QUEEN OF PERSIA
ESTHER, by Norah Lofts; Michael Joseph. English price, 8/6. S source material for the arts the story of Esther has been oddly neglected, states the author of this new portait in her preface. The Jewish Queen of Persia and wife of Artaxerxes has been overlooked by the poets. painters
and choreographers who have made so much of apocryphal Susannah. There are apparently some disadvantages to inclusion in the Sacred Canon. Nor does the Book of Esther in the Authorised Version hold much appeal for children --ten uneasy chapters of plotting and treachery with a massacre as a climax. From this fairly unpromising material, however, Norah Lofts has made fof girls in their teens an attractive readable book with the romantic appeal which Hassan and Messer Marco Polo possess for this age, the "gorgeous East," in fact. The actual sequence of events as narrated in the Old Testament is followed very closely; the whole effect of Norah Lofts’s re-telling is to increase the force of the original, to make it comprehensible where it might not have been so before. Thus the treachery is there, but woven into a richer context it has more meaning than it possessed in the synopsis-like text of the Bible. The only criticisms one could make of the book concern some of Artaxerxes’s turns of speech. "The queen has not seen the place yet," or "Administrative matters bore me." Dialogue in a historical novel is always the capita] diffi-
culty.
D.N.
W.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 629, 20 July 1951, Page 15
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248QUEEN OF PERSIA New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 629, 20 July 1951, Page 15
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