SATURDAY, SUNDAY
CHILDREN ARE BORED ON SUNDAY, by Jean Stafford; Victor Gollancz, English price 12/6. ADAMS’ WAY, by Lonnie Coleman; Victor Gollancz, English price 12.6..COCKATOOS, by Brent of Bin Bin; Angus and Robertson, Australian price 16/-; ALICIA DEANE, by E., ¥Y, Timms; Angus and Robertson, Australian price 16/-. [N the tén short stories of Children Are Bored on Sunday we are regaled, skilfully, with the emotional adventures of the tired, the frustrated and the lonely in the thickest underbrush of civilised America or Europe. Jean Stafford specialises in the state of mind of suspended reality. We mortal millions live alone, and here we experience to the ful! the clinical terrors of this isolation. The second American contribution to our scrutiny, Adams’ Way, is a novel of the deep South in which an elderly eccentric and scholar ostentatiously cossets a young Negress, partly simply to horrify the neighbours, partly in the hope of creating an American Eliza Dolittle. It begins briskly and works up to a pretty climax with the whole town clamouring for Adams’s blood, but then breaks down into a commonplace and heavily-contrived happy ending with the intervention of the goddess ex machina, Emma Ford, apostle of sanity. The fourth novel in a saga of Australian country life, Cockatoos, deals vith the fortunes of a group of small tarming families in New South Wales round about the Boer War period, It «is desperately matey and successfully keeps in play a bewildering array of themes and characters. (One of the many heroes seemed to change his
Christian name halfway through, but that may have been just my bemused attention.) The detail has _ essential truth, but the total effect is somehow static, rather like disturbing an ant’s nest-a busyness with a _ disrupted purpose. Alicia Deane is ye old-tyme romance ~-Monmouth’s rebellion, Judge Jeffries, the West Indies, pirates, and manifold acts of violence and skulduggery-a tale of sound and fury, which vies with thase
comics,
David
Hall
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19541126.2.24.3
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 801, 26 November 1954, Page 13
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325SATURDAY, SUNDAY New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 801, 26 November 1954, Page 13
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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