DON'T NEVER FORGIVE NOBODY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 501, 28 January 1949, Page 11

DON'T NEVER FORGIVE NOBODY

JOSHUA BEENE AND GOD. By Jewel Gibson. Eyre and Spottiswoode. | HE American frontier hero is very hard to kill, whether his name is Paul Bunyan, or Buffalo Bill or Joshua Beene. He is hard to kill because the American people want to read about

him, and imagine that they too are frontier heroes; a'rather necessary compensation if you happen to live in the middle of one of the more noisome of the larger American cities. Whether the New Zealander wants to identify himself with the American frontier hero too is a dark secret local booksellers will, no doubt, keep clasped to their bosoms, Jewel Gibson has evidently observed that these heroes smack strongly of the Old Testament. Joshua Beene, her creation, has some of the certainty, the narrowness, the crudity, and all of the long white beard of the Old Testament prophet. The book, which is too episodic to be called a true novel, deals with the last year of his life. God has set down three score years and ten as the limit, and Joshua, who has followed his conception of the Lord all his life, is quite ready to claim his golden crown at that age. During his last year he triumphantly routs his enemies; the Baptists, the Holy Rollers, and in short, any sinner who did not agree with Josh. The book, a first novel, abounds with local colour familiar to readers who have staggered through Gone With the Wind, or any other Southern pantechnicon; cotton mouthed moccasins, purple verbena oozing delicate nectar, lynchings, whippoorwills and swamp water. Josh is quite a character, and Miss Gibson makes the most of him, but it is hard to burn with any sort of emotion over the book, which I left. with the faint hope that it might be the last of the genre.