BE GOOD, SWEET MAID

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 822, 29 April 1955, Page 14

BE GOOD, SWEET MAID

| PRIVATE’S PROGRESS, by Alan Hackney; Victor Gollancz, English price 10/6. THE ) FIVE SEASONS, by Kart Eska; Hart- | Davis, English price 15/-. THE BLIND | MAN, by Walter Jens; Andre Deutsch, Eng- ) lish price 8/6. THE MOON TO PLAY | WITH, by John Wiles; Chatto and Windus, | Enflish price 12/6. "HE first of this clutch of novels is a hard-boiled satire on life in the British Army during the last Great Emergency. The barbarian might be at the gate, but in the regiment into which conscription pitchforked Stanley Windrush the players are undistracted from the time-honoured occupations of bludging, dodging and other traditional games of the brutal and licentious soldiery _down the ages. It is all clean fun, not | quite up to early Waugh or recent Amis, a

but good for a laugh, Chance rules all and heroism is at a discount. In wartime Russia (without the solace of the Churchillian _rhetoric) . life was much more grim, This is the scene of The Five Seasons, translated from the German. The fifth season is hunger. It is an account, not without its sardonic irony, of the efforts of a pure young Communist to live up to the glorious principles of the Party: she continually runs foul of the vested interests of petty corruption. Her own mother, a local office-holder, is a major racketeer. But this corruption is played for keeps: food is short in the Turkmen Republic and the reward of successful bludging is to stay alive. The main interest of this novel is the appalling meaning in human terms of "errors" in carrying out a great Plan. One wonders what else returning German prisoners of war can tell us of Russia. A short novel, The Blind Man, also translated from the German, has not much to offer us. It is a study of the states of mind of a forty-year-old schoolmaster who has. just lost his sight. It might be crisp and urgent in German: in English it is obvious and dull, Another novel of the downtrodden native in South Africa, The Moon to Play With, is, perhaps inadvertently, at times almost lyrically attractive. It describes from the inside the life of an African boy which, of course, ends badly. It is unlikely that many people will read both this and Herr Eska’s novel; should they do so, they may be struck by many parallels between the South African police state (as far as the Africans who make up the majority of the population are concerned) and the Russian.

David

Hall