THE DAY DREAM STORY,

Waikato Times, Volume 117, Issue 19545, 6 April 1935, Page 18 (Supplement)

THE DAY DREAM STORY,

Traffic in Unreality. “THE TALES OF ELEANOR MORDANT.” (Martin Seeker.) The true spiritual home of Miss Mordaunt’s stories is, one feels, the popular magazines. It was a mistake to reprint them in book form and another mistake to collect 'them once more between the thin pages of what is practically an omnibus volume. This is not a mere gibe. Magazine stories are.as a rule picked up in those leisure moments when one wishes to escape from the cares and vexations of the world. They provide diversion —a turning away from reality. And Miss Mordaunt’s stories are carefully calculated for this purpose. To begin with, they are set In the day-dream regions; the fetid -swamps of Africa, or India, or South America—anywhere 'that is, to the average reader, sufficiently remote, exotic and unreal. Even Melbourne will do, provided that we make our way to the romantic (and to Miss Mordaunt vaguely supernatural) quarters -of the Chinese residents of Little Bourke Street. The people we meet in these picturesque regions are precisely the people of our daydreams. They are at once twice as large and 'half as deep as the people of real life. They are the 'creatures of a schoolgirl’s imaginings; b'ig brutal men, and occasional vague heroes, and helpless, deeply sensitive heroines well in the foreground. But after all it is neither people nor places that really call forth Miss Mordaunt’s greatest efforts. She reserves these for the emotions. She is a specialist in every variety of heartthrob. Her stories are full of the very tensest of tense moments. And to do her justice it is not always the stereotyped tenseness of other popular writers. She really does describe emotions with a good deal of power and a certain amount of insight. But unfortunately they are almost always ■unreal emotions. For, given her chosen role—that of a trafficker in unreality—'it must be admitted that Miss Mordaunt fills it very well. Her stories are full of “atmosphere”; they are written with force and skill; they are neatly rounded off. They are in short excellent examples of their genre. Only it Is a very inferior genre. D.H.M.