CATHEDRAL CLOSE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22504, 22 August 1936, Page 4 (Supplement)

CATHEDRAL CLOSE

A SEQUESTERED SOCIETY After the high explosives of much modem fiction, the leisured ease and cloistered calm of Susan Goodyear's "Cathedral Close" is like green, refreshing shade. The dean, three canons, precentor, minor canons, lesser Church dignitaries and their wives form a community almost self-contained. Scarcely a breath from the mundane world disturbs their placid existence, and gradually the cathedral conies to stand for more than the needs which brought it into being. It is a toy world of small useless things, wherein human beings come to mean less than signs and symbols, and trifles appear like things of moment. A new dean, and perhaps more important still, a new dean's wife, comes to the Chapter—people from the hurlyburly of the outside world—and they find difficulty in accepting the cathedral viewpoint. Both have individuality, the wife has humour, and has once indiscreetly written a novel. The surface is rippled, and although the action shifts only by an almost imperceptible piece at a time, and that piece is discussed and thrashed from all angles (Mrs. Goodyear is very clever at finding new angles), gradually the ripple becomes a storm of the first magnitude. Scandal has raised its unpleasant head in the close, and it is not to be appeased until a canon has been led to the sacrificial altar. . Mrs. Goodyear, herself a cathedral wife, naturally knows her close well, and tells her story with humour and svmpathv, showing the mixture of piety, good works, snobbery, sincerity and seltdeception which exists in that sequestered socvety. "Cathedral Close," by Busan Goodyear. (Chatto and Wimliis.)