TIMES AND PLACES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 668, 24 April 1952, Page 13

TIMES AND PLACES

THE GREAT ORDEAL, by Johan Fabricus; Heinemann. Australian price, 9/6. TRUTH IN THE NIGHT, by Michael MacLaverty; Jonathan Cape. English price, 12/6. THE SWAN, by Marguerite Steen; HartDavis. English price, 12/6. BARBARY SHORE, by Norman Mailer; Jonathan Cape. English price, 12/6. TRE GREAT ORDEAL by Johan Fabricus is another legend-turned-into-literature. It’s the story of the making of a Javanese saint. Readable enough, though perhaps the atmosphere could have been heightened. At times it is, doubtful whether one is reading about Javanese or about white people living in mud huts. However, the book may, have suffered in its translation from the Dutch. Illustrations are by the author. It’s obvious to anyone who reads Truth in the Night that Michael MacLaverty knows his Ireland, and particularly the islands off the Irish coast. He has achieved a fine blend of character, situation and setting in this, his latest book, and has told a story of love, marriage and death in a way which is idiomatic "without being artificial and human without being sentimental. The Swan, by Marguerite Steen, is a curious piece of work. There’s the air of a Georgian drawing-room about it, but the air of a drawing-room from the windows of which one sees, not an artificially classical pleasaunce, but a modern block of glass and concrete flats. In writing her romance of the early 19th century, Miss Steen’ has deliberately affected a Jane Austenish idiom, and even, for that matter, an Austenish subject: a woman in search of a husband. There, though, the resemblance ends. Mics Steen ‘sees more deevly into the characters of Tulia, the adolescent Pelham, and Miles (who seems to have been drawn direct from Surtees) than her literary forbears would have tonsidered proper, or even decent. "4 Norman Mailer, as anyone who read The Naked and the Dead will remember,

is not a man to mince matters, His second novel, Barbary Shore, goes a long way to uphold the reputation he made with his first. In it he has shown his ability to write on two levels-the one of sound fiction, the other of intellectual exposition-at the same time, and to say something worth reading on both. Barbary Shore may seem to some to be an unwholesome nightmare, but if that is so it is because some parts of civilisation are already living in nightmare, and others (our own included) are in danger of drifting into unwhole-

someness.

PIC