LATEST FICTION

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22386, 4 April 1936, Page 4 (Supplement)

LATEST FICTION

PICTURESQUE STORY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ITALY "The, Son of Marietta," by Johan Fabricius, is an extraordinarily long novel concerning life in eighteenthcentury Italy. The author is known to English readers for his refreshing and vigorous novel "The Lions Starve in Naples," translated from the Dutch a couple of years ago. This writer is a born teller of tales as the early chapters of his new novel amply testify. The story opens vividly with all the trappings of romance. A company of players, laughing and calling from carriage to carriage, arrive one moonlight night at the gate of the old episcopal city of Todi and request lodgings for the night. They stay yet another night, and give a greatlyappreciated performance. Then, having paid the rascally innkeeper his outrageous /dues they go their way. But they leave behind them a young baby girl. The council of Todi shoulders the responsibility of the child, who is called Marietta, and pay the innkeeper for her keep. Marietta grows up with the other children. She is precocious and unruly, and shows promise ol beauty, but is quite unconscious of her romantic, arrival in Todi. The girl has an ugly childhood. Her adopted mother is a semi-invalid and is unable to protect her from the violence of the innkeeper. When she dies Marietta seeks refuge in a convent outside the city, and for two years knows happiness in the serenity of convent life. Her dream of becoming a nun is broken by a request from the new Bishop of Todi that she should enter his household and receive musical as well as domestic training. Thus begins a new phase in Marietta's life. The bishop, realising the Eossibilities of her personality, trains er to take a place iu a more sophisticated world than that of Todi, yet when the time comes to make her choice she refuses her opportunities, and marries a young coffin-maker, because she does not want to leave Todi. Within a year, and after much mental suffering* Marietta bears a son and the focus of interest in the story is fradually removed from Marietta to er son. Benedetto, as the boy is called, grows into a clever but strange youth, whose escapades become the talk of the town. He is clearly marked for a bad end, and after robbing a grave he is forced to flee from Todi and eventually finds himself in Venice, on the gallows. Benedetto never succeeds in gaining the readers sympathy, which was so readily given to Marietta, and even the historical background fails to bolster up the latter half of the book. It may bf> that some distinction in style, which is part of the original, has been lost in translation. As it stands, the story is hardly worth the tedium of finishing its 1000 odd pages, but the first half is extraordinarily Interesting. "The £>on of Marietta," by Johan Fabricius. (Gollancz.)

POWERFUL NOVEL A NEW ZEALAND AUTHOR It is n6t often that the blase modern reader is swept ofF his feet by the sheer „ vigour and emotional power of a novel. That makes it all the more pleasing that 6uch a novel has been written by a New Zealand writer, and all the more surprising that it has been written by a woraan. She is already well known to us by other aliases than M. Escott, hut by this book, " Show Down," she has won herself a place among the top rank of our writers. Every reader of " Show Down " will look forward to a further development of a talent which has not until now been allowed full play. To an old story of one woman and two men, M. Escott's powerful style gives new life and meaning. It is terse and vigorous, sometimes to the point of crudity, and no more telling way of expressing emotion could have been chosen. The theme is at times almost unbearably tragic, but not a single concession is made to the reader's longing, if not for a " happy ending," at least for some measure of " poetic justice.'' The plot itself is simple. An Englishman, long resident in New Zealand, owns a small farm in the Waikato, to <'.■ which he brings a cultured, wealthy and extremely attractive English girl. When the glamour of their love wears thin, she leaves him for another man—not a clean, swift break, but an-infinitely cruel and- lingering parting, during which the farmer (and the reader with him, so intensely real is the pain) reaches the depths of suffering and bit- ; terness and iespair. And there the author leaves them. In her treatment of this triangular clash of emotions, she nears perfection. The book does not attempt to creep into the New Zealand reader's favour merely by reason of its New Zealand setting. Indeed, if anything is to be learned from a comparison of this story with those novels whose chief claim on our attention is the fact that they concern our own country, it is that M. Escott has captured the genuine atmosphere of colonial life by the very simple method of not trying to. The setting is incidental to what is essentially an introspective study of instinct and emotion. Yet even a stranger, reading the book with no preliminary knowledge of New Zealand, must subconsciously build up in his mind a more vivid and realistic picture of New Zealand life than any amount of tuis, rata blossoms and boiling mud pools could give him. " Show Down," by M. Escott. (Chatto and Windus.)

THREE GENERATIONS "*• SAGA OF WESTERN AMERICA In his very long novel, "Hands," Sir. Charles G. Norris has attempted a "Forsyte Saga" of California, a task requiring for success the vision of a rare artist. His book is divided into three parts. In the first is seen the lowly family be- • ginnings. There is the jobbing carpenter, industrious and plodding, finding solace for his drab life in the revivalist preachings of f) wight L. Moody; thereafter a dry bigoted zealot who yet found it hard to tread the narrow path. The scene shifts to his son, caught up in the wave of money-making, sweeping from success to success, a dynamic American who believes there is nothing dollars cannot buy. The last book shows the third generation, a grandson brought up in gilded luxury, surfeited with pleasure, mature ;and soft at twenty', ill prepared for the eventual crash caused by the great San Francisco earthquake and the fall in world m arkets J It is a great theme to bridge the gap between the sturdy pioneers and the jazz life of to-day. Mr. Norris is a competent workman, but it does hirri no injustice to say that ho lacks the vision and the selection of John Galsworthy. Like his hero he is a good carpenter who can build up a book about any subject he tackles. Working to a formula he industriously sits down to tell a story and work in the incidents he requires. / hy Charles G. Uwsria. (Heine-