BODIES... By “Caxton”

Northern Advocate, 14 September 1940, Page 10

BODIES... By “Caxton”

To The Isles of Spice, by Frank Clune (Angus and Robertson. 10/6). Illusion in Java, by Gene Fowler (Dent, 8/-).

All the glamour of the South Seas is in these two books. Java with its temples, venerable traditions and picturesque folk lore offers inexhaustible fascination in both books. Gene Fowler’s stage is never dull. Music, dancing girls, curious ceremonies, life in towns and villages all move in and out of shifting scenes of tropical enchantment. An engrossing story. Frank Clune gives us a palpitating narrative of his tour in the East Indies. The sun and winds seem at play in his all-awake breezy style. He saw things with .a quick appreciation for what mattered and what would interest the world that read about it. He liked to see things steadily and thoroughly too, as for example when he tried opium smoking so that he might know it at first hand and got nothing out of it but a headache and “a pain in the pit of the pinny.” One does not want to read either of these books because they deal with countries that may be entangled in the war, though that is not impossible, but, because both alike, but especially Clune’s, spill for us without stint an amazing wealth of information, woven into the story, neither dull nor heavy, but alive to the finger tips with captivating and sustained interest. <s * * * A DOCTOR LOOKS BACK. Those who read Harold Dearden’s earlier book of autobiographical recollections will need no bush to the wine of a new book in which he continues

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his life story under the title Time and Chance (Heinemann, 10/6). In this volume the author takes in a big slice of his varied experiences during the 1914-18 war. As a specialist in nervous diseases he explored some strange and startling cases. •? V $ * The Salt of Sanity. No. 957 is Modem Humour, edited by Guy Pocock and M. M. Bozman, and just the book to banish the blues. In the preface “Everyman” says: “Here is a nosegay of live specimens.” Sorry to find trivial fault with a riotously delightful book, but the association of a nosegay and live specimens is a shocking case of literary misalliance. The book’s all right though, and there is so much to choose from that you can pass up any author you don’t like and still find plenty left, for there are no less than 66 of them. Indeed it would be fairly hard to name a notable public humorist of modern times who is not represented; represented, one may say, by the cream of his genius not the skim milk. I can’t remember who said it but the war is proving it true —“Humour is the salt cf sanity.” If we are blessed with an overflow of humour —the real thing, we shall find ourselves welcome everywhere, in these times, and -the more we spread the genial smile and honest laugh the more we help to keep ourselves and others cheerfully and courageously sane, just when Hitler is doing his worst to stampede us into panic. If we lack overflowing wells of humour within ourselves and some of us feel guilty, here are wells to dip into at the heart’s content. * # -'f >'s HUMORISTS AT LARGE. “Everyman’s Libary” list reached me this week, 964 volumes. I was haunted with the idea that this renowned collection of books had reached the thousand mark. However, 964 is not far off, and among the last' dozen I noticed number 962, Stories and Episodes, by the now exiled author Thomas Mann; 961, Poems and Prose, by Swinburne; 958, Stories, Essays and Poems, by D. H. Lawrence; 956, Far Away And Long Ago, by W. H. Hudson. (Dent, 3/9 each net). The price is the new advanced pi-ice in London.