Books Reviewed

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 653, 3 May 1929, Page 14

Books Reviewed

REDISCOVERED GENIUS years or so ago Mr. M. P. Shiel wrote a number of thrilling tales. They were recognised as contributions to literature, but so far as the general reading public was concerned the author quickly faded into obscurity. Mr. Victor Gollancz, who has now reprinted four of Mr. Shiel’s romances, admits that he himself had read no word of Shiel’s until two months before issulug four reprint volumes, and the fact that he has three more of Shiel’s books in preparation, with otherg to follow', is an indication of the impression this giant of the Edwardian period made upon a particularly discriminating publisher. “The Purple Cloud’’ is perhaps the best known of Mr. Shiel’s books. Ambrose Bierce. Jules Verne, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe —any of the masters of weird and fantastic tales — might envy Mr. Shiel this work. It is a tour de force in imaginative writing —a story cf the only man living in a

Savages and Sex “Studies of Ssfvages and Sex” is the title of a new collection of essays by the late Mr. Ernest Crawley, whose larger w’ork, “The Mystic Rose,” commanded wride attention. The volume comprises a group of interesting papers, hitherto unpublished in book form, edited by Mr. Theodore Besternian. Mr. Crawley had an unusually accurate power of fathoming motives and analysing psychological problems revolving round sex. The results of his researches make most informative reading. All forms of love—filial, conjugal, parental—are dealt with in this book and treated, chiefly, from an ethnological point of view. But the studies do not end there. There are eight subsections, for instance, to a chapter on the nature and history of the kiss in which the hongi or noseflattening caress of the Maori receives honourable mention. A particularly interesting chapter deals with the practice and psychology of anointing; another is woven round “The Oath, the Curse and the Blessing”; others on “Life and Death,” “Fcetecide,” and “Obscenity and the Orgy.” The work, as with all treatises of this kind, has involved a vast amount of research. The editor is to be congratulated on his skill in presentation of these unusual papers. Havelock Ellis, who read the editor’s proofs before the book was published, says that the essays show' those qualities “w’hich have made Crawley one of the most attractive figures among the pioneers of our modern investigations into sex.” And as Havelock Ellis, apart from his brilliant studies in sex, is recognised as a very eminent figure in the w'orld of letters, such praise carries a value that cannot always be attached, in these hectic days, to the prefaces that herald each new book from the presses. “Studies of Savages and Sex.” Methuen and Co., Ltd., London. Our copy from the publishers. In Soviet Russia When Mr. N. Ognyov produced “The Diary of a Communist Schoolboy” he was acclaimed as a writer who had given us one of the most striking pictures of the Russia of to-day. It w’as Russia as seen through the eyes of schoolboys—the most rampageous collection of demagogues-in-the-making —and was far from being a pleasant picture. Mr. Ognyov has followed this with “The Diary of a Communist Undergraduate,” in which the leading figures of the previous book, Kostya and his companions, move forward a stage beyond their youthful idealism and their Utopian ideas to find themselves faced with grim realities. Here are glimpses of student parties with the ever-present spectre of starvation lurking in the shadows; of homes in which the chief activity appears to be interminable talk. All Russians dearly love to talk far through the night and to indulge in soul-searching introspection. And Russian undergraduates have cacoethes loquendi even more strongly developed than their fellows. At all events, the talk is interesting and the book as quaint as its predecessor. “The Diary of a Communist Undergraduate.” Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 14 Henrietta Street. Coven t Garden, London. Our copy front the publishers. The Soil v. Man When Dock Hunter drove his rickety wagon over the dusty foothills to his mountain farm lie took with him a wife who was young aud beautiful. A shack of roughly-hewn logs, crudely thatched, made their home, and here they began their light against the forces cf Nature which seemed determined that man should never wring sustenance from the arid soil of the Antelope country. Year after year Dock Hunter slaved and dreamed: year after weary year his wife dreamed and slaved, every so oaten bearing children. By the tenth year of their struggle both had be-

come just as brutish as the pigs in their sty or the cows in their byre. Vardis Fisher, in “Toilers of the Hills,” has penned a novel of the soil and strong fare it is; a brilliant, if sombre, study of a titanic battle. And be supplies us with a strange gallery of types, deep-etched. The women of Antelope are frowsy and worn out with work and child-bearing; the men are clods, incapable of finer feelings and regarding baths and cleanliness as the inventions of the devil. Mr. Fisher narrates, with stark realism and undeniable force, the life of the Hunter family, the grim desperation that haunted its two chief members • and the gradual blunting of the feel- ; ings of a sensitive woman. To dispel the atmosphere of inspissated ! gloom we are permitted, at the end, j to see a ray of hope for these blind | strugglers. Modern methods applied 1 to the Hunter fields give promise of adequate returns. This is a vital book: one that deserves to rank with ! the best novels of its year. “Toilers of the Hills.” Our copy from the publishers, Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 14) Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. London. In France in 1916 The value of a war history, the details of which were obtained as soon as possible after the events described had happened —and from the rank and file of the men who fought, as well as from official dispatches—must be inestimable in studying the Anzacs’ part in the Great War. “The A.I.F. in France, 1916” (Vol. 111. of the Official History of Australia in the Great War), by C. E..W. Bean, which has just been published by Angus and Robertson, reads like the personal diary of an omniscient observer of the year’s struggle. The author has also utilised German accounts and so presents a true picture of the fighting. The volume opens with the Australian and New' Zealand troops in Egypt; resting after their arduous eight months on Gallipoli. March 20, 1916, saw' them in France and plunged into the thick of fighting on a scale until then undreamed of. Of their part in the epic struggle on the Somme, in the battles of Pozieres, Fromelles and Mouquet Farm, the casualty lists published at the time told something. A little more perhaps, but only a little, may have been learned from the men themselves, but never before has the story been told with such a wealth of detail. The achievements of the New' Zealand troops, so far as they coincide with those of the Australians, are described. To anyone w'ho served in France, however, or to anyone wanting to know something of the liell-on-earth our troops endured during their first year on the Western Front, the volume can tell much. Like its predecessors, this section of the Australian War History is well illustrated, and contains over 400 maps and plans, as w r ell as many explanatory footnotes and references regarding the men of all ranks whose individual accounts of the fighting the author has so successfully welded into one complete narrative. The Official History of Australia in the War of 3 914-18, Vol. lll.—“The A.I.F. in France, 1916,” by C. E. W. Bean. Our copy from the publishers, Angus and Robertson, Ltd., Castler. agli SI set, Sydney.

ANSWER TO CORRESPONDENT

“Busite.”—Muriel Hine wrote “The Flight” iu 1922. In 1923, “The Spell of Siris” was published. There is no record of her having written a book with the title “Cladagh Returns to Siris.” —The Bookman.