LIFE IS EARNEST

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 462, 30 April 1948, Page 11

LIFE IS EARNEST

CALL IT LIFE. By George Sava. Macdonald and Co. Ltd., London. HIS is a story of a failure and a success. "Margaret was a German woman of good birth, but brought up as the family drudge. She ran away to become the wife of Isaac Jacobi, a Jewish industrialist. For several years life was good; she had children, position, wealth. But with Hitler’s rise, Jacobi’s business went to the wall and the family sought refuge in England. From this point onward the reader finds himself deep in the subject of psychiatric healing, with occasional excursions into surgery, Dr. Sava asserts that this is a true story, with changes only in the names. of the characters who, by the way, all call him "George." But he strains credulity to the breaking point by asking us to believe that Margaret, | once the charming hostess of a lovely home, can take to the streets, acquire the habits and jargon of the uneasy London twilight, and return, almost in a flash, to her former status of utter tespectability. Margaret marries David, an English widower with a small boy whose custody is sought by an impossibly vicious type of mother-in-law. A court scene, the submissions of counsel and the judicial reactions make up one of the better scenes in the book, relieving Sava’s numerous essays at philosophic calmness in extraordinarily trying circumstances. The story is an interesting study of a complex subject, but a fault is the characters’ too frequent protestations to George that he is "so good to us." It is almost a monument to the author’s virtue as a comforter. It ends happily, at least with a strong suggestion that Margaret "sees into the future and sees that it is good."

E.R.

B.