Stories. By J. P. Priestley. Heinemann. 195 pp. N.Z. price $6.40.

The old master continues to retain his touch, even" in a most unlikely literary form. The two long tales in this new work, “The Carfitt Crisis” and “The Pavilion of Masques,” are plays reworked through a connecting narrative and offered as novellas with a recent short story sandwiched between them.

Mr Priestley retains the dramatic form by limiting severely the settings for his action and by deliberately avoiding all but the barest descriptions. Instead of stuffing his writing with details of what his characters are thinking and feeling, he lets them speak for themselves like the actors they are.

The results are sharp and perceptive. Both stories deal with deception and self-deception; nothing is quite as it seems and in both the most elusive and devious character turns out to be the sensitive manipulator, the man with the only sensible appreciation of

motives and the. way events hang together. “The Carfitt Crisis” contrasts the deceptions of affluent English middleclass life with the equal deceptions of the “alternative society” and its druginduced escapism. “Masques” owes a little to the remarkable historical relationship of King Ludwig of Bavaria and the adventuress Lola Montez in 1848. The contrast here is between the delusions of political authority and the delusions of radical politicians—with a healthy dose of sexual deception thrown in on both sides.

The tales are comedies in that they both end happily with some of the cast, at least, enjoying an improved understanding of themselves. They also expand further Priestley’s life-long exposition of life and manners and reinforce other of his recent writings in which his view has become saddened without bitterness or anger. “The Carfitt Crisis,” in particular, is so powerful that many readers might hope Mr Priestley will rework it again and put it back on stage. The result would be enthralling.