NET AND ROPE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 799, 12 November 1954, Page 16

NET AND ROPE

THE PRIMITIVES, by S. B. Hough; Hodder and Stoughton, English price 10/6. YIELD TO THE NIGHT, by Joan Henry; Victor Gollancz, English price 9/6. UNDER THE NET, by Irish Murdoch; Chatto and Windus, English price 12/6. B. HOUGH has turned from thrillers to a happy tale of the wholesome English family so lovingly portrayed by Samuel Butler and D. H. Lawrence. The "primitives" are twins, Percy and Eliza, whose youth is tortured by the ambitious gentility of their mother; in the end Percy, a poet, gets six years’ hard for living on the immoral earnings of Eliza while they are living together as a married couple. The narrator blames the twins for this catastrophe, but the author blames the regional setting of the novel, and the mother; between the two, belief and interest in Percy and Eliza wither away, and although the early chapters are authentic enough, Mr. Hough confuses the character of the mother. It is easy to define the’ author’s own experience in Joan Henry’s novel; her earlier book and magazine articles explained how she served twelve! months in a women’s prison. This novel is the monologue of Hilton’s last 14 days be- fore she is hanged for murder. There is little incident (her appeal fails, she is confirmed, she says goodbye to her mother); the interest is in the situation powerfully imagined from within both the women and the gaol. In her cell the light is always on, two women warders are always watching, talking, playing patience. Apart from one’s overwhelming sympathy for the dying woman the best of the novel is the different reactions of the warders to their charge. Under the Net-Joyce Cary cum Noe! Langley-is presumably a portrait of the kind of people a budding writer meets in London. This is perhaps taking it too seriously; I was irritated by the persistent irresponsibility in character Or oe.

and situation, but this simply marks it as an existentialist novel. Which is not surprising, since the author is a philosophy tutor at St. Anne’s in Oxford, and

this is her first novel,

R.T.

R.