EROS AND AGAPE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 902, 16 November 1956, Page 12

EROS AND AGAPE

SIX PEOPLE AND LOVE, by Stella. Zilliacus; Putnam, English price 13/6. THE FLIGHT FROM THE ENCHANTER, by Iris Murdoch; Chatto and Windus, English price 15/-. THE QUEEN’S KNIGHT, by Marvin Barowsky; Chatto and Windus, English price 15/-; THE MAGNIFICENT ENEMIES, by Edgar Maas; Chatto and Windus, English price 15/-. «ROS is international; Agape is not. Miss Zilliacus (daughter to Konni Zilliacus) is concerned with both. Her book is made up of six studies in the form of a novel, and the scene shifts about from Geneva to Warsaw to Stockholm, etc. The manners are always excellent, no matter how great the passion: the language is adequate, urbane, and never unexpected: the style is discursive and undramatic. On the subject of Eros Miss Zilliacus is unexciting; with Agape

she declines not infrequently into a girlish if well-meaning banality. I was irritated with this book, which mixes the living and the loving; the author’s parents and her characters. The Flight trom the Enchanter is stuff. The response to situation and language is much more lively; the approach to character much more a thing of pungency and satire. But just what the title meant I could not tell until I looked at the publisher’s blurb, where I learned that the "Enchanter" is just one form or another of the ideal. It doesn’t matter: this is a novel of amusement and strength. Bold Sir Launcelot is, of course, The Queen’s Knight. And though not many readers can be counted on to share the author’s saturation with "Malory’s rosy _picture of a chivalry that never really existed," a far gteater number might welcome the rest of his foreword which is quite explicit about just how much history and how much novel we are getting. Disarmed by such honesty one can then face a readable and rapid novel containing excellent description of battle. And containing, too, the rosy myth of Launcelot and Guinivere made ruddy flesh. In many ways The Magnificent Enemies is the most extraordinary of any of these novels: in a quite staggeringly bloody sea-fight at the end of the book all the main characters are annihilated. Its history, for it is an histori-

cal novel, is the matter of the conflict between the Hanseatic states and the Likedeeler, a sort of brotherhood of "equal-sharers," piratical and _ idealist. The brief suggestion of a present-day analogy is fortunately not expanded beyond the prefatory note. Nothing could sort more uneasily with this roaring, flourishing tale than the suggestion of

historic parallel.

M.

D.