AMONG THE BOOKS. SONS O' MEN.

Otago Witness, Issue 2650, 28 December 1904, Page 77

AMONG THE BOOKS. SONS O' MEN.

BY Gr. B. IiATJCASTEB.

London: Andrew Melrose. Tn this volume of short * stories the author has given us a series of strong, vivid pictures of 2few Zealand life and character. . It is the Kipling style — brief, strong, naked of landscape setting ;' from the savage solitudes of frost-bound ranges to the tussock plains and cleft grey gullies there is little. Just the firmiy-dfawn line of distance, the stvong, sometimes unlovely foregrounds ; it is men — ''Sons o' Men,'!, a long procession of them Trhose portraits, crude enough, — in black and white some of them — fill, the pages. Men in the rough, stripped to reality by station life, by the hitter battle \rith Nature hvthe wild back country ; with the \outer graces of social lifelin those who once knew them stripped away, to be in harmony with the^ unvar-j nished directness of those who %neW them ] not. \ / v - - Mr Lancaster has Kipling's quick, keen grasp of technicalities, of phraseology-. ' His men talk like the men of their kind : shearers, roustabouts, rabbiters, half-castes. Like, maybe, and "a little more so" — but -that is a fault that will wear with time — read the curt opening lines — the proud humility of a man's appeal to men : Raw labour of a raw-new land, _ Rough-hewn along' the rougher ways-— And all unskilled am I to stand And call my wares on either hand; Or draw to this and this the praise; And yet — I call — at your command. That is why, for sake of the vital truths iof human nature, the deep love of our island home, the absolute intense sympathy with reality which breathes from every page of "Sons o' Men," one may pass by the touch of exaggeration which- marks such sketches as "Hell for Leather," the chro»icle of a day's horsebreaking. In "The Down Country," record of a poor man's wooing and wedding, there are truths of a woman's inner life and its subtle workings that will gr ; p j many a woman by the throat, bringing the quick sob of understandiing and the slow I teara of sympathy to bear witness to their realism. In the pages that tell "The Story of ,Wi," he who knows his brown brother equally with his white will appreciate the warm true fellowing and v understanding of j the writer. And so one could go on from j name to name, from page to page of this j series of rough yet tender sketches of "Sons | o' Men," each portrait or episode complete in itself, but all strung lightly together by the unfolding of station life on the Great Mindoorie Run, "down south." "Sons ©' Men" is a book that will find a wide circle of admirers, and they will be principally men.