DREAMING AND WAKING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 936, 19 July 1957, Page 13

DREAMING AND WAKING

INTO THE DREAM, by Edward Hyams; Longman’s, English price 15/-. TATTING, by Faith Compton Mackenzie; Jonathan Cape, English price 12/6. GROWING UP, by Barbara Lucas; Victor Gollancz, English price 13/6. RAISING DEMONS, by Shirley Jackson; Michael Joseph, English price 12/6. MOTHER SIGNED THE CONTRACT, by Julia James; Peter Davies, English price 15/-. HE hero of Ecward Hyams’s clever and disturbing novel is a businessman’s son, who wishes to become a fruit farmer. He is sent adventuring, in the manner of Candide, and pays a Symbolically appropriate price for settling down. His friend, an orchardist’s son who wishes to be a figure in commerce, is used in antithesis. Into the Dream is an individual blend of comedy, tragedy and satire by an author of wide background, bright invention, and positive beliefs. Though on the side of the farmer, the soil and its fruits, he explores quite compassionately the minds of people who manipulate them in trade. Given Mr Hyams’s energy and power to ofganise material, the next two authors might have made their novels as striking as they are agreeable. Faith

Compton Mackenzie s characters and their intentions drift in and out of one’s grasp. Barbara Lucas starts with a promising situation, and in some_ passages cevelops it with intriguing subtelty. But there are many passages of unedited trivia, of the kind proper to family letters. By writing the (continued on next page)

& (continued from previous page) novel as reminiscence, Miss Lucas has probably lowered the reader’s tolerance and her own discretion. Raising Demons, a sequel to Life Among the Savages, is Shirley Jackson’s further account of her own household. The children’s conversation, and their mother’s comments, have grown more pungent. There is the same tonic attitude, the blend of warmth and astringency, of open-hearted verve and decent reticence. But an admirer of those taut, imaginative stories, The Lottery and Hangsaman, cannot enjoy seeing their author at work in this crowded field of formless, first-person-singular writing known as domestic comedy. Shirley Jackson’s life, as seen here, comes close to the ideal of human happiness, and looks unpromising for a creative writer. It is an old dilemma. In Mother Signed the Contract, a very young Australian actress tells of what lay between her academy training and her first West End Chance. Everyone planning to go on the stage should read this everyday account of the fun and horrors of job-hunting and of life in obscure troupes, and consider the resilience of body and spirit it requires. But Miss James’s book offers. neither the distinction of style nor the insight into plays and acting which would

attract the general reader.

D. F.

T.