AUSTRALIAN REALISM
YOU CAN’T SEE ROUND CORNERS, by Jon Cleary; Eyre and Spottiswoode. English price, 8/6. FRANKIE McCOY, warped product of the back streets of a large city, and at war with humanity, is something of an Australian Studs Lonigan. At twentyone Frankie "knew all the answers and was out to beat the game." Called up for military service which he has tried
to dodge, he deserts and finally commits robbery, rape and murder, You Can’t See Round Corners, which won a second prize of £1,000 in a Sydney Morning Herald literary competition, is a competently written novel. The prose occasionally lapses into journalese, but is on the whole as deadpan and inflectionless as most Australian and New Zealand voices; what it loses in subtlety, it makes up for in vigour and down-to-earth honesty. Setting up as a small-time bookie, Frankie passes in his bleak surroundings from sheila to sheila to an inevitable violent death; for the pattern of "social realism" can be as standardised as that of the Western and the Who-dun-it,
J.R.
C.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 532, 2 September 1949, Page 14
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175AUSTRALIAN REALISM New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 532, 2 September 1949, Page 14
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