"OWLS DO CRY"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 933, 28 June 1957, Page 11

"OWLS DO CRY"

Sir-Somewhere between Mr Hall and Mr Vogt (though a little closer to Mr Hall) there exists a standpoint which discriminating readers of Owls Do Cry may find more acceptable than either review or counter-review. For though the novel is a good deal more mature and finished than Mr Hall would concede, it is also considerably less perfect than Mr Vogt, in another of his disastrous enthusiasms, would admit. It probably is the best novel yet written by a New Zealander-though this statement is a bit like claiming to have the largest dam in the Southern Hemisphere: there’s a great quantity of ocean in the Southern and a large number of dams in the Northern Hemisphere. The book does possess qualities which our fiction, that thin pastel line running from Katherine Mansfield to Mr Sargeson and Mr Courage, has markedly lacked; energy, breadth, vehemence, a willingness to risk loss of decorum by letting out all the stops. Greatly as we can admire Miss Frame’s contemporaries, their voices, though truly tuned, are reedy and anaemic. Just as Mr Sargeson has the greater conscious artistry, so has Miss Frame the more rare gifts of energy and scope. In Owls Do Cry there is a blessed lack of the decent reticences of contemporary New Zealand fiction. All this can be said while retaining one’s critical faculties intact. Not all is perfect. There are the clumsy badverse, bad-prose passages in_ italics, which interrupt the narrative without offering much illuminating comment upon it. There is the dreadful refrain, "Sings Daphne from the dead room" (accompanied, perhaps, by Mr Glover on his old guitar). There is the excessive symbolic and narrative weight borne by an accidental death by burning, and the subsequent erection of a house on the spot, to be occupied by the victim’s sister, Mr Vogt should know that there is a difference between an accident in real life and in fiction. In the former case we must believe it happened because we either saw it or reliable people told us about it; in the latter case we have only the author’s word for it and we have a right to suspect her of contrivance if it fits too neatly into her symbolic — structure. Macbeth would hardly be a_ great tragedy is Macbeth had just happened to murder Duncan. There is, again, a similar strain put upon the "oven-and-pikelet" symbol; symbols not already charged with significance in the world at large may show signs of incongruity under strain, as this one does, Mr Hall did well to indicate flaws in an important book. His interpretation of the epilogue was a sad error, but Mr Turner has said all that is needed. And if, in his penultimate paragraph, Mr Vogt means that Daphne has found "fulfilment" through "a great love of life,’ then he shows a profound ignorance both of the symbolism of the book and of certain forms of therapy in com-

mon use. But perhaps he does not mean that: it is really difficult to. be sure of what he is attempting to convey.

W. H.

OLIVER

(Christchurch).