RAPID REVIEWS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19412, 21 August 1926, Page 7 (Supplement)

RAPID REVIEWS

" The Venture Book," by Elinor Mordaunt (The Bodley Head). " Mape," by Andre Maurois (The Bodley Head). " Revelations of a Society Clairvoyante," by Nell St. John Montague (Thornton Butterworth). " The Pursuit," by L. W. Vedrenne (Allen and Unwin). " The dropping of the anchor outside new islands—islands and islands and islands, no two ever alike: ever-changing languages and ever-changing peoples; all in the little—small as a jewel so that it seems as though one were able to take it up in the hollows of one's two hands, feel tho warmth of it, turning it, catching the glow upon it as upon a jewel—that for me is life." Let nobody whose interest is in tho trodden ways of the world, the hum of busy cities or the amenities of modern travel, think to find anything to their tasto in " The Venture Book." Elinor Mordaunt- has a fierce love of the sea but not as .viewed from the hurricane deck of a paiatial liner. Give her a battered auxiliary schooner, black with soot and heaving with cockroaches, and she feels " as completely at homo as though she had never been anywhere else." While few perhaps are hardy enough to enjoy personal contact with such stark realities, there is enough of the lurking bohemian in most of us to derive a keen pleasure at second hand from this very individual travel book to thrill as we gaze upon our >" first flight of flying fish like elfin silver scimitars of the sea," or upon a nautilus " with all its tiny orchid-iike sails set, indomitably sailing a momentarily tranquil, perfectly blue and yet to it no larger in all its pride and panoply than half a thumb's length—unending ocean."

M. Maurois has done it again. With the subtle blend'of wit and insight that revealed in " Ariel" the essential Shelley, he has now penetvated the mind of the writer, tho reader and tho actor, and incidentally etched delicately brilliant impressions of Goethe and Mrs. Siddons. For in that dream-world of " Mapo," tho writer remoulds events to his own liking, and out of his harmless intimacy with the virtuous Lotte Buff emerge tire sighs and storms of " The Sorrows of Werther:" the reader of Balzac is transformed into a mere character in one of the master's novels: and even Mrs. Siddons, despite the perfectly sincere grief she feels at' her daughter's death, is yet able, in her portrayal of Queen Constance, to-use that grief to deepen and enhance her art so that " in the depths of her actress' soul a far off melody, frail and almost' gay, murmured again and yet again, ' I have never acted so well.' " Much as the virtuous reviewer may deplore the lack of reticence and even of common decency which produces the highly-spiced memories of the Asquithian order it must bo admitted that from the journalistic point cf view they have their merits. They are eminently quotable. But what is to be done with such books as, " The Revelations of a Society Clairvoyante?" I it, Nell St. John Montague (in private life Mrs. Standish Barry), recounts some of her experiences as a crystal-gazer, and very lurid some of her visions are. But as the heroes and heroine of her stories are referred to merely as Lord A, Lady Y, or Sir A.B. (for oven seers it seems may be snobs), the valuo of the revelation from both the social and scientific point of view is somewhat discounted. The Declaration of Independence mentions among tho inalienable rights of man, " life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." This is tho pursuit which gives the title to L. W. Vedrenne's rather unusual story. David Kvteland inherits a share in Kytelands' Wharf, a flourishing portion of the Thames dockside. Ho developes the sound business instinct which has distinguished his family for several generations and, being well on tho road to prosperity, he marries a girl to whom lite means a decorous round of .expensive amusements. Then he discovers within himself a puritan strain, a simplicity which instinctively revolts from the bondage of luxury. Too late he finds the woman he should have married. But this is no variation on the eternal triangle. * David shoulders his burden but resolves that his small son, when he reaches manhood, shall have the freedom to choose his life which he himself has been denied.