ROMANTIC AND SAFE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 8, 18 August 1939, Page 37

ROMANTIC AND SAFE

IN THE GRIP OF THE GALE. By Knud Andersen. Harrap. 5/-. From the days of the sealers the Auckland Islands have been made romantic by remoteness and the bad luck that has overtaken most of their visitors, from Enderby’s whaling settlement in 1850 down to the crew of the Dundonald, who in the nineteenth century closed the procession of wrecked and miserable mariners on. these bleak shores. To these cold, wet, thoroughly Nordic Islands, Mr. Andersen boldly sends two children alone in a small boat to have adventures. This

story follows the conventional wishfulfilment pattern of the best boy’s adventure stories, but though the pattern is an old one the setting is fresh. The unlucky thing that trips up Mr. Andersen, like most of the seamen who have had truck with those southern islands, is that while children like adventures they do most tiresomely insist on the framework of facts used being above reproach. Mr. Andersen’s framework is a little rickety in places-his New Zealand is quite unrecognisable in spite of a sprinkling of familiar names (he describes the Aucklands much more exactly) and it is difficult to disentangle the period of the story. But a ship, a treasure, a castaway, seals, storms, derring-do and no one in the remotest degree resembling a villain, make this the kind of reading matter a responsible aunt may safely put in the hands of a nephew not more than ten years old.