Where the Godwits Roost

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 892, 7 September 1956, Page 14

Where the Godwits Roost

THE SULLEN BELL, by Dan Davin; Michael Joseph, English price 15/-.

(Reviewed by

David

Hall

land round 1945 and 1946 are the subject of Dan Davin’s latest novel. It has links especially with For the Rest of Our Lives: his characters are warobsessed and also home-obsessed. This is a nostalgic book with frequent references back to war in North Africa or Italy, to a faraway Dunedin, or a birthplace with a water tower, or to a Tauranga character watching "ironically from a street corner," in the mind’s eye. It is in many ways a narrow book, narrow in the range of its invention ZEALANDERS in Eng-

(which repeats the same types too frequently; no religion is mentioned, even _to fall away from, except the Roman _Catholic), and narrow, too, in all sorts of scarcely perceptible ways in its sym= pathies. New Zealanders are the goodies --even the bad New Zealanders-and the English are hardly allowed to intrude on this fiercely exclusive expatriate world. The novel moves at a good pace. It catches the idiom of male speech in this country excellently. It has plenty of wit, and it observes human nature with dis- | cernment, although not always with love. : The small change of fiction-the phrase, the incident-is always of full value. It keeps a group of people swirling around in the same goldfish bowl with merry | skill. We even accept the melodramatic incident dragged down as a sort of deus ex machina to bring the book to an end. What, then, is the source of the discomfort it engenders? Possibly its own, terms of reference-New Zealanders in -London-are too big a handicap. There is a good deal of self-conscious discussion of succeeding in England. (Certain of the portraits seem positively to invite an identification with real people.) Davin has it both ways, too, because, while he abhors success, he abhors failure more. "And every year some went back, to teach art in secondary schools, to brass plates proclaiming a London licentiate on a comfortable suburban door, to a university job, to journalism, to the fading prestige of the travelled in a small town, to pubs and self-pity or to modest success and con-

scientious intellectual conversation." Davin indeed seems in worse case than Katherine Mansfield: he can neither live with his memories of New Zealand, nor live without them. This is a better novel than For the Rest of Our Lives; it is at least as skilfully put together as Roads from Home, But I still find Cliffs of Fall, for all its obvious faults,-Davin’s most satisfying novel, the only book an inner compulsion drove him to write.