VOICES OF AUTHORITY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 812, 18 February 1955, Page 14

VOICES OF AUTHORITY

THE FAITHFUL ALLY, by Eric Linklater; Jonathan Cape, English price 10/6. THE CREEDY CASE, by Edward Crankshaw; Michael Joseph, English price 10/6. DON CAMILLO’S DILEMMA, by _ Giovanni Guareschi; Victor Gollancz, English price 10/6. THE SIN FLOOD, by Shirley Murrell; Hodder and Stoughton, English price 10/6. HE European-educated Oriental who scores over humourless’. British bureaucrats is no novelty in fiction. But Eric Linklater’s suavely amoral Sultan of Namua, in his best book since Private Angelo, is a lively creation. Exercising only a nominal authority, the Sultan is at odds with the conscientious, but rulebound adviser, Morland. During an insurrection, when Morland’s attempts at sweet reasonableness fail, the Sultan saves the day by force and cunning. Linklater’s gently ironical style is a pleasure to read. Perhaps it is unwise to seek a moral in what is designed as a witty entertainment, but the sugges-

tion is that government which dispenses -with all force digs its own grave. I sympathised more with the harassed Morland than with the Sultan, who, for all his charm, is something of a rogue. And this, perhaps too obviously, is not what the author expects of us. Edward Crankshaw, too, deals with authority, among the Old-School-Tie buddies of the British Army. Colonel Scoresby, of the War Office, making an

issue out of his belief that a scientific worker, Creedy, is being posted for political reasons, comes into conflict with the privilege-cherishing gang. Unhappily, what promises to be a searching criticism of Army bureaucrats, turns into something of a mare’s nest. Crankshaw’s expertness in international affairs enables him to depict very vividly the complicated clash of loyalties towards the end of the war. Yet all the characters are almost comically English types -very noble, "civilised," knowing only the Best People, dead-pan about their emotions, and somewhat stupid. It is impossible to become very concerned about them, or to believe that the ideas such characters hold can be important. In his third collection of episodes in the feud between Don Camillo and the Communist mayor, Peppone, Giovanni Guareschi maintains remarkably consistent form. Those who are not yet tired of the duo, will find Don Camillo’s Dilemma quite as engaging as its predecessors. The Sin Flood is smoothly presented melodrama of the woman’s magazine kind. As a disastrous double tide on the Essex coast destroys the last evidence of murder and treachery, an old lady, dying, relives her life in the mid-19th Century as the wife of Raphael Raven, tyrant and hypocrite. Fair period and local colour, otherwise totally undistin-

guished.

J.C.

R.