MODERN LOVE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 912, 1 February 1957, Page 13

MODERN LOVE

THE PAIR OF THEM, by Dorothy Cowlin; Jonathan Cape, English price 15/-. SUZANNA, by Isobel Strachey; Jonathan Cape, English price 13/6. ADMIT ONE, by Mairi MaclInnes; Putnam, English price 13/6. CABBAGE IN THE GRASS, by Leopold Louth; Victor Gollancz, English price 12/6. OVE is the theme of the first three of these novels, love, that is, taken seriously; it is merely, like the rest of life, matter for comedy in the hands of Leopold Louth. All four books are worth reading. Dorothy Cowlin, an accomplished minor practitioner, builds up a solid, real picture of the life of an English provincial school teacher. Romance, when it intrudes, has to toe the line and be as sensible and sedate as her heroine. Within its restricted scope, it is an excellent novel. In Suzanna we move upwards in postwar English society to hob-nob with people who still ride to hounds but who, generally speaking, have to take jobs. Just as all the characters are poised uneasily between two worlds, the dying world of undermined status and the new world of making a career, so too the heroine cannot make up her mind between a suitable match and an entirely unsuitable flurry with an older man. When the choice is taken from her, she marries a shoddy Bohemian, endowed neither with status nor money, the ironical twist at the end almost redeeming a novel that-in spite of some flashes of originality--seemed to have ‘passed qut of the control of its author about half-way through. Mairi MacInnes explores the friendship and rivalry of two young women. The nicer of them in the end behaves the worst-she relies on her intuition: that is, she does what she wants to do, with some damage to her friends. This novel has its own strength and distinction. Cabbage in the Grass is a variegated modern cross between Candide and Bouvard et Pecuchet. It, too, has its scene in post-war England. The idealist hero comes of a long line of licensed eccentrics, and even when the licence is cancelled by the levelling intolerance of the welfare state, he goes gaily on his way, entangling himself and other people in an uproarious series of ridicu-

lous situations. The author is enough of a realist to make some of these seem far-fetched, but enough of a satirist to carry us with him most of the way. He rarely muffs his laughs.

David

Hall