FOUR NOVELS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 759, 5 February 1954, Page 13

FOUR NOVELS

QUICK BRIGHT THINGS, by Isobel Strachey; Jonathan Cape, English price 10/6. LADIES WITH A UNICORN, by Monica Stirling; Victor Gollanez, English price, 10/6. THE MAN WITH ONE HEAD, by Fannie Hurst; Jonathan Cape, English price 10/6. A STRANGER CAME TO THE FARM, by Mika Waltari; Dymock’s Book Arcade, Australian price 14/-. "THE double standard always works two ways, being double-ended. Fashionable brittle novels are simply not good enough for us out here, since our healthy isolation has taught us, in liter-| ature as in life, the importance of living people. Thus the first three books of the above quartet can be fairly dismissed as of little more importance than the lava of a dying world. Tsobel Strachey’s Quick Bright Things: divorcee mother and clueless daughter living fashionably on capital in London; mather fails to snare ‘rich neighbour, daughter has fumbling affair with dim young man., At one point mother cries: "It is wicked of us to give a party with the price of gin so high!" Not wicked, just silly. Monica Stirling’s Ladies With a Unicorn describes the amorous and cinematic agonies of some females in Rome: promising start, weak ending, with a few shafts of wit between. Fannie Hurst’s The Man With One Head concerns a horridly typical American matron trying to keep scarlet claws upon her family while getting herself (continued on next page) |

(continued from prévious page) tlected as Assembly Woman. Pious references to the importance of UN include: "After the visit to the Venezuelan delegate we're going to a meeting of the Human Rights Committee. You know, rights of humans. .. We may even catch a glimpse of Mr. Lie." Al] this émbeddéd in soda-fountain sentimentality, nothing but froth and synthetic vanilla. Finally, a réal book and real writing. A Stranger Came to the Farm, by Mika Waltari, is honest, simple, and probably trué to the bleak peasant life of Finland. It has story, it has charactérs who belong to that story: though the plot is somewhat hackneyed, and the prose (being translated) somewhat flat, the book remains wéll worth reading for its lyrical descriptions of the inéxorable seasons as they march over the land, for its sincérity, above all for its importance when contrasted with the celluloid agonies of the idle rich as depicted in

the other three.

Sarah

Campion