PUBLIC LIBRARIES

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 13, 15 July 1939, Page 20

PUBLIC LIBRARIES

BOOKS OF THE WEEK

The City Librarian has chosen "The Open Sky," by L. A. G. Strong, as the book of the week, and has furnished the following review:—

Mr. Strong can always be depended upon to write a story in which the freedom of the open air leaves a final good impression. "The Open Sky" is a story of a doctor, David Heron, who has abandoned the practice of his profession to become a writer. As a result of various .iarital troubles his nerves have gone to pieces, and he is recuperating on an island pfi° the west oast of Iceland. Ueron's parents have been unhappily married, and the taint has repeated itself in his own unfortunate relations with his wife.

Mr. Strong brings the island and a collection of odd types who live there to the rescue. First and foremost there is Sheila, a peasant girl, the illegitimate daughter of a peasant mother. Her father was a painter named Seager. She has a lover, a fisherman called Donough, who also lives on the island, and there are also her uncles, who are harsh, rugged characters. There are two old women who squabble over the dead body of an ancient man for whose love they had once contended. There is a mad priest who has yet much to commend him, and there is an idiot middle-aged farmer who at one stage in the book is attacked by a swarm of ferrets. The j characters and the incidents .have the same harsh quality, but the island is to David Heron something of a place of purification. Inevitably he is attracted towards Sheila. The complications of his own nature and the recurrent crises to which he subjects himself all fall to the ground before the natural simplicity of the girl's character. It is characteristic of Mr. Strong's writing that he manages to keep Heron's relationship with Sheila on a sane and normal plane: there is little constraint either here or in Heron's relations with the other inhabitants of the island (of whom there are not many, when one considers what an extraordinarily odd assortment they are). The author makes no claim to be a subtle psychologist. The book is by no means the heavy psychological type. He does, however. «dmit the impact of psychological consiJarations on the mind of the ordinary human being; indeed he shows without a wealth of philosophical example that the psychological processes are an inherent part of the human make-up. That, in order to do this, he has had to create as a foil a character of such simplicity that her psychological processes are so straight-forward as hardly to be worth the name, is the penalty which he has had to pay for bringing out in full detail the picture of the neurotic doctor. As with all Mr. Strong's books, the final feeling in the mind of the reader is a pleasant one. There is no question about it that the principal theme of the book is the effect of the straight-forward rather simple character of Sheila on the intricate mass of complexes that make up David; Father Morrissey, however, is one satisfactory character, finely drawn and as steady as Sheila, without the emotional struggles which prevent David being anything much more than a straw in the wind until towards the end of the book, when the author shows his solution to have been, at any rate to some extent, worked out by his sojourn on the island. RECENT LIBRARY ADDITIONS. Other titles selected from recent accession lists are as follows: —General: "Famous Plays," "Letters to -a Millionaire," by U. B. Sinclair; "Fastest on Earth," by G. E. T. Eyston. Fiction: "It Couldn't Happen to Us," by A. Stafford; "The Runaway," by K. Morris; "Mr. Emmanuel," by L. Golding.