DESTINATION UNKNOWN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 811, 11 February 1955, Page 14

DESTINATION UNKNOWN

FLIGHT, by Evelyn Eaton; Victor Gollancz, En§glish price 10/6. THE STRANGER AT MY SIDE, by Gwyn Thomas; Victor Gollanez, English price 12/6. THE THIR" ANGEL, by Jerome Weidman; Jonatha. Cape, English price 15/-. FLIGHT is the story of a woman who finds herself on a plane, destination unknown. In her confusion, fragments of her past life come back to her: her marriage, her husband's suicide, and her daughter's birth. Finally she realises that the passenger next to her is her husband. The reader has long before realised that this is a both brilliant and banal variation on the theme of Outward Bound, in which the departing soul is given a spiritual security check against a background of contemporary mores. In The Stranger at My Side, Gwyn Thomas continues to embroider themes from Welsh life, where folks are "voters" and bear labels according to disposition or trade, as Sewell the Sotto and Hughes the Flues. Despite this tiresome affectation the book is rich in "comedy that is all the more pointed for its familiarity with suffering and despair. Jerome Weidman will be remembered for his novel I Can Get It for You Wholesale, in which he wrote of New York Jewish life with wit and compassion. In The Third Angel he moves to the deeply snobbish fringe of a New York suburb to tell the story of a campaign by a malicious newspaper column-

ist against the memory of a war hero. In his intense but improbable narrative of the reactions » of «the -devoted war widow and the affected community he continues to display the qualities of an enteftaining and compassionate novelist.

J.R.

C.