ROBIN HYDE’S NEW NOVEL

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 278, 20 August 1938, Page 5 (Supplement)

ROBIN HYDE’S NEW NOVEL

“Nor the Years Condemn,” by Robin Hyde (London: Hurst and Blackett).

The publishers do not hail “Nor the Years Condemn” as a sequel to “Passport to Hell”; however, Starkie is again the central character, and this time the period is that immediately following the war, when returned soldiers were faced with Utting themselves into civilian clothes again. It is not hard to guess that Starkie would find the process most distasteful. His is a temperament which the war showed to Advantage. In his amazing personal.courage big wild spirits found an outlet. New Zealand at peace provided no such outlet, and in the first chapters of “Nor th 0 Years Condemn," Starkie js lu and out of jobs and In and out of prison with monotonous regularity. Robin Hyde again affects the realism which was the most marked characteristic of “Passport to Hell,” and there is no doubt she does it well, but ‘.‘Nor the Years Condemn” is very loosely constructed. While Starkie is in prison, and in between episodes the reader is treated to descriptive passages, explanations of various political events in New Zealand, and paragraphs of general Information about the country. Her fund of knowledge about all sorts of odd things is aptazing, but its accuracy becomes 'open to criticism when she makes a character mention the Wairoa River as joining the Waikato at Ngarttawahia, which is far from the course of any of the three Wairoa rivers in New Zealand.

The best writing in the book is in that part which deals with the depression years, and tlie reader will have much sympathy for Starkie and for all the other unemployed men whom he typifies at that time. J