NEW NOVELS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18861, 8 November 1924, Page 4 (Supplement)

NEW NOVELS.

STELLA BENSON'S WIT.

" Pipers and a Dancer"—{Macm ill an and Co.). —Stella Benson is one of tho most brilliant of a brilliant group of modern women novelists. Indeed, her Hashing (but never flashy) wit is apt to dazzle the reader and blind him to the underlying humanity of her work- This latest book is the story of a girl who travels out to China to be married, but on reaching her destination finds that the bridegroomelect has been carried off by brigands to the mountains where he dies of dysentery just as his release hiia beeu negotiated. There is material h;re for tragedy of the commonplace, obvious, miscalled sort, bul even a short acquaintance with Miss Ben fon's methods will acquit her of the charge of "obviousness." For Jacob Hemming, unpleasant, yet pathetic, bore, tragedy ends, not begins, with his capture and death. His epitaph is fittingly Bpokcn by kindly Dr. Narrowby. Well, well . , . poor chap. Someone's pressed him to stay at last."

The study of the " wee bride," self-con- I fesscd, but incorrigible poseuse, is cruelly clever, so cruel indeed that one cannot help feeling that Ipsie (the name is suggestive) is a savage piece of self-portraiture by the author. Mrs. Sophie Hinds is a delightful caricature of the Ella Wheeler Wilcos type: " Her writing catered painlessly to the painfully ordinary. Through it she believed that she was helpful to other stricken women, and the stricken readers Selieved the same ... ' Sophie

Sophie, you have a genins for leaving'! exactly the right amount unsaid,' apE lauded Pauline, and Mrs. Hinds, who ad intended in each thought to 6ay everything, was naturally delighted to find that she hod, so to speak, failed so successfully." There is more than a touch of "Saki" in Miss Benson's wit, and, to say that, is to assure the prospective reader of a treat j indeed

" The Boy in the Bush" (Seeker) —by D. H. Lawrence and M- L. Skinner-—"He felt as if there had been something damming life up as a great clot of weeds wfll dam a stream and make the water spread marshily and dead over the surrounding land" —in these words the author (for Mr. Lawrence's collaborator obviously does no more than supply local colour) unconsciously gives us a clue to the obstacles in his own path. This story of the early days in West Australia might have flowed in a clear, bright stream, nad it not been clogged with a morbid tangle o! sex relations. which makes it but a " fen of stagnant waters." There is power and to spare m the pictures ' U— of life in the wild, 1 but it is all mud- | died and spoilt by this martenng obsession. Oar copy is forwarded from Robertson and Mullen, Ltd. (Melbourne).

"The Roadside Fire"—by Madeline Linford (Parsons) — will to the critical reader, be particularly welcome as a confirmation of the exceptional quality that was apparent in i Miss Linford's first novel, "Broken Bridges," and a justification of the impression that the talents which created it would not be exhausted by a single achievement. . The "roadside fire" burns in an obscure Polish village where two English girls, meet-. ing and becoming friends on the way, join a little company of people engaged in relief work. Settings and atmosphere are manifestly, drawn from actual experience, and reproduced with the aid of vigorous and incisive prose. The story covers'a period of six months in the Polish winter, centres upon the life of the mission workers' home, and rarely goes beyond the.-tinv village. Within that narrow I cttclo, upon the drub background of the Polish peasantry, are sketched vivid portraits of the various types of men and women who have drifted to the roadside fire, and huddle- together » »■ in spite of sharp antipathies, against the piercing oold of tho s>iiuw, and the acute revulsions of starvation and squalor and disease that surround them.