PRIZE NOVEL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 514, 29 April 1949, Page 16

PRIZE NOVEL

ALL THE KING’S MEN. By Robert Penn Warren. Eyre and Spottiswoode. English price, 12/6. WARDED a Pulitzer prize in 1947, "Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men has now been re-published in England. The story, that of a Southern politician, Willie Stark, a man of the people corrupted by success, is told mainly by Jack Burden, press agent and henchman to Stark. The author handles with considerable skill this narrative device of an intelligent sympathetic observer situated at the centre of events, which, as Henry James demonstrates in his prefaces, allows for some of the best effects in fiction--economy, suspense and inténsity. The career of Willie Stark from farm boy to law, then politics and the Governorship of the State, in some respects parallels but never closely follows that of Huey Long. Stark exemplifies the hard-driving man of affairs obsessed with an illusion of a humanitarian mission, but who is in fact a hollow individual able to achieve fulfilment only in power and in the oppression of those who retain their humanity. But the novel is more than a political document; it is @

study of the tensions of modern life within the wider frame of history and morality. The narrative, carefully balancing action and reflection, moves at a fast pace conveying the texture and colour of the deep South. The characters exhibit an often violent dramatization in speech and gesture, which would be unconvincing in any country other than that which

has produced Hollywood.

J. R.

Cole