FROM PINKS TO REDS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 948, 11 October 1957, Page 13

FROM PINKS TO REDS

44k FINE AND Lf BROWN, by Hugh Atkinson; Victor Gollancz, English price 12/6. STOPOVER: TOKYO, by John P. Marquand; Collins, English rice 12/6. THE HIDDEN ENEMY, by V. H. Lloyd; Angus and Robertson, Australian price 17/-. TEN SECONDS FROM NOW, by Kay Cicellis; Harvill, English price 13/6, [-OR a backdrop, Mr Atkinson takes the politically independent, but emotionally unstable, India of the 1950's, at the time of the Satyagrahis’s march into Portuguese Goa. The characters and theme are handled with remarkable sympathy, insight and candour. Mr Atkinson uses the love affair between Peter Boyd-a forthright and individualistic European artist-and Sohini, an Indian girl, as an emotiona! (continued on next page)

BOOKS (continued from previous page)

fulcrum for an appraisal of the racial and political enigmas of India. As a result of his affair and his sympathies with the "browns," Peter finds himself ostracised by the "pink" Europeans, while his motives are suspect by the natives. Although unable to fight these ingrained prejudices, the couple persist in their affair. But the national uprising against the Portuguese involves Sohini, and enmeshes them both in the ensuing riots. The tragic denouement is all the more poignant because of the author’s economy of treatment, Two American agents, Ruth Bogart and Jack Rhyce, in Stopover: Tokyo,

are assigned to Japan to eliminate unidentified Communist agitators. They do this in the guise of "Do-gooders" making’ a survey of the work of the Asian Friendship League there. Ruth and Jack besides having to contend with ruthless "reds," discover unprofessionallike emotions creeping ‘into their relationship. The two conflicts, emotional and professional, make their task doubly hard, but with the aid of Mr Moto the assignment is successfully concluded, though not without sacrifice. Interesting, but unconvincing, is Mr Lloyd’s study of the morals of an Australian Army Captain, John Grant, sent with an infantry company to rescue, from a Japanese fate worse than death, -a group of stranded women at a Mission in New Guinea. That such a brave soldier should murder a missionary in cold blood for no reason other than that he has nursed a phobia about religion from boyhood days, and should then evade justice, makes one wcender at the raison d’étre of such a novel. Equally mystifying is the purpose of all the school-girlish tittle-tattle in Kay Cicellis’s Ten Seconds From _ Now, which is a hotch-potch of seemingly inconsequential love affairs amongst the staff of a Greek broadcasting station.

Richard

Hutchings