CONVENTION AND REVOLT

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

CONVENTION AND REVOLT

THE HOUSE OF GAIR, by Eric Linklater; Jonathan Cape, English price 10/6. THE. DWARF, by Par Lagerkvist; Chatto and Windus, English price 8/6. THE GARDEN TO THE SEA, by Philip Toynbee; McGibbon and Kee, English price 12/6. THE. LYING DAYS, by Nadine Gordimer; Victor Gollancz, English price 12/6. HE HOUSE OF GaAIR is an excellent novel of the thriller type with a literary flavour. It moves with the speed of Stamboul Train, has the dramatic intensity of The Franchise Affair, and the sharp characterisations

of The Caine Mutiny. To give any hint of the plot will spoil the reader’s enjoyment. The Dwarf, translated from the Swedish, is a well-told unpleasant shortlong 175-page story of a Renaissance Court told by the dwarf. All the usual conventions are observed. The Prince is treacherous, the ladies adulterous, the dwarf malignant, the Church ineffectual, the courtiers cruel. There is therefore little element of surprise. A larger view of Italian Renaissance history could well have been expected of an author who ranks rather higher than Rafael Sabatini, and is a Nobel prizeman. The Garden to the Sea is a highly experimental Philip Toynbee novel, in the tradition of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. It will interest those who feel that literature should constantly seek outlet through new media, and adopt new forms of expression. The narrative is in the first person; but fourfold. Adam speaks and is followed by Adam speaking through his experience at different ages; through Noel, the voice of his Innocence; through Tom, the voice of his Fall; through Charley, the voice of his Punishment. This drags things out rather, but it would be unreasonable to expect streams of con- sciousness in poetic prose to be succinct. Innovations of this sort are not unknown in other branches of art. Rouault’s paintings look like designs for stained glass windows. A whole school of Continental painters uses a palette knife instead of a brush as if modelling in clay. But there it is. It is a matter of taste. In The Lying Days, Helen’s father is a Rand mine official and his household is modelled on suburban’ English middle-class lines familiar to us in New Zealand. Helen rebels against everything in it, its worship of the mine, its conventionality, its attitude to Africans, its sex taboos and its lack of culture as she views it. So off she goes to Johannesburg first as a student and then as the mistress of a Government Native Welfare official. She doesn’t believe in God, but she is concerned about the Native problem. We are given an uninhibited narrative of her sex life, which

is frankly anigaal.

F.J.

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