MINOR AND MAJOR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 917, 8 March 1957, Page 13

MINOR AND MAJOR

THE SMALL WORLD, by John W. Morgan; Victor Gollancz, English price 12/6. A ROOM IN PARIS, by Peggy Mann; Longmanns, English price 15/-. MY OLD MAN’S A DUSTMAN, by Wolf Mankowitz; Deutsch, English price 10/6. BAND OF ANGELS, by Robert Penn Warren; Eyre and Spottiswode, English price 18/-. "\/ERY funny". splurged twice across the dust-cover of a novel is enough to give any reviewer a sinking feeling, but it wasn’t this alone that stopped my fincing anything really amusing in John Morgan’s The Small World. Mr. Morgan’s Bernard, whose career at a small Welsh University is. the reason for the novel, is. alas, not so much a character as a hysterical catalogue of all the under-graduate antics Mr. Morgan has ever thought of. In addition to this, the pale shadow of Mr. Kingsley Amis lies across each page, and there are occasional minor manifestations of the deities of the Welsh Comic Revival. "My old man’s a dustman, he fought in the Battle of Mons," is the Old Cock’s battlecry as he rides out to defend his rubbish dump against the world, the flesh and the City Council. This Cockney Quixote, with poor bombblasted Arp (so named because of the

letters on his jacket), playing a rubbishpicking Panza, are probably the most outrageous pair in all the Londons of Wolf Mankowitz’s invention. Too outrdgeous, perhaps, but then this is a bravura performance by a true comic artist. Peggy Mann’s A Room in Paris is a carefully regulated story about a G.I. would-be artist, his girl, and life on the Left Bank. Miss Mann is a script writer, and I should imagine a competent one, but it’s a pity her competence in radio has carried over into her novel a certain slickness, a tendency to present people and events as though they were packaged in cellophane. In Band of Angels Robert Penn Warren has gone back to the problem of human freedom and its attainment, and has failed by a small margin to say exactly what he wants to say. He has recreated the period of. the American Civil War on a terrifying scale, and has set down in it Amantha Starr, the daughter of a Northern land and slave owner, who is herself sold as a slave on her father’s death. © Here is the source of all the conflicts Penn Warren deals with, and the source of the flaw which keeps the book from fully expressing the ideas which obsess him. He wants to discuss a human problem, but his tragedies are built on a classical scale; good and bad remain immutable. He has no time for the small inconsistencies in human conduct, the touches which, in fact, make conduct

human.

Peter

Cape