WHOLESOME FARE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 901, 9 November 1956, Page 13

WHOLESOME FARE

FIVE OF A KIND, by Roland Gant; Jonathan Cape, English price 15/-. FRIENDS T COURT, by enry Cecil; Michael Joseph, English price 12/6. THE SECOND by Edward Grierson; Chatto and Windus, English price 13/6. THE CITY BOY, by Herman Wouk; Jonathan Cape, English price 15/-. OLAND GANT’S Five of a Kind has the merit of a neat construction, but that is by no means its only merit. A French, a German, an English, an American and a Russian soldier are brought together by an incident at a German prison camp near the end of the war, The American hopes to keep in touch, stage a ten-years-after reunion, The breakdown of this intention is described with remorseless gusto-a parable, of course, but told with the art to make it palatable.

Friends at Court exhibits barristers in forensic wrangles or going to the races with those indispensable stage-man-agers, their clerks; all is presented with lightness and wit. The apparent intention is to characterise a profession rather than individuals, There is a thin love interest and an even thinner trickle of plot.

Edward Grierson also takes us inside the lives of barristers. A woman advocate is engaged in a controversial mur-

der trial and finds womanly intuition almost as good as evidence-to which it eventually leads-but only just in time. This is a slower-moving, sedate relative of the -detective romance, The City Boy is a novel about an eleven-year-old growing up in New York, perhaps thirty years ago. It is all good fun, especially the high jinks at Camp Manitou, (That peculiar product of rampageous private enterprise, the summer camp, is really taken to bits here.) Boys, girls and their elders are presented with a serene cynicism that helps make this good-humoured book attractive, All four of these. novels have, in a way, a moral, They are uncommon in

modern fiction in not confronting the old-fashioned with problems of "morale

ity."

David

Hall