LITTLE WORLDS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 718, 17 April 1953, Page 13

LITTLE WORLDS

THE GRASS HARP, by Truman Capote; William Heinemann. N.Z. price, 10/6. A CRY OF CHILDREN, by John Horne Burns; Secker and Warburg. N.Z. price, 12/6. THE CLOSEST KIN THERE IS, by Clara Winston; Victor Gollancz. English price, 12/6. POKER AND I, by John Coates; Victor Gollancz. English price, 12/6. N The Grass Harp, Truman Capote evokes a South which is not a place so much as a way of looking at the world. He writes of children or, at least, his people have that air of children grown old in childhood and denied their kingdom. He breathes over them the sad cadence of his prose and with a careful oddity, a folksy wisdom, they seem delicately to come alive, The grass harp whispers with "gone voices," and without much place in the world these carefully strange characters take up their lives in a house built by forgotten children in a China tree. But they are not left in ped&ce, though for a time they are lulled ‘by natural things-in much the same way as we are lulled by this exotic, autumnal prose, which preserves. if it does nothing more, the very manner of beauty. : Love and passion and the decay of both; world of flesh and world of spirit; so might be described the burden of A Cry of Children. And though we may not accept the specific solution this novel offers we yet cannot deny that in the fierceness of observation Mr. Burns puts before us a picture of reality comparable with the best in contemporary American writing. Clara Winston’s America is outback and drear. She,tells with some competence a story of The Closest Kin There | Is, brother and sister, and their relationship, which is, if anything, even more bleak than the land around. Poker and I is the story of Poker, eccentric peer, and his illegitimate daughter, Lesbia, who is the "I" of this long light tale. It is a story about lovers and babies, war and peace, and it has at its end, money and happiness-from which the reader will see that this is

fiction.

M.

D.