THE FACE OF VIOLENCE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 796, 22 October 1954, Page 14

THE FACE OF VIOLENCE

THE THIRD SKIN, by John test} Victor Gollancz, English price 10/6. HE LIGHT IN THE FOREST, by aed Victor Gollancz, English price "HE face of violence is highlighted from different angles in these two novels. In the first the ancient profile is revealed to a youth from a good home in the suburbs of London. In the second it is reflected in each of two conflicting ways of life: a primitive society that has raised and nurtured a youth, and the urban civilisation which is his heritage by birth. John Bingham attempts in the course of his fast-paced thriller to show what leads a youth with a respectable upbringing and education to become involved in a crime for which the penalty is death. Leslie Marshall, aged nineteen, a sensitive, imaginative, timid mother’s boy, becomes an accomplice in the brutal murder of an elderly man. This outstanding thriller gains its strength from the author’s efficient handling of the expected pattern in fiction of this genre: the defiance of authority, the common fantasy of urban man hemmed in by society’s prohibitions and injunctions. The Light in the Forest is the story of the rescue of a fifteen-year-old boy eleven years after he had fallen into the hands of a Delaware Indian tribe. The boy finds his parents to be dour, pro-perty-loving Presbyterians, and when opportunity offers he joyfully rejoins his Indian family. He cheerfully renounces all the trappings and Privileges of civilisatidn for the primitive life of oneness with nature. But disillusionment comes finally when he revolts against participating in the savage violence which is

part of the Indian tradition. The final question is still to be answered as the boy heads back to our world and its propensity for erupting into the infinitely more devastating violence of modern war. This short novel, written with = surface simplicity and rather heavy characterisation, would appeal to young readers as well as

adults.

J.R.

C.