EXOTIC LANDSCAPES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 797, 29 October 1954, Page 13

EXOTIC LANDSCAPES

THE BATHS OF ABSALOM, by James Pope-Hennessy; Allan Wingate, English price 15/-. MARTINIQUE, Trinidad, Dominica, *"" Barbados-these names have for most people old and obscure associations of piracy, slave-trading, wrongs criminally inflicted and_ criminally avenged. Mr. Pope-Hennessy describes his book as an "extended footnote to the work of that great writer, James | Anthony Froude," the author of English | in the West Indies. He is perhaps too | modest. His own sensitive, unprejudiced eye lacks the special focus of the historian and sociologist, But he has obviously an affinity with the squalidly exotic landscapes he has passed through and the deeply passive genius of the transplanted Africans, For the French administration of Martinique, its order and efficiency, he has several good words to say; his view of British administration is less sanguine: ", . . the ragged | clothes spread out to dry by washerwomen on the shores of the Roseau River, which daily and publicly pro‘laim the inexcusable poverty in which the working people of Dominica are maintained." , The condemnation is sharpened by its sharp concrete reference. Mr. PopeHennessy is a tourist, with a difference. His erandfather, as a benevolent Governor of Barbados, abolished flogging in the eighteen-seventies, thus arousing the "itter enmity of the white planters; and e himself in 1938 was private secretary tha Cavarnor of Trinidad and Tohorn. Thus he is linked to the West Indies by birth and occupation. But there is a closer spiritual link of attraction and repulsion to the haunted luxaf theese islands their juxtaposition of death and fertility. He defines this bond in a balanced and lucid prose, which becomes at times prose-poetry: "All down the coast the | sand was black and ashy soft. unlike | the tumbled stone beaches of Dominica | . . huge nets were stretched along the beach on poles, as though someone were . trving to fence in the land or fence out the sea." One would like to see more of the world through the eves of this

author

James K.

Baxter