PAST AND FUTURE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 440, 28 November 1947, Page 16

PAST AND FUTURE

TO-MORROW AND TO-MORROW, By M, Barnard Eldershaw. Georgian House, Melbourne. WASHDIRT. By James Devaney, Georgian House, Melbourne. INE of these Australian novels is ambitious, the other of limited scope. It is the less pretentious which succeeds as a novel, but TJo-morrow and Tomorrow remains a_ stimulating and attractive book. Washdirt is a story of the Bendigo gold diggings about 1850, carefully docu-mented-the account of goldmining methods is exact and interesting--and recapturing the idiom of the times and its essential atmosphere. The characters (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) tend to be either black or white. The action moves at a smart pace. M. Barnard Eldershaw sets himself an almost impossible task and, considering its difficulty, he has acquitted himself well. In To-morrow and To-morrow, he is writing as an Australian of 2350, or thereabouts, when a government of technicians has imposed on the world peace, plenty, and leisure, if not happiness, all in exchange for eight years’ compulsory service. Three-quarters of the book, however, is a novel within a novel, the historical reconstruction by a 2350. novelist of the 30 years following 1920. This is a firmly realistic account of a working-class family and some others passing through slump, war, and, finally, the deliberate ritual destruction of Sydney by revolutionaries. Eldershaw is a vigorous satirist, and his destructive criticism of our society-‘"the most fantastic tyranny the world has ever known, money in the hands of the few, an unreal, an imaginary, system driving out teality"-is effectively presented. But he is mature enough to see round every corner: in his brave new world there is a new struggle for freedom against authority. Men love liberty more than comfort, more than reason. The weakness of the book is its dissolute form. Also, parts of it have the appearance of a dump into which all sorts of things have been flung with haste and without close scrutiny. For so original a writer Eldershaw is surprisingly hospitable to second-hand thought.