MERE ENGLISH

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1053, 30 October 1959, Page 13

MERE ENGLISH

THE RIVERS OF BABYLON, by Robert Liddell; Jonathan Cape, English price 16/-. THE ENGLISHMEN, by Laurence Lerner; Hamish Hamilton, English price 15/-. THE VISITED, by Joan O'Donovan; Victor Gollancz, English price 15/-. THE UNKIND LIGHT, by Charles Elliott; Hamish Hamil*ton, English price 13/6. [-NGLISHMEN teaching literature in an Egyptian university not long before Neguib took power and unloosed the full flood of nationalism are the main (continued on next page)

BOOKS

(continued from previous page) characters in The Rivers of Babylon. The society is as cosmopolitan but not as glittering as that of Durrell’s Alexandria. Liddell’s methods are more sedate, and his characters more ordinary and alas! often more tiresome. At least I was rapidly against the lecturer hero, Charles Harbord, in whose mouth butter does not melt, nor in whose mind any unkind thought harbour for long, but who indulges in orgies of unconscious self-congratulation. His subdued Roman Catholicism-no doubt merely meant as part of a general apparatus of good taste-does not stop him being holier than thou. But this is a good novel within its range, and excellent as a passing on of facts-what it was like to be English and living in an Egypt going nationalist-and as a portrait of a ‘university department, complete with the intrigues and the double-crossings of the best academic tradition. It embodies incidentally an iconoclastic view of the character of Katherine Mansfield which might well be pondered here. The Englishmen introduces us to a Cape Town boys’ school, just clinging to a precarious distinction, and filling its staff vacancies with English masters, if it can get them cheaply enough. Both Englishmen mark their stay in the school, and the radical, naughty one sets everybody by the ears before he is eased out. This too has factual virtues, the complete society, with the expected South African ugliness and the sympathy for the down-trodden native. The story of an old maid in an English suburb tipped into an affair with an elderly Lothario by an unsetiling visit to Ireland’ is the satisfying theme of Joan O’Donovan’s accomplished first novel. She is skilful in showing the implacable love which turns her shy goody into a bold harpy and ultimately a madwoman. In The Unkind Light American relations with a base-providing Asiatic

island people are described in a wellpoised novel of action. Much as he dislikes Americans, the English author seems to dislike his own countrymen more, if we may judge by the treatment of his local consul. Three of these novels are good and the fourth not bad of its kind.

David

Hall