WHAT LONDON IS READING

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIII, Issue 20776, 10 July 1937, Page 12 (Supplement)

WHAT LONDON IS READING

RIGHTS OF THE INDIVIDUAL POLITICS IN IRELAND (Specially Written ior "The Timaru Herald" by Charles Pilgrim) LONDON, June 14 Politics enter more and more profoundly and more and more insistently into the novel of to-day. Men cannot help thinking about the general state of the world even when they are writing and reading Action. "We the Living" (Cassel) by Ayn Rand is, like so many recent novels, about that new Russia, which is such a problem to so many and an offence to not a few. Miss Rand, a Russian who has lived under Soviet rule, writes in strong, idiomatic English. She is a rebel against the fruits of rebellion and urges the rights of the individual against the state. The tale is a tragedy of a woman and two men. The woman is Kira Arguonova, the daughter of wealthy parents, who, at eighteen, found herself in the changed Leningrad. The two men are Loo Kovalonsky, the son of an Admiral and still "white” in his sympathies, and Ardrol Taganov, the son of a worker and an active Bolshevik fighter. The two men are in love with the woman.

At first, Kira lives with Loo, whom she loves, but when his health breaks down, she goes to Androi, so that she may secure refuge in a sanatorium for her lover. Her influence over Androi finds the money to maintain Loo. Her lover’s return brings terrible tragedy and death. The Red soldier who has betrayed the cause for the woman he loves commits suicide and Kira is shot ni trying to scape across the frontier. The author Indicts the State as the killer, which sacrifices the Individual to the idea. But she has not written a ’White” tract. “We the Living” is a novel in the fullest and best sense. The Anger of Ireland As many readers of fiction know, Liam O’ Flaharty is a novelist who is an Irishman—and an Intensely patriotic Irishman—before all else in “Famine” (Gallanez) he has treated a subject which always stirs the patriotic Irish heart to a fierce heat. Like Miss Rand, Mr O'Flaharty has indicated a political system, which has, in its time, tortured a whole people, The days of the Forties and the Famine in Ireland are matters of general knowledge. Every Englishman learns something of them in his history books but only an Irishman can feel them in his heart. The Irish people who stand as protagonists in this terrible tale are the Kilmartins. typical peasant farmers. Over against them stands Chadwick, the agent of the absentee landlord, carrying out all the brutal behests and relentless needs of the political situation. Again, one says that that this is no more tract of or for the times. Like “We the Living,” “Famine” is a thoroughly human story about actual men and women caught in a fate far bigger than themselves. We see Ireland, racked, starved, depopulated. Before our very eyes they are driven out of the country they love by the hundred thousand. Even Chadwick is a creature of fate. He commits his evil not because he is a worse man than the majority but because he is an agent in the fullest and most helpless sense of the word. The author has written many moving studies of the Irish people in their troubles and in their tragedies, but because this theme has stirred in him a national strain stronger than any other, it has forced out of him what will be regarded as, so far, his masterpiece.

Righting a Wrong If the Importance of a man is to be judged by the number of books written about him after his death, Oscar Wilde must be accounted amongst the writers of the first rank. Probably the tragedy of his end has Invested him with an appealing glamour. The latest book about him is “Bernard Shaw, Frank Harris and Oscar Wilde" by Robert Harborough Sherard (T. Werner Laurie).

This book has been written as something of a pious duty to counteract the hostile life by Frank Harris. Sherard was Wilde’s closest friend who stuck to him throughout the last days in Paris. He says that this book would not have been written had it not been that Harris' libels were accepted and endorsed by Bernard Shaw, the greatest of them all. It is probable that Shaw, with his usual goodheartedness, wrote the endorsement to help Harris, who was an old friend in adversity. .

The new work is no matter of dead controversy. It is full of life and full of keen argument. It shows the poet and dramatist as a man who was certainly no monster of popular legend. Wilde had his weaknesses, and they were shocking ones, but he was also a man of abnormal gentleness, sympathy and amiability. It is unlikely that this will be the last study of one whose complexities present all the fascination of a mystery. Probably, the truth is much simpler than can be imagined. Wilde was a man of refined talent who at his best approached genius. He was the leader of a literary school and a misleader of the youth of his time. The best is to remember his polished accomplishments and not to spend endless effort in picking him to pieces.

Mr Talbot Mundy, who has written another novel, knows well those wide open spaces about which he writes. He has had an adventurous life in India, the Near East, and Africa. He has walked across Africa from end to end and also from side to side! He has done much big-game hunting, but to-day does not care much for it. He regards single-handed sailing as the sport of sports. He enjoys the company of stranger.-,, but owing to “an unexplainable love of solitude" has few intimate friends. He is an American citizen by choice, because, he says, he does not know any more entertaining. laughable, lovable people, or any people more willing to laugh at Itself Nationalism and internationalism he cocnsiders equal absurdities. “Supernationalism seems to me to be the goal to strive for. Some day I wll. write a book about that.” As it is he works eight hours a day. beginning at three in the morning. He says that he finds personal publicity almost nauseating.