A MEAL OF OYSTERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 894, 21 September 1956, Page 13

A MEAL OF OYSTERS

ELARNA CANE, by Affleck Graves; Faber and Faber, English price 12/6. THE GUINEA STAMP, by W. R, Loader; Jonathan Cape, English price 13/6. THE HOSANNA MAN, by Philip Callow; Jonathan Cape, English price 13/6. IKE, like, like; but what lies beneath the semblance of things? When Virginia Woolf wrote that she might have been writing of Elarna Cane; it is an accurate comment on this curious, triangular novel. Sentence by sentence the bright, merciless accumulation goes on: everything is like something else and the very felicities. as if a housewife were gathering up piece by piece a rare and ‘shattered vase, have more truth than the whole. The labour has an inexorable qtality; one works and wades through a welter of apt simile. In one corner, bassoon-blowing Lorne, all cold male; in another, the carrotheaded, illiterate poltergeist, Elarna, (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) the daily self-help; and in the third corner, Wetsie (sic), with an I-eye and a feminine pen. As a meal of oysters this is not as Satisfactory as one might have expected it to be; it is filling enough, and yet one sighs a little at the sameness, at the monotonous luxury of the feast. The Guinea Stamp is a novel that returns an Oxford-educated African to West Africa and a job on the mainly British staff of a new University College. It might be one with a dozen other not dissimilar novels did not the writing and the perception in some measure redeem it. There are, Mr. Loader demonstrates, good motives on either side of the racial curtain; but "good" is an active condition, and the good motive in action is peculiarly liable to be sullied by circumstance. At this level the mad snare of personality, possession, unhappiness, would seem to be the same for African as for Evfropean; with the important difference, of course, that the European has rather more devices of distraction, and has the escape-hatch of Racialism is a real thing, a confused and difficult problem; and it is to Mr. Loader’s credit that he has, not been satisfied with the easy cliché for it. | : : Provincial bohemia is the grey envir--onment ‘of The Hosanna Man, and though I cannot think it a good novel, though it is virtuous enough, it serves in its way to remind one of Leslie Fielder’s observation that bohemianism has _ become an escape from art. As a novel this is strangely without ferment, either of imagination orcof personality; quite as though what happens to anyone, the mere event, is of an ultimate importance.

M.

D.