BIRDSEED FOR THE PHOENIX

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 752, 11 December 1953, Page 14

BIRDSEED FOR THE PHOENIX

THE MUSTARD SEED, by Vicki Baum; Michael Joseph, English price 12/6. THE REBELS, by Henry Treece; Victor Gollancz, English price 12/6. UNTIL FHE PHOENIX, by F. S, Chang; Victor Gollancz, Enf§lish price 12/6. . SAINTLY but slangy-and mildly boring-Italian faith-healer visiting America to attempt to help the darkened mind of the brother of a G.I. friend is the linking character in The Mustard Seed, a story of the neurotic and the unbalanced in which the device of "case histories" enables Vicki Baum to draw in a number of other themes to garnish the main one of incestuous twins. This long, fluent nove] seems always on the point of going somewhere important but never quite sets forth. In The Rebels, Henry Treece tells the. story of .a middle-class family in the Black Country in the eighteen-sixties, all of whom come to grief because their natures are too passionate for the de- © corum of Victorian England. The vigorous -narrative has more force than probability. : F. S. Chang’s political novel describes the fortunes of a young couple who belong to the land-owning classes ousted by the. Communists in China. There is graphic description of the break-up of the old way of life in the country and in Shanghai. The author is honest enough to show both the advancing Communist and the decaying Kuomintang governments as intolerable by our standards, but he clings nostalgically to Nationalism in making his young people escape to Formosa, where Kuomintang corruption gives wav to purity and high

endeavour. We hope.

David

Hall