LIGHTS OF SYDNEY.

Otago Witness, Issue 2232, 10 December 1896, Page 39

LIGHTS OF SYDNEY.

By Lilian Tubneb. London, Paris, and Melbourne : Oaesell and 00. Lilian Turner is a younger sister o£ Ethel Turner, who in already on the high road to literary fame,; and has literary aspirations that are justified by the work she ban already produced. Tv The Lights of Sydney " gained for Miss Turner the first prize in a .competition advertised by the proprietors of OanseU'a Magazine. Wo must view the work, therefore, not as a specimen of Mies Tarnor'a work, but as a specimen of the kind of story she considered most adapted to the tastes of the magazine already mentioned. Such efforts seldom produce literature. The feuillston style demunds that- something taking and something worthy of being illustrated should appoar in every chapter. Fancy Sir Walter Scott's works published io serial form 1 " The Lady of fcne Lake " would nevex have attained the dignity of book form had readers been confronted with tbe locg descriptive digressions that no doubt add charm to tbe whole, but taken cat of their setting would have been insufferable. We do not forget that even the very bast novels now appear in serial form, nor that the immortal Pickwick was developed in weekly numbers. It is on record, by the way, that the fathtr of serial stories, who hai gone down to his rest uuhonoured and unsnog, was a mysterious personage, who called at the office on a certain day in every weak, was provided with a bottle of wine and a copy of the previous week's number, wrote bis instalment, received his couple of guineas, and vanished into obscurity until the next week. But few writer* do their work in this fashion. Suoh stories are apt to be of the type of that book— we forget its name for the moment — to wbioh a numhur of eminent writers contributed a chapter each. Suoh a literary olla podrida rarely tickles tbe palate. From the nature of the ciroumstanoes'Miss Turner muat have written her atory complete before submission to ' the publisfiera, . but it is evideotly written for serial publication. Here the reader is plunged into notion at once. A plot and several sub-plots are evolved in epigrammatic sentences that somehow seem too old for the writer, who seems already to have quite made up her mind about the problem of life. It ia good to feel so young as to be infallible, though none of us are— even the youngest of us. Though we oannot admire " The Lights of Sydney," we can V6ry much admire the manner of the writer. If she, were only nob so tragic it would be so much more pleasant. The story has abundance of local colour. It is redolent of Australia, and this no doubt constituted much of the attractiveness it presented to t.he judge or judge?, bnt why ifc should have been called "The Lights of Sydney " is a mystery, since nearly all tha action takes placa in the country. Tbe title is reminiscent of " The Lights of London," " Tho Mysteries of Paris," <fee, but the reader must not expect similar descriptions of life in the Now South Wales capital.