A WOOLGATHERING GOOD COMPANION

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 380, 4 October 1946, Page 22

A WOOLGATHERING GOOD COMPANION

BRIGHT DAY Bv

J. B.

Priestley

William

Heinemann, Lid.

HIS novel, by the device of recollection in late middle age, bridges two worlds. The insistent memories of Gregoty Dawson, a successful but soured film script-writer, take him back all the way to a Yorkshire wool-broking town in the years of innocence preceding 1914. The. society in that town, warm, human, without frills, cultured in everything save externals, is what our society would be like if we let it follow its natural bent, nearer anyway to a New Zealand atmosphere than are most English social groups. Mr. Priestley, as befits his ofiginal, is an expert at making his characters talk dialect. There is a business intrigue going on in a wool-broking film. There is a lonely boy admiring the vitality and compactness of a brilliatit family, and their altnost uniformly eharming and talented friends; an excéss of virtue here perhaps, but we s606n see otherwise. There is an ageing man lamenting the frustrations of the artist, whether actor or writer, in the modern film industry. It is a little difficult to determine what Mr. Priestley intends the real theme of the book to be. If it is the contrast" between what Gregory Dawson thought were the characters of the Alingtons and what they were really like, he

misses his effect, which could have been deeply tragic, but instead hardly causes the lift of an eyebrow, the last dénouement falling particularly flat. Even if he were more concerned with Gregory Dawson, the narrator, in whose reveries most of the action takes place, and the actual fate of his youthful ambition to write, he does not achieve more than a sketch of a commonplace mind, supported by a sturdy cynicism and a gift for robust phraseology. "It is the bright day brings forth the adder," says the title page, and Mr. Priestley’s own particular little snake in the grass does dart its head out of his pocket only once: I mean his obsession with events getting out of their right place. in the time sequence. There is ah eccentric lady who has the gift of second sight. She uses it, but how this helps the development of the story I cannot tell. In Bright Day, J. B. Priestley paints brilliant scenes, everything in which is perfect, the people and what they say and what they think. But the effect of the whole is more trivial than that of the parts. There is a failure of integration somewhere, and the novel ends leaving us grateful for some things, but fundamentally sent empty away. : Among these good things are some shrewd and forcible comments on the modern film industry, and like the hero, we are all "tired of seeing a wonderful medium, with which you could do almost anything, bitched up by moneylenders and salesmen and second-rate solicitors on the make." No names, n packdrill. :