CHILD OF TWO RACES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 949, 18 October 1957, Page 12

CHILD OF TWO RACES

WAR IN THE BLOOD, by Salvador de Madariaga; Collins, English price 15/-, WHITE MAN’S TEST, by Pierre Boulle; Secker and Warburg, English ice 14/-, SEPTEMBER MOON, by John Moore; Collins, English price 15/-. ANCIENT Mexico, modern Malaya and timeless Herefordshire make a varied enough bracket for most people. Don Salvador de ‘Madariaga, the brilliant diplomat .turned novelist, continues in War in the Blood the story

of the Conquistadors, this time showing how the children of the first generation of mixed Spanish-Indian blood begin to revert to one ancestry or the other. It is exciting reading, a colourful consideration of the problem the child of two races has to face, Although the characters change their names and titles with the speed of characters in a pre-revolutionary Russian novel, it is well worth the effort to keep abreast. There is no panache or flourish about M. Pierre Boulle’s White Man’s Test, translated by Xan Fielding; but its quality is fine and hard. It is the story of a little French girl befriended | by Malayan natives when she survived the Japanese invasion; the story of her marriage ta one of the village boys and her subsequent "rescue" to be educated in Europe. But Malays, even boys, cannot be trifled with like this, and M. Boulle draws up his threads and brings his story to a dramatic and unusual conclusion. Where de Madariaga’s book was 19th century drama, this is the 20th century method, and ably handled; it is as good as The Bridge on the River Kwai. September Moon, a romantic novel against a real setting, is a carefully worked out and pleasantly written story with good rural characters (some are caricatures). As in the fairy tales which are guaranteed-safe-for-children, virtue triumphs in a _ surprising number of places. It is a story of young love, and the setting is Herefordshire in hoppicking time, when the gipsies invade the farms much as a shearing gang invades a New Zealand sheep station. Within the limits of a pleasant, romantic novel the book is successful: the author writes to entertain and it would

be curmudgeonly to cavil.

S.

P.