MORALITY APART
MADAME SOLARIO; Heinemann, English price 16/-. SOME DARLING FOLLY, by Monica Stirling; Victor Gollancz, English price 12/6. A SORT OF BEAUTY, by Jack Reynolds; Secker and Warburg, English price 16/-, PETER PERRY, by Michael Campbell; Heinemann, English price 13/6. HE anonymous author of Madame Solario has treated an entangled theme with delicacy and assurance. The scene is Italy some time in the first decade of this century,’and the whole atmosphere of the novel is nostalgic. A beautiful and mysterious woman and her rascally brother move in a cosmopolitan society with a predatory intention none the less sinister for being vague. The writer is so deeply in love with his theme that he allows a good deal of detail to invade his text; Proust could get away with 50 pages devoted to a dinner party, but here an over-close scrutiny of the fabric of events sometimes creates a static effect. But the book is ‘good, its flavour refreshingly unusual. Monica Stirling tells her story with an enviable economy and grace, A Parisian actor becomes the lover of a young woman who very soon prefers her advocate husband-a triumph of taste rather than of virtue; a book that is not a word too long. A Sort of Beauty is prolix and slowmoving, but the detail it heaps up is authentic and, though there could be less of it, is never wearisome. A callow young Englishman goes out to Thailand and becomes infatuated with the Siamese courtesan who ruins him. On the whole he enjoys being ruined, On the whole we, enjoy the spectacle.
Michael Campbell’s novel is original and funny. It is also the story of a young man being initiated into a more sophisticated society, this time in Dublin. The Peter Perry of the title is his eccentric aunt, a theatre- haunting partygiver whose precarious solvency just survives the three months covyered by the book. These four novels all succeed, but don’t, please, look to them for a vindication of conventional morals.
David
Hall
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19570524.2.20.3
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 928, 24 May 1957, Page 13
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335MORALITY APART New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 928, 24 May 1957, Page 13
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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