TWO BOYHOODS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 742, 2 October 1953, Page 12

TWO BOYHOODS

IN THE CASTLE OF MY SKIN, by George Lamming; Michael Joseph. English price, 15/-. THE BICYCLE RIDER OF BEYVERLEY HILLS, by William Saroyan; Faber and Faber. English price, 12/6 "HE exotic world of the British West Indies has never been so well described as by the astonishing group of novelists and poets of the past decadeEdgar Mittelholzer, Roger Mais, Raiph de Boissiere. Samuel Selvon and George

Lamming. In this autobiographical account of his boyhood on Barbados George Lamming has caught not only the West Indies zest for life, but its socia] and racial problems as weil. His story of a growing boy, half African and half European, is also the lively history of a raw, developing community which changes in a few years from peaceful Stagnation to a setting for ugly riots over land rents. Yet it is the scenes of boyhood observation, the innocent glimpses of the extraordinary beneath usual happenings, which give the , book its vitality. This little world is seen with a moving intensity by Lamming's brooding eye, sharpened by his eccentric sense of humour and enliyened by the island slang in which many of his characters speak, The incidents’ at the bath-house, the voodoo-like revival meeting, the dance held in honour of a _ visiting British warship, the episode of the crabs and the giant fisherman on the beach, are powerfully done. And illuminating it all is the profound and compassionate imagination of the young narrator, resigned in his attempts to come to grips with a world that he only half believes in and will never fully understand. William Saroyan’s story is of his boyhood in Fresno, California, in the Armenian colony where "nobody was interested in anything except the making of money," where his only friends were the failures and flops, the _ Poets and

tramps. His wild humour and old eye for the fantastic are seen in his account of the Armenian pupil who threw the headmaster out of the window, the attempts to set fire to the orphanage where he went after his father’s death. his purchase of a 12-dollar phonograph, his experiences while selling papers on the street and as a telegraph messenger. But here also is the moral Saroyan, the carpet philosopher: "I was long years discovering the secret that it does not matter at all where one begins . . . the important thing is for a man to resign himself to the truth that he is only a man, and to work, and then to find in the rare moments of luck the greatness which is not his alone. . ." This is, his message to all those, like himself, of

poor origins.

P.J.

W.