This Month’S New Reading

Book Reviews:

Warm People Aren’t So Hot

ANTHONY Thorne has given us better novels than his latest.

The Warm People. (So Long at the Fair, for example, which re told —and solved —the old mystery of the Paris International Fair of the late 19th century when the brother of the heroine disappeared completely, and so did his hotel room and any knowledge of his existence. This novel was made into a movie).

The Warm People has all the in gredients for a good story—but it does not seem to get going, unless, perhaps, until the final chapters.

The whole thing is full of dis tractions, as though Mr. Thorne wrote it while he had his mind on something else.

The narrator is an innocent young Englishman from one of the many obscure cultural divisions of UNO. His mission is in Haiti and the Dominican Republic and his assignment is to find out why there is friction between the two coloured republics which go to make up this second largest of the West Indian islands.

It is a UN theory that the fric tion is caused by the fact that al though all are from the same racial stock, the people of Haiti speak French and that the people of the eastern half of the island, the Dominican Republic, speak Spanish. It should be made clear, perhaps—because Mr. Thorne does not do so—that Haiti was once a French Colony and the Dominican Republic part of the Spanish Em pire. Over the years, the popula tion of both became largely that of descendants of the slaves brought in from Africa to work the planta tions, and French rule ended in Haiti as a consequence of the French Revolution. France, at a later stage, tried to win back her colony but failed; it became a coloured republic, which was in a state of perpetual revolution, the political coups of one party or an other, turning up with the persis tence of a recurring decimal. About 1916, the United States took a hand and put the republic under a sort of protection. The history of the Dominican side of the island is somewhat similar, but they seem to have done without US protection.

Mr. Thorne’s young innocent Englishman soon finds that the difference of opinion between east and west sides of the island is not a matter of language, but rather a matter of guns and hand-grenades supplied to both sides by an oblig ing Latin American gentleman who lives on a luxury yacht with a luscious girl-friend and his school girl daughter who has been edu cated at a school in England.

The story has one or two good characters—Joe Kessler, for ex ample—and is not wtihout its amusing aspects. In order to get his information as to what goes on, on the border, the young UN official suppliees Joe with an amount of money. With it Joe immediately sets up a chain of brothels which certainly gather in the informa tion, as well as embarrassing profits.

We do not know how long the author spent in Haiti but our guess is that it was not very long and that he would be happier writing against the more accustomed Eng lish or Continental background, rather than in trying to get the warmth (for which read “lush-

Conducted hy the Assistant Editor.

ness”) of these warm people down on paper and dragging in such tourist-bait as voodooism and what-not. The story bristles with possibilities, but most of them fizzle out in anti-climax. (Published by William Heinemann, Ltd.

Australian price, 15/6. t

Another Murder with Emotion

SEAFORTH Mackenzie’s newest novel, The Refuge, is for graduates from the simple thriller. It is called a “psychologi cal crime-story” and that, probably, is as good a description as any.

Briefly, it is the story of a crime reporter on a leading newspaper who murders the woman whom he has secretly married. The woman is a political refugee and at the time he murders her, Fitzherbert, the crime-reporter, still loves her.

His motive for the crime is fear that she will “destroy” Jiis 19-years old son (by a former marriage) whom she has seduced.

That is the essence of the plot.

The story begins with the discovery of the body and the remainder of the 340-odd pages are taken up with a dissection of the 10 years’ emotions that preceded that event.

The psychological crime story has considerable vogue at the present time, but it is not every one’s meat—chiefly because the reader is usually asked to swallow certain unusual premises without which the story would make no sense at all. Having once swal lowed, however, the emotions and motives that follow are believable enough. , , .

This sort of book depends, essen tially, on good writing to put it over; and whether Mackenzie falls short or achieves the ideal is a matter for the individual reader to decide. In the 340 pages of micro

scopic attention to the narrator’s actions and reactions, at times the author comes perilously close to being plain boring.

Two of the several hard-to-swal low premises are (1), why the police took the “suicide” at its face value when the case bristled with suf ficient odd angles to merit an in quiry on a scale that would have disillusioned 19-years old son for ever; and (2) why the narrator (somehow one hesitates to call him “hero”) had to be an ace crime reporter. He is so obviously that type of newspaperman who con siders himself a writer (with all the finer feelings of such) rather than that dull technician —the lowly reporter.

Perhaps Mackenzie considered that the technical requirements of the plot made a crime reporter necessary; or he may have deliber ately set out to show that even if a man has an artistic beard, an aesthetic approach to most things, and is a whole bundle of emotional and sex inhibitions, he can, at the same time, be en rapport with burly police officers and make his living by writing about the seamy side of life in a big city.

Maybe someday Mr. Mackenzie will give us a story about a pugilis tic-looking bloke with a cauliflower ear, a busted nose and the manner of a disillusioned police-sergeant who is an ace literary critic.

But whether you find this dis section of emotion to your liking or not, you will find interesting its presentation of the contemporary scene as it affects the European refugee who brings to his or her refuge so many of the “isms” and the problems and the quirks of mind that are foreign—and often abhorrent —to the plain Anglo- Saxon. (Published by Jonathan Cape and, in Australia, Angus and Robertson. Aus tralian price, 16/-.)

Coolies for the Japs in

Sumatra

IN these days when we are urged to turn the other cheek to our former enemies, it is a salutory experience to check back again on their behaviour as enemies.

A couple of hours with Betty Jef frey’s White Coolies will refresh your mind on the Jap as he was between 1942 and 1945—cruel, sadistic, something less than human.

Betty Jeffrey was one of the Aus tralian Army nursing Sisters who were caught in Malaya in the Jap anese invasion of early 1942. To wards the end of that campaign, the Sisters were evacuated in two groups—the first group finally reached Australia but the second group, of which Miss Jeffrey was one member, was on the Vyner Brooke which was sunk near Banka Island off Sumatra. Sixty-five sisters had left Singapore on Feb

ruary 12, 1942. on this ship; 53 swam or floated ashore; 21 of these were lined up and shot by the Jap anese and the remainder were put in Jap prison camps.

White Coolies tells the story of the Sisters and the other 500 or so people in a women’s camp in Sumatra —of the cruelty, hunger, privation, sickness and death that were contingent upon being a prisoner of the Japanese. Despair there was as well, but surprising little of it in proportion to the circumstances. Courage and humour are the keynotes of the book, although these began to wear thin after 3 1 years, when their bodies were reduced to bones, their clothing to rags, their food to the vilest swill and the arrogance of the Japs was undiminished.

Lasting impressions of the book are the amount that the human body can stand: and the futility of imagining that the Japs can ever be expected to behave in what we regard as a civilised manner. In spite of seven or eight years of American influence, there has been nothing to show that, given the same set of conditions as 1942-45, the Japs would not again act as fiendishly towards their victims as they did then. And with the Japs can be included most of the other swarming millions of Asia.

Australia has been urged lately to “be adult’ in relation to the Jap anese—to recognise their right to a place in the scheme of things. If being adult includes investing the Japanese with sudden virtue or be lieving that their fundamental cruelty and disregard for human suffering is a thing of the past, then the Pacific war was fought in vain and the slow torture of the people who existed for all those years in Japanese prison camps has taught ns nothing.

As victors we must have made a pretty poor showing since 1945, in Jap eyes: Turning the other cheek is not a virtue in their lan guage whether or not it is adult thinking in ours. The wooing of Japan, as a bulwark against Red Asia or for any other reason, is hard swallowing for anyone who knows at first-hand the behaviour of the Japs in the recent war. (Published by Angus and Robertson, Ltd. Australian price 17/6.)

High-Browed Desert Song

THIS book, Nine Days to Mukalla, is written by Frederic Pro kosch, of whom, I freely admit, I have never before heard. But according to the blurb on the jacket, he is a young American educated at Yale and King’s Col lege, Cambridge, was a Press attache in Stockholm, is a Chaucerian scholar and poet and has written several other novels.

Of one of these earlier novels, Thomas Mann has said that it “ex cited, charmed and haunted me.”

That should have warned me. I cnce, dutifully, tried to read Thomas Mann, and boredom was the only result. Mr. Prokosch’s effort goes beyond that: it is like something that beats on the brain during a long bout of malaria—a nightmarish writhing of mists and vapours with no beginning and no end.

I freely admit that the book could be all that the jacket says that it is, and that it is yours truly who is at fault: it is the sort of “work” (and at least 50 per cent, of today’s literature seems to be in the same category) that produces in me a feeling of acute despondency, and the awareness that my brow is now so low down as to be confused with a pair of Australian bowyangs. Perhaps I should go on record as saying that my idea of a gcod novel is Gone With the Wind, or, a bit more up-to-date, The Cruel Sea. Surrealistic writing of the socalled clever variety, if indefinitely prolonged, would probably drive me into a padded cell. I have an oldfashioned prejudice about novels that they should be easily understood and have some relation to life.

This, of course, proves that I have no artistic soul.

But to return to Nine Days to Mukalla. It concerns four Euro peans who survive a plane crash on a small island off Arabia. De tails of their past life are of the there is an elderly female of the British Empire-build ing caste. A young English female who apparently has lived in India, A middle-aged American archaeolo gist: and a beautiful young man on his way to a diplomatic post in Greece.

In native boats and by other de vious ways they begin their journey back to civilisation—at Mukalla.

They acquire a couple of young Arab retainers who also become leading characters in the book, Most of the narrative is carried on in short jerky sentences of con versation but—again according to the jacket-flap to which I turned for most of my enlightenment—one by one the travellers’ senses are opened to new experiences, freer and more intense than they have ever known.

Possibly. But early in the piece,

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the elderly woman drops dead; and further on, the archaeologist, after acting like a wild-eyed steer throughout, is murdered. That is having intense experience, if you like.

I presume the other two reached Mukalla. I left them in the desert having this sort of conversation: “Tell me, David —do you think you will ever fall in love?”

“I try to love everyone a little.

That’s more sensible, don't you think?”

“Is it? Do you really think so?”

Then a little later: “Do you think you’d ever want to sleep with me?”

David does not appear madly en thusiastic at the prospect and re plies, “What would you like me to say?”

She says: “I don’t care.” And the arrival of some camels or some Arabs finishes that little episode. (Published by Martin Seeker & War burg. Australian price, 13/3.)

Perry Mason Wins

Through Again

1 WOULDN’T say that Erie Stanley Gardner is my dish, either, (although his North American sales total more than 8 million copies a year) but after some of the literature that has come this way this month, his Case of the Lazy Lover makes a nice change—even if only because it moves quickly and the characters have no time for any introspection, whatsoever. It is one of Perry Mason’s Cases — some of the others being Fan- Dancer's Horse, Vagabond Virgin, Lonely Heiress, etc. The title Lazy Lover does not seem to have too much relation to the story, which contains the regulation number of corpses, tough cops, third degree methods, slick conversation. Of course, the cops—and the District Attorney and the whole police set up—are suspicious of Perry Mason, and Perry Mason, by his natural ability, pep and drive, just naturally keeps one hop ahead of the lot of them. He never seems to eat and he never seems to sleep. Next book coming up should be Case of the Duodenal Ulcer.

Lazy Lover concerns a disappear ing lady who writes big cheques, her daughter, her husband, who is soon shuffled off this mortal coil, the “lover” (who has amnesia) and a lot of shenanigin about mining shares. Not surprisingly, all works out for the best in the end.

Eight million Americans cannot be wrong, and as thriller fare it is OK. If you like Perry Mason you will like his Lazy Lover. If you do

not, you won’t buy the book in any case. (Published by William Heinemann, Ltd.

Australian price, 13 3. 1 Also Received . . .

NUMBER 4 issue, 1953, of South erly has also come to hand this month. This literary magazine is published by the English Asso ciation, Sydney Branch, one of whose aims is to encourage and facilitate the study of Australian literature.

Considerable space in this issue is devoted to the Australian Katharine Susannah Prichard and her novels. There are numerous other articles and features.

These magazines can be purchased at leading Australian booksellers, price 5 - per copy; postage 3d. extra.

Department of Works, Port Vloresby, is the constructing authority for a new European hos pital to be erected at Lae, New Guinea. Tenders closed March 1, 1954, for supply, delivery and erec tion of an oil-fired boiler plant and for air conditioning and refrigera tion equipment.

A booklet has just been published by the Oxford University Press and the Literary Bureau of the South Pacific Commission listing 160 Fijian idiomatic expressions and their English literal translations.

The compilation is the work of a Fijian, Anare Raiwalui, and will aid the student of Fijian.