A TIRED BATES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 520, 10 June 1949, Page 19

A TIRED BATES

THE JACARANDA TREE. By H. E. Bates. Michael Joseph. Enéflish price, 9/6. OR years the critics have given Mr. Bates unstinting praise, ever since he was "discovered," as a lad of 18, by Richard Garnett, a littérateur of discernment. It must be admitted that the prodigy has usually come up to expectation,» Yet it can be debated whether unstinted praise is good for authors. Mr. Bates can, in a few words, paint a vivid picture. Take, for instance, this: "It (The Jacaranda Tree) had begun to blossom now with drops of bright blue flower among masses of tender pinnate leaves, and its fresh bril; liance had the effect of making the dust seem dead." The contrast between the bloom and the dust is thrown up in sharp relief by the apt choice of a few additional words to the main description. In sketching character also the author chooses his words well, and also his people, though we have met most of them before: the discontented Paterson, the silent worshipping Burmese boy and his sister, whose golden beauty is mute, vivid and, as far as Paterson is concerned, all conquerable; the silly Mrs. Betteson, whom everybody in the town regards as "batty," but who, in emergency,, suddenly becomes the _ fullymatured emblem of eternal maternity; the nervy, unstrung Connie McNairn and her snobbish mother; and?the least successfully drawn and least original, Mrs. Portman, who is the usual flighty woman one finds in novels with a foreign setting-always alert for love adventures and a bore to the reader because .of a lack of reality. Mr. Bates, competent to handle situations, flattens us with hackneyed ones; competent, to handle characters, devastates us with people we have met so often before that we can dispense with their company; and bolsters up the whole with a theme that has been constantly used in recent years by less matured writersof a crowd of white people clustering together for mutual protection in their escape from the approaching enemy (the Japanese) and the interp!ay of emotional reaction to the situation. The novel has flashes of brilliant description but otherwise seems to be the work of a tired man who is abusing his

talents.

B.L.

C.