LITTLE GIRL LOST

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1051, 16 October 1959, Page 13

LITTLE GIRL LOST

THE GAY PRETENSIONS, by Florence Preston; Cassell, English price 15/-. HIS latest novel by Florence Preston is the case history of a girl who goes badly wrong. Naturally she is more sinned against than sinning. The first section of the book describes her upbringing by a cold, unloving mother. The second section deals with her trial, (continued on next page) *.

BOOKS

(continued trom previous page) for the attempted murder of her unsatisfactory lover; the last with her imprisonment and its results. The horrid mother, alas! is much more convincing than the decent, ineffectual father, more probable too than Caroline herself. The book’s strength is in its detail, in its mastery of the knobbly, inconvenient and intractable fact. All the local allusions, to various parts of the South Island and to Wellington, ring true. The method of Zola, the reporting of facts almost for their own sake, is successfully applied to this local theme. The facts are all there, but then facts have the bad habit of answering back. In some ways The Gay Pretensions might fairly be considered the raw material for a novel which was never written, never written because contradictions are left unresolved and the characterisation not taken far enough, and the view of the main character which the reader inevitably forms is-here the facts bite the hand that fed-confused and incoherent. On j@he facts (especially her violent behaviour in Borstal) Caroline is probably insane, but it is another fact that this seems to be denied in the novel. Again it is difficult to accept that a man brought up to believe Caroline is his daughter could, when he finds she was actually adopted, without apparent embarrassment turn round and marry her. This novel deals with a serious theme seriously. It builds up a fabric of realistic incident which is almost always well-contrived. Its minor people are all well-drawn. It is impressive in the way in which all the facts-as in a good short story-contribute to the development of the theme; it is well-con-structed. It perhaps is less satisfactory in its deeper insights into character, but it is still a welcome addition to the growing shelf. of contemporary New

Zealand novels.

David

Hall