NEW NOVELS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 629, 20 July 1951, Page 13

NEW NOVELS

THE BEAST OF THE HAITIAN HILLS, by Phili Thoby Marcelin and Pierre Marcelin; Victor Gollancz. English price, 9/6. -[T HIS" remarkable book-well trans- ‘" lated from the French by Peter C. Rhodes-succeedgs in solving some widely separate problems. There is first the problem of writing as a citizen of a country without an indigenous literary tradition-a familiar problem to New (continued on page 15)

BOOKS (continued from page 13) Zealanders. These two writers from Haiti succeed not only in the realistic portraying of an unmapped people but also in the defining of the deepest religious life of their people; that is, the relationship with the family gods, the regular occurrence of possession by a _ Spirit and, most terrifying of all, the doniination of magicians who are not, like the other powers, liable’ to propitiation. Then there is the problem of dealing with supernatural themes, of making possession and every form of illusion credible. This is done with so much ease that the difficulty is hardly apparent. Further, the authors handle the chief question, that of the truth of myth and supernatural happenings, in a most skilful manner: the possessions and spirits are shown for what they are, i.e., illusions of the mind, but the Beast aroused by the magician to fight the chief character, the mulatto stranger .Dutilleul, is not treated in the same way as wholly illusory. This "Cigouave" does at last appear to Dutilleul as a superior supernatural power; here is one supernatural being who cannot be denied, The Cigouave, as Edmund Wilson points out in his infermative introduction, is linked with Dutilleul’s own guilt. Finally, the novel is a splendid example of victory over a huge epical subject which is here condensed in a perfectly controlled small compass.

E.

Schwimmer