ISLAND MIST

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 536, 30 September 1949, Page 19

ISLAND MIST

THE LOST CHART, by Neil M. Gunn; Faber and Faber. English Price, 10/6. ERMOT CAMERON, who has something to do with shipping, is now attached to Security, and has jpst the chart of Cladday, an island off the west of Scotland. At the club there is much talk, bitter talk, intellectual talk of politics, religion, philosophy, music, art -and war. ‘They argue as they wait for the finger to press the buttons which will shatter civilisation. Much of it is vague and woolly talk, and a precise statement is like a sabre’ thrust. Cladday has strategic importance, but it is Cladday as he knew it in that other

war, on his secret sea-borne missions, | that holds his heart. The remote, misty island, with its brave and simple people: Old MacNeal who. raises his hat to the morning sun, Old Anna who curtseys to the new moon, and Christina, the child, whispering in the cow’s ear as she kisses it. ; " There is an individual note in Mr. Gunn’s_ writing: "The dead bracken crackled. Birch scrub along a_ small ravine had a curious bone-greyness on its purple, a reflecting of the March sunlight that was strangely thoughtful and quiescent, a waiting in its twigs and branches for the birth-act below. The whole hillside was dry and drained, the grass grey and flattened, like dead hair, the rocks grey. The earth was naked and austere and beautiful." I was not convinced that the fate of civilisation rested with a gang in an old hulk. I preferred the story of Cladday itself, which was slipped into the main theme, an odd phrase here and there, with the haunting beauty of a vision half-seen through the island mist?

Nelle

Scanlan