LAST LAUGHS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 953, 15 November 1957, Page 14

LAST LAUGHS

THE FRIENDS, by Godfrey Smith; Victor Gollancz, English | gg 12/6. REVOLUTION AND = S, by P. H. Newby; Jonathan Cape, English price 15/-. THE MYSTIC MASSEU Vv. Ss. Naipaul; Andre Deutsch, English price 12/6. TAMAHINE, by Thelma Niklaus; the Bodley Head, N.Z. price 13/6. SUCCESSFUL politician and his four friends, eminent in different ways, are the main characters in Godfrey Smith’s graceful but not entirely absorbing novel. The‘ hero, Skeyne, is becomingly modest: "How can she like me, when I don’t even like myself?" This is essentially an examination of the nature of success and-as usualthe finding is that success just isn’t The Revolution of Newby’s title is the eviction of King Farouk by Neguib’s young men, in the course of which an Egyptian army officer falls for a European journalist and chases her, ultimately, to England. Nearly all the characters are European, and those who are Greek are naturally comic. The whole novel is, in fact, a feast of unfunny humour. The West Indies are having a very good run these days. The Mystic Masseur is a distinguished addition to the genre and captures the full charm and humour of the idiom. V. S. Naipaul is another Trinidadian novelist of Indian descent; he rather refreshingly laughs at his own people, in the person of a young man who graduates from being a massager (or quack doctor) to being a faith-healing charlatan and at last a political leader. Tamahine works to an early death the notion of a half-Tahitian damsel

coming to England to live with her English relatives, but it is another 150 pages or so before the book ends.

David

Hall