TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE
PLAY ME FAIR, by Elizabeth D’Oyley; Michael Joseph, English price 12/6. BLIZZARD, by Phil Stong; Hodder and Stoughton, English price 10/6. THE HAND OF THE WIND, by Denys Jones; Jonathan Cape, English price 15/-. AIR play is asked for the Duke of Cumberland, son of George II, who suppressed the Young Pretender’s rebellion of 1745. A competent soldier, he was accustomed to meting out the usual punishments of his time, but Jacobites and romantics have labelled him "Butcher," a slander which increasing corpulence did not remedy. Historians have already dealt fairly with him, but Miss D’Oyley has persisted in her task
of "scraping away the slime of untruth," as she inelegantly puts it. She has overdone it. The poor fat Duke seems almost too good to be true, and certainly too good to be interesting. Take a number of characters, including Iowa farmers and their families, a Korea veteran, a harlot, a rural Senator, a rural reporter and others. Trap them in an Iowa farmhouse in a BLIZZARD. Let the Korea veteran and the harlot be secretly and regrettably married, let the Senator take off his jacket and deliver a sow of her piglets. It will all come right in the thaw. It does in this book. Mr. Jones’s book is set in Somalia, and his leading character is a Brazilian U.N. observer, whose story, tragically ended, emphasises with great power the feeling of impending overwhelming calamity which comes out in the novels of Africa. We encounter Italians, the former rulers; the British, gallantly "keeping order"; the underhand, halfeducated brand of African nationalist,
at once pathetic and despicable, driven on to catastrophe by the force of giant strains and stresses, too much, almost, for the human soul to survive. The love story which Mr. Jones threads delicately through the book is only the more moving because of the sense of impending tragedy which grows with it. No one will be cheered by this book, but its compassion and quality of style must be admired.
Edmond
Malone
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 885, 20 July 1956, Page 14
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341TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 885, 20 July 1956, Page 14
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