WINDS HIGH AND LOW

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 810, 4 February 1955, Page 13

WINDS HIGH AND LOW

RAMA RETOLD, by Aubrey Menen; Chatto and Windus, English price 12/6. THE LEAP IN THE DARK, by R. H. Ward; Victor Gollancz, English price 12/6. THE SOLDIER, by Karlludwig Opitz; Muller, English price 10/6. SOWERS OF THE WIND, by T. A. C. Hungerford; Angus and Robertson, Australian price 16/-. | AMA is delicious. Aubrey Menen makes him not so much an epic hero as a sort of Hindu Candide whose virtue is a perpetual source of disquiet and inconvenience. But it is Anatole France rather than Voltaire that he brings to mind. The 25 centuries-old kingdom of Ayoda is peopled by men and women just as silly, boastful, timid. greedy and spiteful as ourselves, but, because this is a story, there are some sensible and upright people, too, enough anyway to bring Rama and Sita hom« in triumph in spite of the wicked ravisher Ravan. The main story and the delightful side-fables are told with delicate humour which makes this eat (continued on next page)

+ (continued from previous page) least as welcome as Aubrey Menen’s earlier books. A large part of The Leap in the Dark is a play-told as a sort of film scenario -within a novel. The involved maunderings of the self-harassed characters under the stress of obscure fears and guilts lack the imaginative unity of Kafka. Apart from the absurdities of the novel’s construction, it is very difficult to come to grips with its people. However vigorously one plunges in, one never jumps clear of the surrounding darkness. The Soldier is a translated German novel about last-war army life in North Africa and France. It focuses attention, with transparent pacifist intention, on the horrors and futility of war: easy money. It has occasionally a gleam of macabre itony, but it is not a work of great force. On the back jacket of Sowers of the Wind the he-man author gazes into the unspeakable distances behind the 2000watt lamps like a wistful All Black who has become an intellectual and wishes he hadn't. His story is about army service corps jokers in the Australian occupation forces in Japan, who talk the expected army vernacular, blackmarket on a gargantuan scale, and transfer their racial intolerance from the Japanese to the Indian troops. In spite of its crudities and involuntary self-revelations this novel makes a stronger impression than it has any right to do.

David

Hall