VARIOUS WORLDS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 785, 6 August 1954, Page 13

VARIOUS WORLDS

IN LOVE, by Alfred Hayes; Victor Gollancz, English price 10/6. THE LESSER INFORTUNE, by Rayner Heppenstall; Jonathan Cape, English price 12/6. JANE AND PRUDENCE, by Barbara Pym; Jonathan Cape, English price 12/6. THE LAST BARRICADE, by Mervyn Jones; Jonathan Cape, English price 12/6. THE EVERINTERESTING TOPIC, by William Cooper; Jonathan Cape, English price 12/6. EAD In Love and you may decide that a love affair seen through to the last bitter kiss and self-abasing phone call is better read about than experienced; which is true enough if suffering has no place at all in your particular pleasure garden. In _ Love, though, like its subject, is not all suffering. Telling the full story, it goes back to the first sad-pleasurable tension; and there is much wry humour. But it would be surprising all the same if it did not start many old, wounds aching. The story is told in the first person by a man who, on reflection, is probably not to be much admired. The woman might be called a bitch or worse, but looked at a second time there is something near a forgivable inevitability in her behaviour, if you can conquer the haunting fear that in too many ways she may be everywoman. Dipping into this book now for the fourth or fifth time, I still find it hard to put down. Mr. Hayes writes, as they say, like nobody’s business; what he communicates has for the reader a quality of direct experience and as much of its impact as you can expect short of the real thing. It is a very remarkable book. The Lesser Infortune is frank and interesting, but not as exciting as the author’s earlier, too-little-known novel The Blaze of Noon. This new book reads more like a report on experience than a work of the creative imagination. It’s "I" is a young writer with pacifist leanings who joins the army and, discovering his mistake, spends much time in not always admirable efforts to get out of it. It gives a picture of army life as it was for some who might have been more usefully employed, of an army hospital for neurotics from the inside-and of one man’s: mind. Miss Pym’s parish women, never far from the vicarage, are among the most delightful creations I have encountered in tecent fiction. She’s the sort of writer you expect to find rather slow going and then discover is as absorbing as a thriller: she knows and recreates it all so well. Her Jane is a vicar’s wife and Prudence a friend in town who "has

her love affairs." It’s even better, I | think, than Some Tame Gazelle-which is high praise. Mr. Jones writes extremely well. His central character is the deposed President of a European country living in exile in England and planning counterrevolution, but the story is more interesting as a study of his effect on others -especially his son and the girl he is to marry. A little further off are some well-drawn comic characters, among them an English pioneer socialist, now wealthy and a bit of an old dog, who is a Mice contrast with the Continental revolutionary. In spite of its subject (guess what?) The Ever-Interesting Topic is the least absorbing of this batch of novels. Not that Mr. Cooper can’t write or hasn't a story. to tell-he can and has. But he mars both with his comments as author, which is something we don’t expect from one with enough perception to see, in an agreeably amused way, through several sorts of attitudes to sex.

F.A.

J.