ON THE MOVE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 500, 21 January 1949, Page 14

ON THE MOVE

‘UNDER STRANGE SKIES. By Christina Soltan. Published for The Melville . Press by George Allen and Unwin Ltd., London. HIS is the story of Christina Soltan’s journey from Berlin to Liverpool via Krakow, Moscow, Harbin, Tokio, Singa‘pore and Capetown, a journey which began in 1938 and ended in.1942. It begins with a comfortably-circumstanced music student in Berlin being woken early by the crash of glass as two German policemen wreck the shop of a Jewish tailor. It ends four years later, when the same music student, no longer comfortably circumstanced and _ herself a victim of Nazi aggression rather than an onlooker, steams into Liverpool Harbour ‘on’ her way to join the Polish forces. (We are not told whether sMe was successful in this-our guess is that she contented herself with marrying her Michal.) This is an exciting and moving story told by a young woman who was trained as a pianist and not as an author, It has been said that each of us has in his own life the material for one novel, but Miss Soltan has been further handicapped by the fact that in a mere four years of living she has amassed material enough for a baker’s dozen. The task of confining this wealth of material into a mere 480 pages is one that would tax the ability of an experienced craftsman. Moreover the author finds herself in this travel-autobiography obliged to deploy her talents in two genres at the same

time-she must mow be the detached onlooker, considering dispassionately the surge of history that deposits her now here, now one wave farther on, and she must also take time out to tell her own love-story. Miss Soltan has certainly not a great deal of time to think about love, and in any case she is\not a Negley Farson, who can dismiss an amour in parenthesis without halting for qa second the march of history. .The bare vowel "I" is .extremely hard to handle, particularly in emotional contexts, and though the authoress manages her closeups and fade-outs with restraint, the reader is not so fully identified with his heroine that he can accept them without a squirm. Miss°Soltan is more succéssful in dealing with her less personal experiences of people and events, and when she is deeply moved by the larger issues her prose forgets the carefully assumed literary touch and shines forth in unadorned simplicity. Her love for her native Poland is the main emotional theme of the book. . But Under Strange Skies has the supreme merit of an odyssey-it moves, Something is always happening, there are mew scenes, new characters, some just extras, many unforgettable portraits, Apart from the early chapters dealing with Nazi Germany the ground covered is almost virgin, and, now that the Iron: Curtain has descended on Poland, some of it is likely to remain so as far as western readers are concerned. The chapters on Japan, both before and after Pearl Harbour, make enthralling reading, though they would seem fantastic and improbable to.anyone who has not lived to see them receive the hallmark of history. It is inevitable that a strong flavour of melodrama should impregnate the works of anyone who attempts to write modern history from a_ personal viewpoint, and if readers find the pace and emotional tempo too hot for their liking they must blame History.

M.

B.