THREE STYLES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 893, 14 September 1956, Page 13

THREE STYLES

POINT OF ORDER, by Gwyn Thomas; Victor Gollancz, English price 12/6; A MALE CHILD, by Paul Scott; Eyre and Spottiswoode, English price 15/-. THE DINNER PARTY, by Gretchen. Finletter; Victor Gollancz, English price 12/6. WYN THOMAS, a kind of comic cousin to Dylan, is one of the funniest, most exuberant writers alive, His outrageous style, blending resounding metaphors, sizzling Welsh oratory and | tongue -in-the-cheek sententiousness sweeps the reader along like floodwater, as up and down on the surface bob hilarious anecdotes and "voters" with names like Rollo Vaughan the Hastening Dawn. Point of Order's sketchy plot concerns the misadventures of Councillor Eryl Pym, an ambitious chiseling mugwump, inordinately given to public speeches. Such episodes as Pym’s courting, a football match and a singing contest in a hospital ward are ebullient farce. But the portion describing the last stand of a "voter" on a slowly subsiding mine-sapped hill strikes a deeper note, showing that Thomas, like all good comic writers, is keenly aware of basic human values. By comparison with Thomas’s exuberance, Paul Scott’s style seems drably ordinary, Yet in this novel of everyday life, the direct, uncluttered prose gives an impression, not of mere reportage, but of the illumination of the familiar. The ex-serviceman hero, ill and low in spiritual energy, gains true maturity and new courage from his friendship with a young reconciled couple and the birth of their son. Nothing much happens, but Scott’s ability to give a significant order to ordinary experience lends the novel a quietly convincing air and a feeling of depth. Mrs, Finletter’s style is one made familiar by feminine writers of fictional diaries-a kind of jerky garrulousness. She acknowledges her debt to E. M. Delafield; and The Dinner Party, in fact, transports the Provincial) Lady to America, as the diarist struggles through a dinner party, visits an Army camp, talks politics with Washington types and redecorates her house. All quite amusing and shrewdly witty, but fundamentally pretty trivial and exhausting to read as

a whole.

J.C.

R.