Extended Frontiers

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 452, 20 February 1948, Page 9

Extended Frontiers

THE WINDS ARE STILL. By John Hetherington. Georgian House, Melbourne. HIS novel about Australians, Englishmen, and New Zealanders escaping from Greece in 1941 is a straightforward adventure story. The general atmosphere is good, the nervous strains of waiting in hiding, the insatiable suspicion. The Greeks are well portrayed, their courage, stoicism, and boundless willingness to help the beaten friends of their country at great risk to themselves. But so far as the story has conscious art, it is bad art. The love affair between an Australian captain and a Greek farmer’s daughtgr (who wears a "cerise skirt") is an unnecessary embellishment, distressingly sentimentalised (see the coy vagueness of its Big Moment on page 151, where whatever meaning the author may have intended is left to the cleanness, or otherwise, of the reader's own mind), and so much of an embarrassment to the novelist that he has to crawl out of it in the crudest possible way by killing off his heroine at the end of the book. Many men getting out of Greece had real-life adventures very similar to these adventures. But some details cause a certain uneasiness, for instance, the New Zealand soldier who in civil life is a "cattleman" sand "had the capacity for silence of men accustomed to live most of their lives with animals." Then how a Greek caique casually picked up at pistol point had the fuel for a voyage to Egypt (and then apparently back to Greece again) is, One supposes, too trivial to warrant explanation. The Winds Are Still won the Sydney Morning Herald’s £1,000 war novel competition. You needn’t hold this against it. Worse novels have been awarded bigger prizes. This book has, perhaps, a moral for all of us. It points to the immense expansion of our national experience, and therefore of the raw material of literature and art, provided by participation in the war. The Middle East, Greece, Italy, Germany and many other countries have been annexed to the Antipodean literary empire and await their passionate colonists.

David

Hall