MAN'S INHUMANITY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 921, 5 April 1957, Page 13

MAN'S INHUMANITY

THE TRIBE THAT LOST ITS HEAD, by Nicholas Monsarrat; Cassell and Co., English rice 18/-. BEYOND THE GATES, by Evelyn Smith; Robert Hale, English_ price 12/6. THE TREMBLING TOWER, by Claude Yelnick; Museum | Press, English price 10/6. ALL YOU YOUNG LADIES, by Alan Hackney; Victor Gollancz, English price 13/6. }ICHOLAS MONSARRAT’S | new novel tells of the breakdown of. colonial administration on the imaginary island of Pharamaul, off the coast of Africa. The trouble starts when Dinamaula, unproclaimed chief of the Maulas, arrives home after. taking a law degree at Oxford. On the returning plane he gives an interview to Tulbach Browne, correspondent of the London Daily Thresh. Browne, who is cynical, plausible and unscrupulous, distorts Dinamaula’s views on tribal progress to the point of arrogance, and this provides the starting point for a gradual destruction of trust between the authorities and the native race. Tulbach Browne is a genius at his job-he is so good that he soon has correspondents from several other papers hastening like vultures to Pharamaul, where the situation is rapidly getting out of control. Monsarrat shows this disintegration with such skill that the reader is fascinated. His descriptions of journalists and colonial service officers have the ring of truth, so that he sweeps you along with him right into the heart of the tragedy. At this point, however, when the ritual murder cult breaks out, his hold weakens, and the turmoil in the villages and the crisis in the Scheduled Territories Office is far less convincing. Besides this weakness, Monsarrat’s salacious descriptions of women, — his pointless satire, especially when dealing with the idle socialites, and his log cabin descriptions of sex continually irritate. This must be judged a worthwhile novel on a serious theme, prevented from fully realising itself by flaws in Monsarrat’s equipment as a novelist. Beyond the Gates tells the story of Lydia, an unusually plain child who is found hiding in a tool shed at an orphanage which she is terrified of leaving. The author has great insight into her unthinking honesty, tenderness and courage, and has written a happy uncomplicated book-likely to appeal mostly to women-which shows Lydia becoming the mainstay of the house she was at first frightened to enter. The best parts of science fiction novels are often the speculative ones, and in The Trembling Tower, first published in France, these are gripping enough. Two (continued on next page)

BOOKS (continued from previous paée)

lighthouse keepers are involved in the emanations from another world-‘"The Thing," and a tanker is wrecked on their doorstep by a manifestation of the same power. Curious soap bubbles appear which afe representations of the nuclear structure of the other world, and the book tells how a radio officer, saved from the tanker, succeeds in getting in touch with these strange entities. Alan Hackney’s comic tale about an imaginary Middle East State starts in London with a drunken party and moves abroad in a similar state of hilarity. The author’s invention animates a great number of odd characters, who possess a certain fantastic charm. There is Caroline, who starts by writing detective horrors about Dutch Gayboy and ends in a convent compiling the history of a converted slave girl-a prim English lady, Rita Riddell, who, instead of returning home from the East, is blown up in a bomb outrage and swept into the Sherif’s harem. A few English intellectual pretensions are cheerfully | brought to earth on the way.

J.M.

T.