NOVEL SITUATIONS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 787, 20 August 1954, Page 13

NOVEL SITUATIONS

THE BRIDGE _OF FIRE, by Denis Godfrey; Jonathan Cape, English price 12/6. AGAINST WHOM?, by Phyllis Bottome; Faber and Faber, English price 12/6. SEA FRONT, by Rachel Ferguson; Jonathan Cape, English price 12/6. CONSIDER THESE WOMEN, by Hebe Elsna; Robert Hale, English price 9/6. ENIS GODFREY, a name hitherto unknown to this reviewer but hereafter to be kept in mind, has in Bridge of Fire written a commendably sober and honest account of hair-raising happenings. This in itself is merit enoughthe purple patch, the sexy snicker, are both so tempting when you are writing for a living that our hats must come off to anyone strong enough to resist them-but Mr. Godfrey has gone further still and made his very sobriety interesting. Consider the plot, and what lush unhealthy stuff might have been made of it: on a remote airfield in Ceylon, towards the end of the last war, a few hundred men are putting in their time as best they can. Their unhealthily monotonous lives are suddenly agitated by the arrival of reinforcements, not only in male but also in female form; and a few months later the seething resentment .of the old lags results in the murder of a newcomer. But these sensational events are given exactly their right weight and substance in a very human story, which makes one anxious to read not only Mr. Godfrey’s next book, but also his earlier two. Only in the rather difficult matter of the hero’s last-minute conversation does he falter either in delicacy or in strength: and religious conversion, that blinding light on the toad to Damascus, is something which only a genius can make either convincing or palatable to the ordinary reader. Phyllis Bottome’s Against Whom? is, naturally, the work of a far more practised writer. It deals with several neurotics and one warmly sane man in a Swiss sanatorium for tubercular cases: and manages somehow to be both clinical and emotional in its approach. Though the essential simplicity and the goodness of the priest, Father Bretherton, shines out as clearly as the Swiss sunshine, the other characters are too muddled, too frustrated by this teasing thing we call "civilisation," to stand mueh on their own as characters: and the melodramatic, — self-pitying little hussy Caroline is too much a stock piefe of fiction to carry much conviction either. In brief, .a highly polished, sophisticated, competent novel on a not very original theme, by a past mistress of the craft. ; Also highly competent, also sophisticated, but far less easy to read, is (continued on next page)

BOOKS (continued from previous page) Rachel Ferguson’s Sea Front, which describes in loving, convoluted and somewhat tiresome detail the appearance, smells, sounds and inhabitants of a small seaside resort. If one were passionately interested in spas, one might find it worthwhile to plough through page after page’ of Miss Ferguson’s monkey-clever ball games with words: if one isn’t, one might well let it alone. Finally, a horse of a far milder character and colour: an ingenuous, naive, slightly fiatfooted story of that highlycomplicated character Charles Dickens, and the Women In His Life. This is Hebe Elsna’s Consider These Women: and, when you have considered them, I think you will agree that the great man emerges no greater from the well-mean-ing pen of Miss Elsna, I found this book, in contrast to Sea Front, eminently readable; but must confess that the impression left on my mind, a week or so later, is fuzzy rather than sharp.

Sarah

Campion