YOUNG WRITER'S EFFORT

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21924, 6 October 1934, Page 10 (Supplement)

YOUNG WRITER'S EFFORT

NOVEL OF ARTIFICIALITY " Heron " is the work of a young and inexperienced writer who has not learned that trying to bo clever usually ends in failure. It is the story of Richard Heron, a writer, and his three daughters, whoso love affairs end in futility, and in one case, suicide. There is nothing remarkable about the plot, which is readable enough, but the book is intensely artificial in characterisation and in its exotic manner of treating descriptions of the countrywide. An example of Miss Cavan's absurd method is instanced in the following extract: —"It was the little more of flagging twilight going down in rising day. It was the inception of faint pattern in the mist, which left the valley cased only partially in a pale shield; lingering plaques of vapour made precise designs, a bedizining of newly individual dipping fields with opaline glow. There evolved the more and more of timely pageant. Elaine's pink ceiling, the bland immensity that had not tainted their frail unearthly earth, grew stressed with red and gold, with tumbling clouds, becamo a recognisable sky. Spindlyjiills, an insubstantial pile like blue sugar bags ranged distantly, were made visible in a papery, crumpled mass." . Another curious example is contained in the following:—"The tight February landscape could not escape her. She invited it lovingly, mentally stroking the calm green face of a misty hill, with a narrow strip of bare woodland running across it like an incipient outbreak of moustache." These quotations are enough to show the reader of what stuff the setting of the story is composed. Miss Cavan has scarcely given a thought to the fact that the lover of the English countryside must shudder at such straining after effect in its description, which achieves nothing of beauty, but much of the bizarre. " Heron," by Romily Cavan. (Dent.)