IDYLL INSIDE OUT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 764, 12 March 1954, Page 12

IDYLL INSIDE OUT

THE SCHOONER CAME TO ATIA, by Roderick Finlayson; the Griffin Press, 12/6.

(Reviewed by

David

Hall

FINLAYSON’S new * a is an important book; for once that overworked word is fully warranted, because this novel’s publication is an event both in social history and in literature. Few New Zealanders have

ever been emotionally stirred by the distant fringe of tropical islands which we administer and forget. This book has its scene somewhere in the Cook Islands, whose natives are called Maori and speak a very similar language. It is not the smallest of its achievements that it gives with great skill and sympathy the authentic atmosphere of a modern "South Sea" island -the still natural natives who have suffered in greater or‘lesser degree the corruption of European contacts, the self-import-ant white people trying to uphold their superiority in spite of inner emptiness and insufficiency. The whole tempo of the book is quiet. Understatement, toning down the highlights, restraining the outpourings of emotion and deliberately avoiding the crescendo; these have been Mr. Fin--layson’s methods of creating his picture of a fly-blown earthly paradise irretrievably dedicated to the second-rate. In one way his methods are risky. He frequently introduces us to the thoughts of his characters; and, naturally enough, these are often dismally commonplace. Chapham, the resident official (everything from magistrate to customs exam--iner) and his dreadful wife, are ex- | quisite essays in the banal which Flaubert might have envied. Because of the very faithfulness of the portrait, there is an intrusion of the cliche where the language might with advantage have been more incisive, that of the author himself rather than that of the characters he portrays. This short novel is as closely knit as a short story. Incident and personaiity are precisely dovetailed. The tact and skill of Finlayson in handling events also makes itself apparent in the economy of his narrative method and in the deliberate avoidance of the sensational. The plot could have been treated

as melodrama of the most irksome sort. Instead the whole scene has a naturalness, and inevitability and tragic completeness, which produce a novel in a literal sense memorable which is also profoundly moving. An elderly missionary has a more than fatherly affection for a young native girl who works in his house. When a young New Zealand visitoremotionally unstable and in search of a new formula to live by-makes love to the girl, the missionary shoots him. The affair is treated as an accident for the sake of white prestige, but there is enough evidence for a native headman afterwards to blackmail the government factotum. The story has, however, none of the lurid associations the plot might conjure up; it makes an impact entirely different from that of Somerset Maugham’s Rain. This is a very welcome addition to the increasing tally of good novels by New Zealanders, AUSTRALIAN LANDSCAPE AUSTRALIA WRITES, edited by T. Inglis Moore; F. W. Cheshire, Melbourne, Australian price 19/6. N anthology edited for the Canberra Fellowship of Australian Writers, Australia Writes is like a bargain store window. It is crammed full, and it is impossible to trace a principle of selection other than the desire to provide something for everyone. Commencing on the dust jacket and continuing throughout the stories, essays and poetry is one character that dwarfs all the rest: the Australian landscape. This presence in Australian literature with an obvious power to attract a public is, at least in part, a product of romantic nostalgia. It is a turning away from the realities of the modern world to the Australia of the bush ballads and the stories of Henry Lawson, to a culture that was no sooner manifested and celebrated than its origins began to disappear. Consequently it is not surprising to find that the bulk of the stories and poems have been reprinted from The Bulletin. There is a promise of new vigour, if not new directions, in the University of Canberra intelligentsia’s "Acton School." An example of the inspired larrikinism of this group is a couplet by the Dean of the Faculty of Social Science addressed to a new Professor of Geography, Oskar ’ Spate: Welcome, welcome .. . Spates, Youse and us is , . « mates, At the end of this large volume one remembers the work of Judith Wright, Kenneth Mackenzie, W. MHart-Smith, Kylie Tennant and Judah Waten. But throughout it is difficult to see the wood

for the undergrowth:

J.R.

C.