NEXT CHANGE AT YOUR LIBRARY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 112, 15 August 1941, Page 43

NEXT CHANGE AT YOUR LIBRARY

T’S so seldom that one a across a really breath-taking book, the kind of book one rushes about recommending to one’s friends. But I’ve just discovered Impromptu in Moribundia by Patrick Hamilton, ony wrote that well-known play Rope. If you read your newspaper with any degree of scepticism you'll enjoy Impromptu in Moribundia. Moribundia is a planet, reachable from this world, where our contemporary aspirations have become facts. Here is lived in literal truth life as depicted in our newspapers. In Moribundia a "day of nation-wide rejoicing " means that lift boys whistle and that parents dance with joy about the breakfast table. Here popular generalisations have become hard facts. The working class family is incurably shiftless, the Cockney bus-driver is invariably quick-witted and devastatingly good humoured, the Communist agitator is bitter and bearded, the famous explorer is always lean, tanned, and reticent, and every public schoolboy plays the game. And the world so familiar to us through newspaper advertising confronts us on every side. You cannot go far along any Moribundian street without meeting a man crippled with arthritis (you can tell this from the jagged lightnings shooting from his knee-joints), or a woman whose nose is a target for infection. And there is the hero’s landlady who thought her sheets were white, etc. And the hero himself had the unfortunate experience of being literally chained to his bed by rheumatism and having all the doctors give him up. Of course in the end somebody recommended somebody’s emulsion and the chains fell away. But the book is more than a very funny satire on modern advertising. It pours scorn on a whole way of life. The essence of life on Moribundia is hatred of change, for change of any kind threatens the whole fabric of the State. So the most highly esteemed personages | in Moribundia are those who exalt the status quo, and the most widely acclaimed authors are those who believe that all Scotland Yard men have square jaws, that all explorers are lean, tanned, and reticent. that all public schoolboys, etc., and that all elderly colonels have red faces, white moustaches, and prolific vocabularies, The book will probably appeal primarily to those of us who are not moribund. But even if you are a confirmed Moribundian you should get hours of what the newspapers would call "sideshaking merriment" from Impromptu in Moribundia. :