TOO LONG A SUMMER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 545, 2 December 1949, Page 19

TOO LONG A SUMMER

A SUMMER TO DECIDE, by Pamela Hans=e Michail Joseph.‘ English Price, N English critic writes on the dust jacket of Miss Hansford Johnson’s "ability to load every rift with ore." I have not found gold so easily; true, some grains can be sifted out by the dreary process of washing all the mud at the bottom of the river of many words, enough perhaps to show what that kindly critic meant. The novelist has a certain briskness and penetration, but the length and the detail and the indecision as to what’ she wants to do with all these bright and hopeful people get me down. One can find a lot to say for a writer whose hero talks like this of the heroine: "When I was not with Ellen I longed for her, and the moment I saw her the longing died." At other times the choice of terms is less apt: "Both she and Ellen were living on the raw, fretted edges of their nerves." The indecisions of Claud are deliberately contrived, but they do not make him more interesting or less tir rgsome. The detail of this book is often excellent and the interaction of the characters usually magnificent; but the writer, painting indecision, séems to share it, and desperately adds page to page, The general picture of a rather faded post-war London with its lack of comfort or dignity is a substantial achievement. Miss Hansford Johnson is, I think, in the top flight of good middlebrow novelists.

David

Hall