THE WINTER OF TIME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 890, 24 August 1956, Page 13

THE WINTER OF TIME

A CHILL IN THE AIR, by Walter Clapham; Jonathan Cape, English price 13/6. MR. HAMISH GLEAVE, by Richard Llewellyn; Michael Joseph, English price 12/6. NO COWARD SOUL, by Noel Adeney; Hogarth Press, English price 13/6. THE TREE OF MAN, by Patrick White; Eyre and Spottiswoode, English price 18/-. "| HE decay of character, like the decay of a class-or of a civilisationis as a spectacle always mildly depressing. At the same time, while we wag our heads sagely and mutter "How deplorable!" we gain an enhanced pleasure from surviving ourselves. All four of these novels describe deterioration; all four are competent and each has its merit. A Chill in the Air is largely the account of a friendship between a police sergeant in an English Seaside town and an ex-serviceman who is declining into a spiv and finally into a criminal. A depraved teenager reminds us, perhaps too directly, of Brighton Rock, but this story is told with a wry matter-of-fact-ness in which both sympathy and indignation are damped down and the soul left severely alone. Richard Llewellyn’s adroit translation into fiction of the Burgess and Maclean story builds up a clever picture of accumulated disgusts subverting the loyalty of a British Foreign Office official. Unfortunately, while the stage is set in every detail, the central dramathe mind change from loyalty to treason --is just jumped over and omitted. We understand how but not why it all happened. No Coward Soul is ever so refined: An. invalid English poet, greedy for money and affection, preys on those

about him-and is himself preyed on by a vulgar woman. Intrigue, slander and selfishness are well portrayed in a novel of uncomfortable emotional truth. At first sight Patrick White’s fat book looks like yet another Saga of the Soil. It is the story of an Australian couple on a small farm. The early years have the most charm, and the action is more satisfying, too; at least I prefer to read about bush fires and floods rather than about the snobbish daughter ensnaring a suitable husband or the wanton son going sordidly to the bad. The growing old of this couple, innocent and selffrustrated, is described with great insight. But the quality of The Tree of Man emerges as much as anything in brief flashes and asides, the pause for the philosophic chewing the cud of existence. Here is an old man in a dry month: "What went wrong? There was nothing, of course, that you could explain by methods of logic; only a leaf falling at dusk will disturb the reason without reason. Stan Parker went about the place on which he had led his life, by which he was consumed really. . ." Patrick White shoots heavier metal than we always realise. and further.

David

Hall