DECLINING GLORY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 919, 22 March 1957, Page 13

DECLINING GLORY

THE HAPPY EXILES, by Felicity Shaw; Hamish Hamilton, English price 12/6. THE DARK OF SUMMER, by Eric Linklater; Jonathan Cape, English price 15/-. THE RED PRIEST, by Wyndham _Lewis; Methuen, English price 15/-. GIANT’S ARROW, by Anthony Rye; Victor Gollancz, En@lish price 12/6. OLONIAL social life is the theme of Felicity Shaw’s most felicitous novel, treated with the astringency and wit it deserves. The scene is patently African, but unanchored in any identifiable place; the time the present. This is a commentary on the abdication phase of imperial history from a domestic or distaff viewpoint, a delicious comedy of manners told with almost Jane. Austenish decorum. One imagines without much difficulty the years of boredom and contempt which here find their revenge. Professional writers have a hard time of it in competition with the enthusiastic amateur; Eric Linklater keeps his end up well in The Dark of Summer, a highly improbable but convincing tale about the unmilitary conduct of a soldier chasing up a rare case of Hielan disloyalty in World War Two. The plot takes him to the Shetland Islands mostly, but later entangles him in the Korean War, a virtuoso performance lit up by the occasional flash of epigram- " . . rich friénds . . .give you the privilege of wealth and save you the responsibility of looking after it." Wyndham Lewis is sensitive to social atmosphere and by implication paints a gloomy picture of modern Englandwhich "is not on the way to being a second Sweden, with the beautiful houses of working men, whose rooms glow with the inside of forest treesnot that, but a sort of Methodist model of Russia." This is the Red Priest talking, an embarrassing Anglo-Catholic who combines his own aggressive brand of hot gospelling with sudden outbreaks of physical violence. At the beginning one takes Father Card quite seriously; at the end he is merely grotesque, I cannot decide whether the book is a grand assault on a sect-or simply a literary intention imperfectly realised. But I am grateful for the wayside bits of comic dialogue which make the journey so pleasant. Giant’s Arrow deals with the entang!ed marital commitments of two London couples and their hangers-on associated in business, The story (the plot has its improbabilities) is told realistically, and the reader accepts its detail and feels the tragic force of its conclusion. Each of these novels is worth reading

David

Hall