MARTYRS AND PILGRIMS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 765, 19 March 1954, Page 14

MARTYRS AND PILGRIMS

| GOOD ANGEL SLEPT, by Robert Greenwood; Hodder and Stoughton, English price 12/6. THE HOLY FOOT, b obert Romanis; Andre Deutsch, N.Z. price 9/6. THE FOOLISH IMMORTALS, by Paul Gallico; Michael Joseph, English price 126. SHOP each day and all day long, Friend your good angel slept, your star suffered eclipse. It was Browning: she quoted it to him when he wasn’t ;much more than @ grocer’s boy. "Anybody can maké money," her father had | told him, quoting nobody. "All you have | to do is think about nowt else from morn, to neet." It was the latter prescription he followed, in the end. The star eclipsed was his aspiration to be a painter, to be a success in a world not of shops. But married to a girl who was not the one who quoted Browning, his paintings abandoned to the attic, nagged by competition and an acquisitive woman, he knew, when they made him mayer, that "he had won success in a world he didn’t value." Good Angel Slept is a story of frustration; and Mr. Greenwood, knowing his Yorkshire, tells it in a manner reminiscent of Hugh Walpole and Howard Spring. The Holy Foot, declared Giacomino, & missionary friar, was not holy. It was, | ne declared, the foot of some pagan statue, some Bacchus, some Priapus. The population of the mountain village was aghast: it was, they declared, the foot of St. Stephen. Giacomino was a solitary voice, crying out against evil, and in thé war that followed, with the sirocco blowing, they hustled him over a cliff. Then someone dug up the rest of the pagan statue. Repentant. the villagers made the shrine, intended for the Foot, into a memorial of his martyrdom: . er*

it was peasant é¢conomy. Almost as many tourists and pilgrims came to the martyr’s shrine as would have come to see the foot. It is a simple~ story simply told: the author’s view of humen relations is as uncomplicated as his narrative. The village of Sant’ Antonio steals the scene. The Foolish Immortals are not a little improbable, also. Mr. Gallico takes his group of type characters on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in search of the secret of the longevity of the ancients. He takes them, one might Say, ona trite pilgrimage towards a Mecca of the superficial and the sentimental. Mr. Gallico does not always

manage to avoid Dad taste.

M.

D.