THE NEW NOVELS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25173, 13 March 1943, Page 3

THE NEW NOVELS

Literature

The Carrington Incident. By Niven Busch. (Hale.) Have Your Cake. By Ursula Orange. (Joseph.) To-morrow’s Bread. By Dorothy Quentin. (Ward, Lock.) Each 9s. The Leader’s Lady Niven Busch presents the case in his first novel of an American girl who, on a visit to a totalitarian State, catches the fancy of its Leader. Foolishly she consents to give him lessons in Italian, a language in which she is proficient; and before long she is tricked into a closer association. The Leader, having been told by the fortune teller he will live another 25 years, seeks an Aryan heir, and Bertha Carrington is to be the mother. But the Propaganda Minister thinks differently. He conceals the birth of the Leader’s son, and whisks Bertha into a concentration camp. Thence she escapes in circumstances sufficiently romantic to compensate a little for the previous drabness of her lovelife, and which spell such a certain death knell for Hitlerism as to be cheering to-day. This is an amusing and pertinent modern variant on “Candide.” Our copy is from Whitcombe and Tombs. Sophisticates Allowing that the petulant and rather, womanish Andrew, who is the hero of her Have Your Cake, is as admirable a character as Ursula Orange finds him, this is a very satisfying novel. And those who find Andrew a pretentious and rather priggish Bohemian will still recognise the worth of the author’s characterisation in his case, as in that of her other principal characters, including Andrew’s most humble and devoted admirer, Doris, whom he graciously consents to marry in the end. One feels that the author’s manner is rather better than her matter in this tale of pallid loves and sentimental lusts among those of a certain English milieu who consider themselves sophisticated. But she is such an astute observer that even where one may disagree with her interpretations one can still admire her portraiture. Blind Romance A motor accident after a somewhat bibulous West End party leads Gina to a quixotic- guesture. Her sister, Alix, finds no further interest in the handsome young airman, Tony, who loses his sight in the smash. So Gina, the steady member of the family, persuades her father to give Tony a job on the Abbey Farm. Before long she has agreed, from pity rather than conviction, to marry the blind man. Readers of To-morrow’s Bread will deplore her decision and be the more anxious to follow Dorothy Quentin’s pleasant romance to its conclusion. V. V. L.