‘Go Tell It On the Mountain’—James Baldwin. Michael Joseph. 1954.

Te Ao Hou, August 1957, Page 53

‘Go Tell It On the Mountain’—James Baldwin. Michael Joseph. 1954. James Baldwin, the son of a Harlem clergyman, was born in New York city in 1924. He became a

preacher when he was fourteen, but gave it up three years later, and is now living in France, at work on his second novel. I doubt if anyone reading this book could pick it to be the author's first novel. Mr Baldwin knows exactly what he wants to say, and says it powerfully, sometimes shockingly, using a tricky method of flashbacks into the pasts of his main characters with complete success. It is the story of John Grimes, a young Harlem negro approaching manhood, his family, and the small but fanatical religious sect to which they belong. John's father, a man bent on erasing a violent youth with an equally violent religious faith, is head deacon in the church. John's mother, a young widow who married again more for security than for love, is nearly always late for the morning service. John's aunt Florence takes her sickness to the altar, and remembers only the fear and oppression and cruelty of the Deep South where she was brought up. And Roy, John's younger brother and the last light in his father's despairing heart, is more interested in the roaring city streets than in saying his prayers. John himself fights a losing battle against his father's domination and the public religious conversion that is expected of him. Although Mr Baldwin has much to say about a certain kind of religious experience, it is not really the main theme of his book. Nor is the colour-bar, though this plays a large part in some of the characters' lives. He is primarily concerned with the emotional life of his own people: the range and depth and strength of the feelings that always lie behind the face of their everyday living. ‘Blanket Boy's Moon’—Peter Lanham, based on an original story by A. S. Mopeli-Paulus, Chieftain of Basutaland. Collins. 1953. Truth is sometimes worse than fiction, and from one point of view the South African writer is fortunate: his raw material is so obvious and ready to hand (twenty-four hours in Sophiatown would fill a book), but any worth-while novel about social conditions must contain much more than shock tactics or purely descriptive writing, no matter how good it is. The author should try to give the bewildered or incredulous reader some insight into the problems that lie behind his story, and some understanding of why his characters, black, white or coloured, act and feel as they do. This is the task that Mr Lanham, with the help of A. S. Mopeli-Paulus, has set himself in writing the life-story of a young man of the Basotho people. Monare leaves his wife and family in Basutoland to seek his fortune in Johannesburg, the ‘City of Gold’, and having found a small measure of it, returns home only to become involved in a ritual murder. Fear and remorse force him to flee to