LIGHT AND SERIOUS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 898, 19 October 1956, Page 13

LIGHT AND SERIOUS

STARS IN THE HEATHER, by Oswald Wynd; Blackwood, English price 10/-. THE STRUGGLE WITH THE ANGELS, by Adam de Hegedus; Allan Wingate, New Zealand price 13/6. A WREATH FOR UDOMO, by Peter Abrahams; Faber and Faber, English price 15/-. THE GAME AND THE GROUND, by Peter Vansittart; Reinhardt, English price 12/6. F these four books two are intended to amuse and entertain, and two are intended to offer serious argument

through their fictions. Oswald Wynd's piece of trivia is set in Scotland. It is simple, incredible, and awful. The Struggle with the Angels has an improbable basis in fact. De Hegedus, a Hungarian, uses this to make a story of the Crown of Hungary being offered to an English newspaper owner, who is tempted, but withdraws. The principal has a name but little substance. The narrator and the lesser people of. this post-Trianon world «are treated well, especially the Hungarians, who are mostly improbable and very Hungarian. The comedy is comic, the wryness wry, and the entertainment is entertaining. That last recital I set down deliberately. Adam de Hegedus (in what was regrettably his last book) knew what he wanted to do in the way of construction, and how he _ wanted his adopted language to perform. The third author here, Peter Abrahams, is like Hegedus in that "he writes in English," but his most recent book, A Wreath for Udomo, is badly constructed and written in an inflated English. There are so many points to Abraham’s story that in place of pattern. there is only confusion. Udomo is the first Prime Minister of Panafrica, neighbouring Pluralia, a superficial South Africa as Panafrica is a superficial Nigeria. In trying to give his violent story a gen--eral reference for British African settlements in transition Abrahams loses con-

trol. A ‘Wreath for Udomo is loud, shaky and crude. Indignation is a dangerous strength. Abrahams is not, of course, unintelligent, but he is too much committed. Peter Vansittart is not committed in the same way to his theme, ostensibly the recovery of physically, emotionally, intellectually and morally deformed children in Germany at the time of the airlift. By realising an immediate world, he leaves himself free to control his larger implications. The Game and the

Ground is thoughtful and. horrifying. Vansittart is not yet a considerable novelist, but he shows plenty of signs here that he may become one. .

K.

S.