Dead Or Alive?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 137, 6 February 1942, Page 5

Dead Or Alive?

OPHIA’S ideas on lite and death grow clearer, as she takes the mortal scene into her . . . bird’s-eye view, may I say? She argues them out with her unbodied companion. She recalls, more and more distinctly, the forgotten teachings of her long-dead father, a clergyman and a philosopher, and towards him she turns again from the fading, dwindling concerns of earth. "Oh, I wouldn’t like that. Too creepy! Oh no, I’m sure I wouldn't." Don’t say it. Mr. Ervine is much too human, humorous, and intellectually alive a writer to let even the hand of death lie heavy on a novel. Sophia enters into some pretty serious discussions, yes, but they’re neither dull nor mawkish, Let me give you one glimpse of old Sue Sumerson, looking down at her surviving third-’Erbert: "There *e is, there ’e is! An’ if you please, goin’ into the Plough, an’ me not cold in me grave yet. Couldn’t miss ’is pint, one day." That’s respect tor the dead, that is! There’s nothing dead and

|| alive about the dead in Ervine’s story-

-(From

|| a review of St. John Ervine’s novel Sophia, |

3 ry j YA, Janua 20 b ’ y

J. H.

E.

Schroder.)