SAINTS AND OTHERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 779, 25 June 1954, Page 13

SAINTS AND OTHERS

FIESTA, by Prudencio de Pereda; Victor Gollancz, English price 12/6. SET ALL AFIRE, by Louis de Wohl; Victor Gollancz, English price 12/6. THE OTHER LANDSCAPE, by Neil M. Gunn; Faber and Faber, English price 12/6. EVENTIDE, by Arthur F. Nickels; Jonathan Cape, English price 12/6. N theme very like Kazantzakis’s Christ Recrucified but vastly inferior in execution, Fiesta tells of Ros, a Spaniard who revisits the village of his birth, and saves the life of Tomas, a young visionary, who is to play Christ in a Passion Play. While enacting the role, however, Tomas does die, in a vaguely defined sacrificial gesture. The mood is that of the ‘thirties. The author suggests that the Hemingwayish Ros, a_ secularised, womanising revolutionary, is the real Christian and the professing Christians reactionary mockeries. There are some slight compensations in the glimpses of Spanish village life. * Louis de Wohl, who has based several readable novels on lives of the saints, fails to bring St. Francis Xavier alive in his new book, Xavier’s remarkable missionary work in India, Japan and China offers excellent material, but the author is content to observe only from the outside. The result is a pedestrian job

which never at any point looks like doing justice to its subject. Neil Gunn’s story of an archaeologist trying to discover the real tragedy behind a tale written by a lonely Highlander carries a heavy load of muzzy mysticism and would-be profound Kierkegaardian sig-

nificance. The best parts are the things Mr. Gunn always does best----some high comedy involving an English major’s feud with a gillie and the evocation of the atmosphere of a remote Highland village. Least pretentious of all, Eventide succeeds in creating the crotchety personality of an 80-year-old naval pensioner, who, between intervals of fighting official attempts to seize his cottage, sets down his reminiscences. The convincing stylisation of his speech, racy and lively, expresses his tough independence and truculent conservatism. But this is no sentimental whimsey. The old man’s story of his terrible childhood with a drunken father is starkly real, while there is genuine tenderness in his memories of his Chinese concubine. This is a vigorously original novel, rich, gamey

and human.

J.C.

R.