WIND OVER THE HEART

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 364, 14 June 1946, Page 16

WIND OVER THE HEART

LINK OF TWO HEARTS. By George Sava. Faber and Faber Ltd., London. OVERING the period between August, 1940, and June, 1942, this book has been contrived out of letters exchanged between George Sava in Britain and his wife in Australia. The word contrived is used advisedly, for the book has no set scheme, no coherent pattern, and little literary justification. In a prologue which reads even more like an apologia than prologues usually do, George Sava explains that the letters were written to preserve for his infant daughter a personal family record of the darkest days of the war. And as a private record, for a family album, they would be interesting enough, and safe from the unsentimental attentions of reviewers. But they have been offered to the public as worthy of wider circulation, and it is proper to say that they are not. Early in 1940, Sava sent his wife (an Australian) overseas for the birth of their first child, and the first letter in the book is addressed to his unborn child in Montreal. The return letter, written as from the. child, describes its arrival, its thoughts (more or less embryonic) on ifidiscriminate bombing, the gift of the over-age American destroyers, and other topicalities. This highly artificial-and ridiculous -- convention of the infant (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) correspondent is maintained for 80 or 90 pages, but breaks down, completely when Mrs. Sava. reaches her native Australia and sets about the task of describing the fauna, flora, climate, geological structure, early history, and social organisation of the Commonwealth, with an enthusiasm and a proselytising fervour which would make Herr Baedeker’s little red booklets green with envy. (Item, "I don’t know whether it is interesting to note that the first jail to be built in Fremantle was in 1830, the first newspaper was published in 1831, and of course, the inevitable horse-races began in 1833.") But if Mrs, Sava owes much to the influence of Baedeker and the year-book, her husband’s themes reflect the influence of the H, V. Morton school, particularly those passages describing his journeys through Britain, his visits to Gretna Green, York and Lincoln. By June, 1942, however, the family has been reunited, and the accumulated correspondence being then sufficient to fill a book produced "in conformity with the authorised economy standards," the antiphonal narrative stops as suddenly as it began. In the 229 pages there are only seven ("Entr’acte") which hold the attention. These tell how Sava heard, while aimlessly tuning-in his radio, that the ship bringing home his wife and child had

been torpedoed in the North Atlantic: This brief chapter which describes eloquently the agony he suffered during the five days between the first brief message of disaster and the news that both wife and child had been landed safely at a Scottish port, reveals the real link of hearts so effectively obscured through the rest of the book. _ Apart from this isolated interpolation, Link of Two Hearts tells us no new thing; but it does underline the truth of the old saying that no man can be written out of reputation save by his own hand-or, let us be honest even if ungallant, by his wife’s.

J.

M.