BSI Woman Writes
p. 49 · Read in the full issue
First-class Thriller
ANEW thriller novel, “Bring Another Glass,” by Mrs. Georgina Seton, recently published by Angus and Robertson, Ltd., Sydney, is in many respects unique.
In the first place, very few novels worth reading are published south of the Line.
Mrs. Seton’s story is not only written with the hand of a craftsman: it is also cunningly and cleverly constructed, and characterisation is so good that it is hard to believe that this is the young woman’s first effort.
In the second place, writers in the Antipodes rarely, if ever, attempt thrill ers—the strain of story-telling is as much as they can stand up to. But Mrs. Seton’s story is not only a thriller—it is one of those mystery tales so quick-moving and ingenious that the reader can’t lie down.
This reader did his best to pick the killer —but had to confess in the end that the authoress beat him —he should have guessed, early in the piece, the identity of the bloody-handed snake, but he was neatly side-tracked.
In the third place, this probably is the first time in literary history that a thriller novel has been based wholly on life in a South Seas Territory. Mrs. Seton is the wife of a well-known Solomon Islands planter: and the scene of her novel is a small, typical, copra centre in the Solo mons. Types familiar to every one of us walk across her lively and readable pages —there is the District Officer, the store manager, the coconut planter, the recruiter, the medical officer, the itinerant trader, the Chinaman, and (cleverly woven into the very structure of the thriller) a couple of native chiefs and a witch-doctor. JVTrs. Seton lived many years in the Solomons, and knows all the social answers; and it is evident that actual people are the prototypes of the characters she has convincingly limned in her book, and made us laugh at, or admire, or hate. One even suspects that Mrs. Seton—being woman as well as
writer—may have done a little bit of cat ting—but only Solomons residents can tell us that.
The Islands background and the local colour are so clear and correct that—after the endless muck written about the South Seas —it is a real pleasure to commend this book, not only as a novel, of such merit that it deserves British and Ameri can publication, but also as a first-class Pacific Islands story.—RWß.
Nurse E. M. Kennedy, of the BSI Medical Department, has terminated her period of secondment to the Fiji Service.
She is at present on leave, which will be followed by a period of special “study” leave.
The National Arbitration Tribunal of Fiji has awarded and determined that the cost of living bonus payable to the employees of the Colonial Sugar Refining Co., Ltd., on the island of Viti Levu, who receive wages of £2 or less per week shall remain at 1/9 per day as from January 1 to April 1, 1945.