EASY READING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 713, 13 March 1953, Page 14

EASY READING

IB DKS

(continued from previous page) monéy ahd instructions for British and French bagents of the Resistance. Landing from a Submarine in January, 1942, he spent four weeks in Unoccupied France before crossing the Pyrenees on foot in a strenuous 50-mile night journey. He returned once more by _ submarine and was twice dropped by parachute before being captured in April, 1943. This is the story of his first mission. He tells it unmodestly in the third person. He is too much concerned with the minutiae of his trip-returning salutes, ordering drinks, washing, shaving, eating, sleeping-but much of it was spent killing time in cafés trying

not to attract attention.

W.A.

G.

THE HAND AND FLOWER, by Jerrard 'Tickell; Hodder and Stoughton. English price, 10/6. TOM TALLION, by E. H. W. ‘Meyerstein; Victor Gollancz. En§lish price, 12,6. A LONG WAY TO GO, by Marigold Armitage; Faber and Faber. English price, 12/6. TOM TIDDLER’S GROUND, by Mary Cy aed William Heinemann. English price, 12/6 TRE HAND AND FLOWER is easy treading. Those who enjoyed Appointment with Venus will find here the same freshness of character and landscape which made the earlier novel so popular. The Hand and Flower is a London pub whose darts club goes on a day’s trip to Boulogne. The adventures of Charley Collins, brewery man, Shorty, the spiv who joins the Foreign

Legion, .and. Jim-Carver, the-ex-sergeant who meets, loses and finds again the little peasant girl encountered years before, make up a several-stranded story, sometimes very funny, sometimes touching, There is amusifg satire on the Englishman on foreign soil, clinging stoutly to his yirtue while enjoying , himself in a round of mild naughtiness turned on for his benefit. Tom Tallion is a_ clever satirical novel. ‘Touching the early life of the hero, an artistic prodigy, is a strange succession of chatacters whose common factor is that they are all untimely and inconsequentially dead. The urbane treatment gives this. novel an Unusual flavour-like Defoe re-written by Evelyn Waugh. It’s A Long Way To Go to Tipperary, and this witty story shows with considerable insight. that the distance from the smart world of London is not merely in miles but in states of mind. A successful playwright brings his intended bride and his manager to visit his decaying family seat. Horses are the family mania and temporarily the visitors succumb to the bewitching corruption of the place where a fox-hunt is as passionate as a love affair, In a bleak Highland glen an old woman rears her great-grandson, inculcating in him her own hatred of «he English, When the boy’s English relatives discover him, his mind becomes a Tom Tiddler’s Ground. A penetrating, unsentimental study of a dour and ter-

rible confict.

M.J.

B.