BOOKS OF THE WEEK

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 2, 2 July 1938, Page 30

BOOKS OF THE WEEK

The Chief Librarian of the Wellington Public Libraries has chosen "The Moon is Feminine," by Clemence Dane, as the book of the week, and has furnished the following review.—

That peculiar Regency figure "Green" Cope, known as "the Green Man," must have been 5 a satisfactory mark for the wits of the period when wit was a quality highly prized among people of fashion. "Green" Cope lived on green foods,, drove in a green carriage with a green whip, and even went the length of dusting his hair with green powder. Miss Dane's pen might well have found sufficient material in a Sheridanesque analysis of Cope and the society in which he lived, but she has gone deeper than that, and shown us the eccentric from within as well as from without. There is a touch of Hans Andersen in Miss Dane's manner and the way in which she imparts the fairy influence. Green is a descendant of a Greene family, which comes from two green children who came out of a cave. Lady Molly Jessel, the younger daughter of an impoverished house, and a boy from the sea, fight for possession of Henry Cope's soul. There is an extraordinary atmosphere in this book, and Miss Dane in writing descriptive prose of this nature is at her very best. Green is perpetually drawn in two directions; once towards the world outside the world which has become outside his being, and again back to earth largely as the result of his consciousness of a plebeian immediate environment from which he has come. He rescues a seal on Brighton Beach from a net and from some children who are teasing it, and subsequently comes to the belief that this seal is the pet of his sea-gypsy from St. Martin's Land— whom he has met on the beach. There are those for whom wanderlust and the various calls from strange and distant places, real or imaginary, are stronger than the call of anything more ordinary and conventional. There are men who will love only incident-! ally, whose being is really dominated by influences which are not human. Such a one was Henry Cope, and the fact that his imaginary land was one of fantasy, only made the difficulty more acute. His head was in the clouds far above the ground, his feet were firmly rooted to the soil. The whole book is in the realm of imaginative literature. It is not ordinary fiction. It is pure fantasy with a little odd history, largely to give verisimilitude. Miss Dane's skill, however, carries her over a path which bristles with as many difficulties as any Bunyan devised, and brings her safely to a point where she can round off her story with a very satisfactory conclusion.