RECENT FICTION

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24254, 23 March 1940, Page 4

RECENT FICTION

New Zealand Novel The New Zealand novel has, as yet, few facets, yet fiction is as many-sided as life. It is when our native writers finally manage to escape the unimaginative attraction of the family chronicle, perhaps, that they will at last begin to reflect the true colours of our island civilisation. John Mulgan in his first novel has broken with a confining tradition, both in theme and style, and his is the most interesting piece of fiction to come out of New Zealand since M. Escott's " Show Down." Johnson, the Man Alone, is a complete and credible character, the worker without ties and without ambition, who wanders the* country as a casual labourer, drawing good money when times are good. ' There isn"t any better country than this, not where a man can go about and get work and stop when he wants to." he declares, " and make money when he needs it. and take a holiday when he feels ready for one." So he works on farms, even makes a half-hearted at-' tempt to obtain a partnership, and the depression hits the country. Then comes a change. But in relief camps, on maintenance wages, he survives. He is swept into the Auckland riots, then finds work on a farm, where money is not. and nay consists of keep and tobacco. Again, with an improvement in sight, he is vaguely thinking of settling down. But he is too much the victim of a careless spirit. There is , woman on the farm, an angry husband, a shooting, and Johnson is in dead seriousness again a man alone, hunted by the police, a fugitive in the mountain ranges of the North Island. And again he is on the move, unresting, if never restless, a man who has cutgrown the gregarious instincts of his fellows- but found nothing to take their place. Mr Mulgan has told the story of Johnson economically, against a background that is more recognisable as New Zealand because it is never forced. Certain chapters in the book •will remain in the memory, and Johnson certainly must. He is the stun that human beings are made of, malleable .but hard to break. Our copy of this interesting book is from Wnitcombe and Tombs. The Author: John Mulgan is the elder son of Alan Mulgan, New Zealand historian and writer and supervisor of talks for the N.B.C. He was educated at Wellington College the Auckland Grammar School and Auckland University and at Merton College. Oxford, where he gained first class honours in English literature. He joined the staff of the Oxford University Press in 1935, and acted as New Zealand, observer at the League of Nations in the follbwing year. He is the editor of "Poems of Freedom." and with Hector Bolithb wrote " The Emigrants." a volume of New Zealand historical interest. He is now serving with the English territorial army. History Reconstructed This novel is the second from Mrs Grant's pen. and follows her first book. " Winged Pharaoh." in that it. too. purports, according to the suggestion by

the publisher, to be not so much an effort of the imagination as the recollection of a previous incarnation. Whether this is so or not can safely be left for the reader of Life as Carola to .judge, for it does not affect the quality of the book. The story concerns the illegitimate daughter of a noble Italian house of the sixteenth century. If it is purely a reconstruction from historical material it is an extraordinarily vivid one. and the sense of the colour, the dirt, the cruelty, and the vivid aliveness of that period, in that peculiar and inextricable mixture that made its especial duality, is brilliantly conveyed. Mrs Grant has that supreme quality of the storyteller, the ability, with a thousand authentic little details, to transport the reader to the time and scene of the story. For a time one is actually living in sixteenth-century Italy and with Carola one endures oain and hunger and misery, experiences moments of high ecstasy. Banished by trickery and jealousy from her home, the castle of the Griffins, the heroine after many . adventures became a strolling playe'. then'sought sanctuary in a nunnery, and finally, escaping from there, entered into a life that her sufferings had earned, her. Intermixed with the story proper is the expanding of the spiritual life of the heroine and a • growing memory of the history of her soul. Miss Grant has made her story a tract on reincarnation as well as a novel, and while the novel as a tale for sheer entertainment is really excellently done the didactic parts are on a'lower scale, probably because the author has tried too hard. In the messages that the " Voice " eives to Carola and in other passages that tell of reincarnation. Miss Granl has strained after fine writing and has achieved it in the detrimental sense. There are long paragraphs, sometimes pages, which are mesnt to be great orose. Unfortunatelv. as anyone who the •rouble will discover, they are written almost entirely in blank verse The scansion is in correct iambic pentameters, with hardly an error for line after lire. This is not good prose. Prose rhythm is a totally different thing from verse rhvthm. and until Mjfs Grant realifes this her "best" passages will annov where they are meant to charm. This fruit aoart. the book is a first class piece of historical reconstruction and it will please and entertain everyone who likes to read of a time when life, if more uncomfortable, was distinctly more colourful. "The ClocH Struck Seven"

During the course of a robbery at a large country house the aged housekeeper is struck down with injuries which later prove fatal, and the only other occupant at the time, an ex-army officer who had been blinded in the war, is severely injured. When he is able to discuss the matter coherently he alleges that his sister's fiance is the criminal, also stating, to the consternation of relatives and friends, that his eyesight had been restored some time previously, and that he had indubitably seen this man. There is no conflict about the exact hour at which the crime took place, but the blind man's sister testifies, with some vehemence, that her lover was with her at the time and could not therefore have committed it. Both climax and stalemate are thus reached, but Mr Goodchild s handling of the anti-climax is both adroit and convincing.

Man Alone. By John Mulgan (Selwyn and Blount). Life As Carola. By Joan Grant (Methuen) lis 6d. Mammon's Daughter. By Nigel G. Tranter (Ward, Lock). The Door from Zanzibar. By Ray Dorien (Mills and Boon). The Clock Struck Seven. By George Goodcbild (Hale). Callaghan Meets His Fate. By Michael Chesney (Jenkins). Each 7s 6d unless otherwise stated.

Yorkshire versus Scotland A battle of words and ideals between a number of crofters and the Yorkshire millionaire peer who has purchased the huge, but comparatively poor, estate from which they wrest_a meagre existence is well described in Mammon's Daughter. In general, the peer despises his tenants for their easy acceptance of the unhygienic houses which have been handed down without improvement to successive generations, their general indolence compared with his native thrustfulness, and their almost total lack of ambition, while the crofters, for their part, see in their would-be benefactor only an interfering busybody out to filch from them their peace—which is about their only possession. Coming down to the particular, the battle is fought more fiercely between the new laird's daughter and the last survivor of the old regime, with no quarter given and none asked, and the decision, with minor reservations and by certain adroit manceuvrings, gives a victory to each side.

" The Door from Zanzibar " For some years, Hilary Jettle has been haunted by a dream, recurring at frequent intervals with only slight variations, in which a large and sinister part is played by an enormous door. When, therefore, she comes across the counterpart in real life of this imposing, but formidable, centrepiece of her dreams, during the course of a healthrecuperating holiday in a remote village, she is both startled and curious to find out what lies beyond. She herself had come as a child from Zanzibar, and it soon transpires that the door and its owner are also from that country, with the result that the stage is nicely set for a mystery and its elucidation.

Colonel Callaghan Again Wherever our old friend Callaghan is, there also is danger. In Callaghan Meets His Fate this grim but doughty warrior acts as squire and bodyguard to an American heiress who is in precarious and dangerous possession of a valuable emerald, and whose life is menaced at every turn by a group of terrorists. In battles of tactics, however, the gangsters are out-manoeuvred almost continuously by the colonel, and he is even more successful in the fisticuff encounters which enliven nearly every chapter. The title of the book derives from the result of a foray on the matrimonial battlefield. V. V. L>.