MAJOR NOVELIST

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 897, 12 October 1956, Page 12

MAJOR NOVELIST

THE CALL HOME, by James Courage; Jonathan Cape, English price 13/6.

(Reviewed by

David

Hall

NEW book by New Zealand’s major novelist is bound to be an exciting event, and even if our enthusiasm does receive one or two mild shocks as we read this novel, in one respect at least it is fully up to the quality of its prede-cessors-Courage can write nothing which is not alert, deeply felt and vividly expressed. His writing is sensitive, evocative and original, his words are altogether his own property. His new book shows an interesting advance in one field. that of time.

Courage has brought himself to contemplate the moeurs of Canterbury in 1936. He is still writing of the sheep station world, but for the first time I have a.feeling that his touch is less sure than before. For one thing, the young males who get into these fastidious pages are so depressingly loutish: I find it hard to credit that "College" (which, in Canterbury jargon, is a school and not a university) has so far fallen down on its self-appointed task of turning the colonial goose into the golden-crested grebe. The chief character is a New Zealand doctor who returns home from England (did he not appear in Fires in the Distance?), because he has killed his young English wife in a motor accident, and, as his clairvoyant small niece tells him so bluntly, he no longer wants to live. The gradual recovery of his appetite for life is accelerated by his meeting a young widow. Eventually he comes to realise that he can rebuild his life around her, and she-though the symmetry is upset by her marriage having been unhappy-hers around him. (The heroine is, unfortunately, a little dim.) This recovery, and its matrimonial conclusion, are aided by the good offices of a lady in Christchurch whom it is all too tempting to try to identify-"a woman of intelligence and some wit, a writer of acid poetry which she casually undervalued." Had Courage stuck to this theme to the exclusion of putting it in its social context, his novel might have been tidier, but it would certainly have been a lesser book. He has laboured with all the faithfulness of an insistent artistic

conscience: he cannot introduce any character without giving him full life, and there are a good many characters. Perhaps there is a measure of truth in the way women in this novel-even in her own fashion the hero’s bossy married sister-are the custodians of standards of conduct chafed against by their dullard menfolk. But it is difficult to accept that almost every character of either sex should have such obvious limitations. You cannot doubt their reality (Courage seems always to take his portraits direct from life): it is their collection in one novel which prompts uneasiness. If I have misgivings about some features of The Call Home, I would like to make it quite clear that it is a good novel, and my cavils are mild ones. The dialogue is witty and natural, the construction flawless. Scenic descriptionsnot an important part of the book-are successful, even if occasionally they have a hint of the self-conscious. We can be grateful for this new book by our best living novelist.