Leaves from Book World

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVIII, Issue 21819, 23 November 1940, Page 10

Leaves from Book World

NOTES AND COMMENTS

What London is Reading Negley Farson in Africa WIDE RANGE IN NOVELS (Specially written for " The Timaru Herald" by Charles Pilgrim.) LONDON, September 15. P S. FORESTER, that very succesful writer of romance, has just brought out The Earthly Paradise (Michael Joseph). This is the story of Columbus’ third voyage, that voyage which led to his humiliation and disgrace. The chief character in this tale is Don Narciso Rich, a learned lawyer who accompanies Columbus in order to keep an eye on him on behalf of the King. I his character is very fully and subtily drawn, but Columbus himself is not neglected on that account. Mr Forester has evidently been at great pains to verify his references. He must have read widely and carefully. The story on the whole is one of terrible tragedy. Spain Is shown as a relentless dispoiler of lands which had earned the title of Earthly Paradise. Massacre and plunder mark the path of the empire-makers. Through it all we have Columbus convinced of his high endeavour as a Christian. He justifies his own action in dispoiling the Indies by his Intention to spend their gold on the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre. He was the last of the Crusaders. One sees him as a character matched many times in history, a courageous and ambitious man convinced that the high end always before him justifies a base means which he regrets but finds necessary. Travel With A Purpose Negley Farson is already widely known as the writer of travel books. He is a journalist in the great order to journalists. His purpose is not merely to go from place to place and collect more or less unconnected stories. He and his wife, his constant companion, have a dual mind and a dual purpose. In one of his previous volumes he told his readers how he had gone into the less worn places of the world because he was weary of and disgusted with the more familiar shams and evils of modern civilisation. In Behind God's Baek (Gollancz) he tells the story of seven months spent in Africa. He travelled by car and he travelled extensively. Wherever he went he kept his mind open and as far as is possible unbiassed. One pf his chief considerations, wherever he went, was the condition of the natives and their reactions under their various forms of government. In this he expresses some of the high-souled, missionary zeal of such fine journalist as Henry Nevinson. But he has a fair mind for those Europeans who are, or were, administering vast stretches of the Dark Continent. Although there is of necessity some of the hurried judgment which a rapid traveller is bound to make, there is also a shrewdness and a vividness of phrase which gives the book an exceptional interest. Mr Farson has a keen eye for men and some of his personal appreciations may add to our knowledge of events as they are developing to-day. In Search of Stories William LaVarre is a journalist of quite another kind. One may say that he has no purpose in travel save the collection of surprising stories and the scene of surprising things. In Southward Ho! A Treasure Hunter in South America (Heinemann) he certainly tells us of very many things which fill us with astonishment and, one must confess, a certain amount of incredulity. Doubtless there are many more concrete things on earth than are dreamed of in the everyday philosophy of the relatively untravelled, but Mr LaVarre dees seem to have come across an unfair number of extravagant abnormalities. Indeed they follow one after the other with rapid-incoherence. But most of them are entertaining and easy to read. He finds an unknown Foreign Legionary employed by a private adventurer. There is a fugitive Chicago gangster engaged competitively in the sale of poison against a cunning Indian chief. There are alligators with gold in their stomachs and there is a general suggestion of hidden gold to delight the romantic mind. Mr LaVarre betrays no moral intention whatever, but he certainly can provide an exciting book which should be the ideal of millions of elder schoolboys. About the Carters Norah C. James knows her London and especially London in its meaner aspects of lodging-houses and workingclass folk who go about their jobs daily without more than the normal amount of grumbling. She shows them as quietly and determinedly heroic, accustomed to difficulty and deprivation and the overcoming of obstacles in habitual ways. In The Gentlewoman (Cassell) is told the story of a middle-aged charwoman and her family. Mary Carter, the charwoman is the real heroine. She is surrounded by weak characters, a drunken husband, a daughter who gets into trouble and sons who make mistaken marriages. But she pulls herself through and gives many a helping hand to her weak husband or progeny. Her adventures are never exciting in the ordinary sense of the word, but they are as full of a strong spirit as are the adventures of classical heroines who flash brightly in the limelight. It is a consolation to know that Mary Carter finds her reward as caretaker in a country cottage removed from the irritating and sordid trials of London life. Lost Hopes Rose Macaulay is generally known as a light satirical writer of the first rank, but she is also a sincere and serious author, as is fully realised by those who read her great book, They Were Defeated. Her latest novel, And No Man's Wit (Collins)' combines light satire with serious purpose. It is a political and intellectual study of Spain since the Civil War. Kate Marlowe, an energetic woman doctor of liberal views, goes to Spain to look for her son. Guy, who had fought in the International Brigade, and is missing. Accompanied by her younger son, Hugh, a somewhat pedantic Cambridge undergraduate, her daughter Betsy, a reader and writer of fiction, Ernie Kent, who had been a fellow of Guy’s in the Brigade, and Guy’s fiancee, the etherial Ellen Green, Mrs Marlowe sets forth on her quest. The party is helped in its search by

the Marquis Ramon del Monte, a Grandee of Arragon, who hates Communism, Liberalism, Free Masonry etc., and believes in the ancient rivalry between Castile and Aragon. But he had been a friend of Guy’s at Oxford, and so he helps those who are his political opponents. The search takes them through the prisons of Spain. The effect of Spain cn Kate Marlowe, is that of a country saddened with the tragedy of lost hopes. Provincial Ireland An apt title Dutch Interior is chosen for Frank O’Connor's new novel (Macmillan). It is a careful artistic piece of work, a detailed episodic picture cf life in a riverside town in Eire. Mr O’Connor feels passionately that Ireland is a backwater, reactionary, narrow and autocratic. He speaks of her as ‘rotten from end to end. All this drinking and joking and talking, it’s all idleness, despair, putrefaction.’ We meet various provincial characters, clerks, artisans etc. —the beautiful Madden girls who are i their fondness for jewellery and noisy finery, Stevie Dalton anu qu.... ling parents, Gus Devane who. after getting into disgrace, escapes to make good in America. Returning 30 years later with his savings, he is caught again in the mesh. Mr O’Connor writes with compassion as well as satire and the book is highly recommended. Galatea Comes to Life A romantic novel with a good historical background is D. L. Murray’s Tale of Three Cities (Hodder and Stoughton). Deodato is a lay-brothers in a Franciscan community in Rome. Handed over to the Franciscans as a foundling he had no choice in the matter of his vocation, and knew nothing of the outside world, which might have helped him to resist. Being by nature something of an artist, his mind is obsessed with the sculptured figure of a girl in the church, Beata Ludovica by Bernini. When, one day, the girl walked into the church in the flesh, Deodato’s fate is sealed. Escaped from the convent, his travels take him to London and Paris, the Paris of the Second Empire, and the humiliation of France. We have a good picture of Victorian London, and of the flamboyance of the court of Napoleon 111 and Eugenie. Deodato is recognised by his father, Count Caprano, and noticed by the Emperor. This enable him to be near Ludovica, who is a lady-in-waiting to the Empress. Their love story has its vicissitudes and their final separation takes him back to home as a sculptor, and he lives near the original Ludovica. Historical characters abound, and lend reality to the romantic tale. Alfred Noyes has joined the ranks of the “one man left alive” novelists, and so far his story The Last Man (Murray) follows the usual method. Marcus Adams’ lonely experiences in a dead world, where all human beings have been destroyed with a death ray, are staged in a lovely setting. He finds traces of an American girl, Evelyn Hamilton, in the Louvre, and searches Europe for her. Where Mr Noyes is original is in the moral of the story. He says it is evil that has brought the world to this pass, and good is the only thing which will save it. This lesson we might well take to heart to-day This is a poet’s novel, written in the fine prose natural to the poet. As such it is to be warmly recommended.