LIFE IN IRELAND

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22616, 2 January 1937, Page 4 (Supplement)

LIFE IN IRELAND

SADNESS AND TRAGEDY Possessing a relentless flavour, a highly sustained note of tragedy and a constant undercurrent of sadness, " Mount Prospect," by Elizabeth Connor, is a book which does not give happy reading. At the same time, such is the splendid portrayal of character, that the book must receive admiration, in spite of its doleful atmosphere. It is the story of the Kennefick family, born in an Irish provincial town, with, in the case of the mother, a set of false standards, a smug content in herself and a power of domination over others that nothing can shatter. The book travels to its inevitable conclusion upon a succession of tragedies, until the final episode, when Peter Kennefick does what he has long been expected by tho reader to do. The members of the Kennefick family raise a feeling of contempt for their weaknesses and of intense dislike for their smugness and arrogance from the very beginning of the book, and these sentiments receive no abatement throughout the story. No pleasant adjective can bo applied to "Mount Prospect.'' It is, nevertheless, magnificent in its tragedy. " Mount Prospect," by Elizabeth Connor. (Methuen.) DELICATE MURDER A little more actual mystery and a lot less about the science of ballistics would have made " This Delicate Murder," by Henrietta Clandon, a much more readable book than it is. Lionel Fonders, an author unpopular among his fellow writers, asks a group of his colleagues to his home for a shooting party. Fonders is found shot, and murder is suspected. From here the story works out to a logical conclusion, but the lengthy dissertations on ballistics, with which the book is too liberally bespattered, makes it very tedious reading. "This Delicate Murder," by Henrietta Clandon. (Geoffrey Bles.)