THREE NOVELS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 633, 17 August 1951, Page 13

THREE NOVELS

‘sight into the psychology of young THE CASE OF COMRADE TULAYEV, by | Victor Serge; Hamish Hamilton. English | price, 12/6. SHADOW OF THE BRIDGE, by Betsey Barton; Victor Gollancz. English price, 10/6. | A GROVE OF FEVER TREES, by Daphne Rooke; Jonathan Cape. English price, 10/6. VITH the opening pages of Comrade Tulayev, we are momentarily back in the traditional half-world of the. great Russian novelists-the shabby | lodgings of poor Assistant Clerk Rom-| achkin with their smell "of boiled cab-. bage and naphthalene. But this is Soviet Russia, and when a high Party official is assassinated, the ugly machine of Soviet revenge begins to roll.®One by one a number of individuals, none of them remotely connected with Tulayev’s death, are liquidated; no one is big enough or politically pure enough to escape the purge for which it is made the excuse. The story of each victim is told in detail, and they include Erchov the High Commissar, Rublev the old Party stalwart, Makeyev the Regional Secretary-even some of the inquisitors who extort the familiar bogus confessions. They fight for a while and then accept death almost as if they regard it as their last service to Party solidarity. The book is not another Darkness at Noon, but is written with wisdom and compassion. The author has a deep understanding of the Russian mind, and his book is above all an instructive study on the theme of the corruption of unlimited power. Shadow of the Bridge is the story of the revolt against authority of two girls | at a rick girls’ college in America. Alida, the heroine, is an ugly duckling, while her companion Dee is beautiful and poised, passes all her exams and has a "wonderful" boy-friend. When Dee jumps off a bridge Alida blames herself for her death, and develops an oversized neurosis before the headmistress is discomfited and her father’s friendship is recovered. The book is far too emotional to be easy reading, but its setting is authentjé, and the author has real inwomen and in their strange, mystical yearnings. The Ashburns and. the Eliots, neighbouring South African farmers in A Grove of Fever Trees, both have skeletons in the family closet. The Ashburn skeleton is insanity, which appears in their son Danny, a "half-mad giant" who is the hero of this book.. Danny loves Prudence Eliot, but so does his brother Edward, who goes to Johannesburg to work, takes to the bottle, and is eventually killed by Danny in a fit of madness. Danny stays on at the farm, spending a good deal of his time among the Zulus, finally marrying an English girl and having a perfectly normal son. Despite its tragic theme this is a surprisingly lively story, full of vitality, warmth, and the colour of its exotic

setting.

P. J.

W.