AN ORIGINAL TALENT

Northern Advocate, 29 December 1937, Page 2

AN ORIGINAL TALENT

(By L. A. G. Strong). “The Young Desire It,” by Seaforth Mackenzie (Jonathan Cape), Every now and again there appears in literature, not the Man from Nowhere, but the Man from Somewhere Else. It does not. much matter where j he was bom, or where he lives, Somewhere Else being in his case a land of the imagination. Mr Seaforth Mackenzie is a Man Uom Somewhere Else. He describes to us life in Australia, but the fact is unimportant. The important point is that his vision of the world and his way of recording it are essentially his own. That the scene is Australia lends it, I suppose, a kind of physical novelty: but it is Mr Mackenzie’s achievement that he makes his readers at home. Exotic though the landscape is, and unfamiliar the trees, he at once extends our experience to include it. Not since “Kangaroo” have I read a | book which so immediately realised to my senses an alien scene, and made me free of physical and emotional experiences beyond my own. A New Setting.

Charles Fox, Mr Mackenzie’s hero, goes to an Australian boarding school. We meet him as his mother brings him to the head master, and leave him ,in his last year, after his first love has been taken from him. Apart from its setting, it is the sort of story that has often been written before.

The sensitive boy, perceptive but lacking in the hardness that makes an artist: the brutal school; the stern yet understanding Head: the young classical master who falls in love with the sensitive boy; the girl met in a wood: the awakening of young love—we have had it all so often, in fiction and socalled fiction, that we never want to see it again. Yet here it all is, written once more for the first time, with force and sincerity, and, as I said, a new view of the world.

One can pick any number of holes in this beautiful performance without detracting from its beauty and its value. Mr Mackenzie offers us that rare thing, an original talent, in the white heat of its first honesty, and there is nothing to do but acknowledge it with gratitude and something like awe.

Emotional Perception.

There are things here which any writer might be proud to have seen and caught in words. The' mare Julia shaking herself ‘with a little thunder’: and this;

Suddenly the great bell of the chapel began to ring, as it rang only on Sundays and on the first day of a new term. It crashed among its own echoes, each stroke hanging crowded on .the air and spreading out as relentlessly as a ripple spreads on the face of still water, impossible of arrest. There came, after the first stroke, the frantic beating of pigeons’ wings; they were always sent flinging across the day from their refuge in the towers, as though so great a sound had muscular force to hurl them out like a giant.

These exactitudes of physical perception, are matched by an emotional perception as sure, though not always as surely expressed.