SLIGHTLY INTERESTING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 791, 17 September 1954, Page 13

SLIGHTLY INTERESTING

PROOF OF VICTORY, by Mary Mitchell; Methuen. THE CROSS ROADS, by Jaspar Sayer; Jonathan Cape, English price 12/6. VOICES IN THE HOUSE, by John Sedges; Methuen, English price 10/6, INTRIGUE, by «Christopher Veiel; Hamish Hamilton, English price 12/6. SLIGHTLY interesting only: for, though three of the quartet are quite

agreeably written, and the fourth quite skilfully slung together, there is not a single idea worthy of the name in the whole lot. So this column must. be addressed simply to people who have time to fritter, not to the busy reader out for mind-food. Mary Mitchell’s Proof of Victory is the most human of the four books, though the edged wit which made A> Warning to Wantons almost a’ memorable work, has here given way to a woollier but warmer wordiness. The theme is love, and the rejection of Jove, in a very ordinary Australian family, and the story flows along pleasantly | enough in the conventional way. There are one or two characters who are not. stock types: the mother who has been) outgrown by her daughters is not without wounded dignity; and the shaggy, lonely old man whom one of these daughters befriends is another character on his own. For the rest, there are gogetters and failures: censorious matrons and easy-going maids, an Italian greengrocer with a jealous wife, and all the other concomitants of a small up-coun-try town. Miss Mitchell is, perhaps, fonder of the town than of the people, thus making it more real: when she has to cope with anything so vast and amorphous as Melbourne, even her skilled hand falters, and manages to convey little else save unreality. The Cross Roads, by Jaspar Sayer, is a novel about the permanently bewildered upper middle classes in England who can’t make up their minds how best to spend their meagre cash. The hero, Richard Tendring, is hagridden by what seems to him a vital necessity, a good pre-and-public school for his boys. If you are English enough to grant that this is a necessity, you will be able to enter sympathetically into his angonies when, as a fairly high up civil servant, he is confronted with a crass American willing to pay him five thousand pounds for secret information. But, if you don’t imagine that the world’s leaders can only be reared in certain places, and speak with certain accents, you will (as I did) find the whole business curiously unreal. The death of married passion between Richard and his wife is a matter of more general interest: but the author has nothing at all original to add upon this saddening theme. He can only tell us rather portentously that, among timid and rather tapewormish humans, passion is never very real anyhow. Voices in the House, by John Sedges, is also about married love, this time in America. A story of gracious living in Vermont troubled by a set of difficult servants, it seems destined to make quite a neat slick film: and then (continued on next page) /

BOOKS (continued from previous page)

| the melodramatics will appear timely. Mr. Sedges writes well: and, had he ideas to convey, might produce a novel which would do more than merely while away the idle hour. Mr. Veiel, whose novel Intrigue is about just that, also writes well enough: | but his story of fornication in foreign parts leaves an unpleasant taste, which is not sweetened by the crime and curiously bungled trial at the end.

Sarah

Campion