THE CAT AND THE BAG

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 817, 25 March 1955, Page 13

THE CAT AND THE BAG

THE YOUNG HAVE SECRETS, by James | ‘Courage; Jonathan Cape, English price 12/6. | 7MOTIONAL currents are often. ~ deepened by being narrowed. But I must confess to sofie uneasiness at being | confined, as we are in James Courage’s new novel, to the mind of a ten-year-old. Fortunately James Courage breaks out of the restricting bonds of his own rules, and the youngster has an adult sensitiveness at least to the exact temperature of the lovelornness of the Garnett sisters. Actually, of course, young Walter) Blakiston is a peg on which to hang | events which could not otherwise be | collected within the observation of any | one person-a rathér outmoded approach | to the writing of fiction. However, he is | more than that. He is himself a charee: | ter, not simply a device-the sounding board echoing back the strange discords |

of the adult relationships. [his in some | degree compensates us for our disbelief | that this small boy could ever have been | in fact the confidant of so many grown+ up hopes and fears. The Young Have Secrets is triumphantly well-constructed. From the opening | scene, when the dog is tun over by the | tram and its body summarily disposed of, a grotesque and horrible incident which recurs as a sort of symbol of the_ nastiness of the extefnal world, every event is precisely dovetailed into the whole, everything is consistent and harmonised, and we have the pleasure of seeing a novelist in full control of his material pursuing a deliberate course which achieves nothing by accident. Tho gawkiness and the decorous but niggiing mariners of Christchurch in 1914 are described without gusto but without flagging. We have the sense that his (coritinued on next page)

BOOKS (continued from previous page) material is painful to James Courage. and that the tragedy set off by a talkative and vengeful washerwoman is an essay in masochism. But we are not greatly harrowed. The tempo of the book even where the three sisters are rivals for the affections of one man-is subdued. ) This is one advantage of using a juvenile "medium" to tell the story; we do not rise out of his comparative indifference to the vicissitudes of the adults. James Courage is a sensitive novelist who has so far not shown great versa- ) tility. In this respect his new book is an advance. The expatriate Garnett household, romanticising its English origins, | the irrepressible Mrs. Nelson and her | vulgar son, the glimpses of the school, are fresh ground. He is in the same | groove still with the Blakiston parents: | they show the same patterns as in The

filth Child and Fires in the Distancethe hard self-engrossed father, the putupon suffering mother. And James Courage is as obsessed as Ivy ComptonBurnett herself with one time and place. Although I like Fires in the Distance a good deal better, I feel I shouldn't, that Children Have Secrets is the better novel. Its material may be less attrac- | tive, but it is an accomplished, superbly controlled story. I am very far from concurring with the New Statesman reviewer that practically its only interest is the novelty (to English readers) of New Zealand in 1914 as a subject of fiction. Its author has grown steadily in stature; this book will enhance it. Even his. limitations seem to be turned to

account.

David

Hall