BOOK NOTES

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVI, Issue 310, 28 November 1936, Page 7

BOOK NOTES

"BIG TIMBER." William Hatfield’s "Big Timber” is a novel of excellent background. Mr Hatfield lias taken the timber of the Blue Mountains (New South Wales) for his real hero, and it is a hero worth reading about. Interpreted with the sincerity and flexibility of his pen, tile big timber in this novel gradually grows to possess the reader with its intrinsic romance, its drama and steadfastness, just as it possessed Dale Garnett, the nominal hero of the book. All Dale’s ideals and his loyalties were locked away in the timber he loved more than man or woman, and all the author’s care and magic in "Big Timber” have been lavished on the trees. In making them live ho has neglected to make his man and woman real people. Dale is a paragon. There is nothing ho attempts that he does not adorn with success—axemanship, leadership, scholarship, sportsmanship. He has every abstract virtue, and remains to the last an abstract of manly perfection rather than a man. Helon, his fiancee, talks viv idly enough when she is in the picture, but what of her thoughts and feeling** during the long years of separation from Dale ? She is given credit for nothing but a glib loyalty; too glib to be artistically satisfying. The book’s strength is in the earthly actuality of its timber chapters, the Mangers and rhythms *of felling and hauling in the Burragorang and Walda valleys, and the catastrophic timber drive towards the end.' JOHN VAN DItUTEN. John Van Druten, playwright and novelist, has mastered to a nicety the slick, contemporary fashion for weaving a story around intrinsically commonplace characters, endowing these figures with life, and, without going one inch over the bounds of possibility, making a book which is interesting all the time one is reading it —however soon one may forget it after the last page is finished. In this latest work of his, “And Then You Wish,” lie takes a little old lady, Blanche, who is passionately interested in the stage, introduces her to an uncouth young man, who is a writer of unproduced plays, has her mother this unrecognised genius, go to all sorts of lengths to get one of his works produced, and finally, when her bantling lias "arrived,” shows her cast olf by the fellow for whom she has done so much. Mr Van Druten is too competent a craftsman to lay himself open to criticism on technical grounds. He has done a well-finished job.

"I AM BLACK.” America has given us quite a few novels, both by white and negro authors, describing the black man’s reactions to white domination and to conditions in his own environment. But there springs to one’s mind no previous work along these lines whi" deals so simply and convincingly with the problem of an uneducated and uncivilised black majority, as does “I Am Black,” by J. Grenfell Williams and Henry John May. The story is laid in South Africa, the central character being Shabola, son of a minor Zulu chief, who is forced, by various circumstances, to forsake the life of the kraal, which he loves, to work for the white man in the Johannesburg mines, and, later, as a house-boy. Without jeopardising the very real artistic value of thenwork by adopting either an indignant or a moral attitude, the authors have managed to convey the bewilderment of the Kaffir when confronted with white man’s justice, and the clash between age-old tribal tradition and a new civilisation, which robs the black man of his own social background without giving him anything to take its place. This is an excellent novel. “THE POISONERS.” George Preedy (alias Marjorie Bowen), historical novelist, has brought off an exciting tour-de-force in "The Poisoners.” It is a novel of crime and detection, as blood-chilling and breathcatching as the best modern work in that genre, yet it is set against a live background of 17th century Paris, and the ghastly events its portrays are said to be founded on the authentic basis of police records of the period. Apparently the Paris over which Louis XIV., "the Sun King,” spread such a glittering panoply of extravagance, hid many a cesspool of subtlest crime and repulsive superstition. A young and ardent police lieutenant stumbled on evidences of a highlyorganised “gang” of poisoners, which included perverts from the highest aristocracy, the medical profession, the army, down to the lowliest villains and villainesses. Their insidious methods of spreading death and corruption were difficult and dangerous to track, and even more ticklish to reveal, since the detection threw Paris into a panic and brought devilish accusations to the very chamber of the King’s unscrupulous favourite, Madame de Montespan. Yet, trace and reveal the upright Chief of Police and his astute assistant, did; until piece by piece the hideous practices ol the poisoners were unmasked, and their diabolical leaders brought to destruction. The unfolding of this black under-leaf of French history is straighforwardly, aptly done, avoiding lurid exaggeration, and yet dissecting and synthesising the inherent drama of the situation so as to achieve urgency, pace, suspense.