THE SPICE OF VARIETY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 775, 28 May 1954, Page 13

THE SPICE OF VARIETY

THE BLOSSOMING TREE, by Betty Askwith; Victor Gollancz, English price 10/6. FLAMING JANET, by Pamela Hill; Chatto and Windus, English price 12/6. DEVICES AND DESIRES, by E. Arnot Robertson; Jonathan Cape, English price 10/6. A BED OF ROSES, by William Sansom; the Hogarth Press, English price 12/6. [HE BLOSSOMING TREE, by Betty Askwith, is easily the most readable of these. four: and that in spite of a certain luke-warmness, a lack of enthusiasm, which would kill a more pretentious work. It will appeal to all who like a quiet story of the English Upper Classes in the late Edwardian days. The heroine, Catherine Dysart, suffers a brief infatuation for an Irish vet-sus-tains his loss with stoicism-marries a titled neighbour-and is happy enough in a blue-blooded way until she’ meets an emigré Frenchman and really falls in love. That is all the story: like a cold evening meal, it has its charms as well as its mild disappointments. No one could compare Pamela Hill’s Flaming Janet with a cold meal-rather, it is a hot posset to be swallowed down gratefully on a winter’s evening. Janet Kennedy came from the Lowlands of Scotland in the 15th Century to bewitch many men, among them the sensitive and enigmatic James IV of Scotland. Hers is a lusty tale, told here with bravura and a fair amount of taste. But it suffers the disability of all except the greatest historical novels: each character seems to have such a conscious eye on posterity, is so determined to be picturesque, that the reader suffers his surfeit of lampreys early. "Oh, for a spot of placid, human, credible dullness!" was the sigh of this reader, when Flarming Janet had seared her way through 251 excited pages and come to rest in a glossary. E. Arnot Robertson’s Devices and Desires is, on the other hand, so muted as to be equally incredible. A constant nymph, orphaned on the first page, strays thereafter through war-ravaged south-eastern Europe possessed by two urges: to get her band of refugees safely to their havens, and to find matrimonial security for herself. Her adventures, (continued on next page)

BOOKS (continued from previous page) hair-raising in any other context, seem here almost dull; since she herself in spite of her impressionable age, is not at all changed by them: though something like a year passes, she does not develop. This is what J call dullness. A Bed of Roses, by that same William Sansom who earlier delighted us with The Body and other sensitive works, is a book so ugly in conception and execution that I, for one, could hardly finish it. A weak masochistic heroine, a brutal stupid hero, much drinking, wenching, bull-fighting and man fighting-all conducted wholly without style-no, Mr. Sansom, those who truly admire your gift can only hope that you will soon forget this horrid work, and return, in your own time, to the graces that once

were yours.

Sarah

Campion