VIEWS ARE LONGER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 887, 3 August 1956, Page 14

VIEWS ARE LONGER

THE LONG VIEW, by Elizabeth Jane Howard; Jonathan Cape, Endlish pice 15 -, CHILDREN OF THE BLACK-HAIRED PEOPLE, by Evan King; Michael Joseph, English price 18/-. SOLO, hy Stanford Whitmore: Victor Gollancz, English price 15/UPERT BROOKE once described a marriage in a sonnet reversed: he began with the "final" couplet filled with

the ecstasy of young love and ended with the deliberate commonplace of its children and their careersAnd Henry, a stockbroker doing well. Elizabeth Jane Howard achieves an effect of very different scope by a somewhat similar device: she has written a novel inyerted in time. It begins with the breaking up of a marriage in 1950 when its two children are grown up and encountering their own difficulties, and ends in 1926 exactly at the point where these star-crossed lovers first met. The irony of time’s changes, in a Priestley play laid on with, not a trowel, but a, shovel, is in this book a delicate and effective cement for an emotional perceptiveness of depth and subtlety. The heroine is a woman more completely realised than any I can think of offhand in the novels of the last ten years. Her husband, the volatile, brilliant, impossible, ultimate predatory cad, is not nearly so convincing, though we concur

that "His most satisfactory and astonishing aspect was his capacity to astonish her." Elizabeth Howard has perhaps learned something from Elizabeth Bowen, but the appearance of this novel-in spite of an occasional passage too clever by half-is heartening evidence of a return of a slight flush of originality to the cheek of that debilitated patient, modern English fiction. Children of the Black-Haired People is written about the Chinese peasantry of the 1920's by an American diplomat sheltering behind a pseudonym. A long book, it has the air of being faithful to its facts; much of it can be corroborated elsewhere, In spite of a tightly-controlled plot it ends inconsequentially as though "Evan King" finally just left off writing. If we are to have tracts in the form of fiction, this could scarcely be better done-an act of sympathy as much as a novel. And Solo? Well, this guy Virgil Jones was a whole lot of piano; people listened

when he played, the ultimate jazz man, but boy! he was trouble, too, big trouble, the snootiest innocent-independ-ent who could down four hot searing quieting whiskies and still not mellow into the least politeness to a zouzou client or boss. This is all Chicago, too, stuffed full of right guys and dames with

big golden hearts.

David

Hall