"DR NO"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 39, Issue 989, 1 August 1958, Page 11

"DR NO"

Sir-It seems to me that The Listener review of the novel Dr No, by Ian Fleming, did not say enough. In an article in the New Statesman entitled "Sex, Snobbery and Sadism" Paul Johnson takes a much more emphatic line against what he calls the "Fleming phenomenon." "The sadism of a schoolboy bully, the mechanical, two-dimen-sional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent and the crude, snob-cravings of a suburban adult" are, he says, "dished up

with all the calculated accountancy of a Lyons Corner House." Paul Johnson concludes: "Recently I read Henri Alleg’s horrifying account of his tortures in an Algiers prison; and I have on my desk a documented account of how we treat our prisoners in Cyprus. I am no longer astonished that these things can happen." Now it seems that S. S. and S. have an equal appeal in New Zealand. Not only has Dr No arrived in book form, but he is being serialised in one of our popular weekly newspapers. There are a lot of excellent arguments against the censorship of books in any form. Whatever we may think about such arguments, we have to deal with the fact that there is censorship of books in New Zealand today. Quite recently, a friend of mine, who keeps a bookshop (and who, incidentally, cancelled orders for Dr No after reading the N.S. article), was questioned on his order for two books. The books under suspicion were Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, and The Confessions of Zeno by Itala Svevo. Words then, such as "crime" and "confession" are suspect; foreign authors ditto, especially with Russiansounding names. Ian Fleming, however, sounds good and British. It is unlikely that our customs-house censor would be free from welfare-state snobbery; so, to clinch the bargain, whisper in his ear that Sir Anthony Eden stAyed at author Fleming’s house after the Suez crisis. My bookshop friend, who makes a valiant attempt to import good literature, is almost crippled by the import restrictions on books. We wonder how much of our overseas funds has been paid into the Fleming pocket. We wonder, too, what action the new Government will take about the ignorance of custom-house censors and the difficulties besetting the few who would tend to correct such ignorance by the importation of good books.

IAN

HAMILTON

(Auckland).