This Month’s New Reading

(Conducted by the Assistant Editor)

Much Beating Round

The Tea Tree

POSSIBLY if I had read The Pea Pickers (which won the S. H.

Prior literary prize in 1941) I should be more fitted to cope with Eve Langley’s White Topee, just

published.

White Topee is evidently a sequel to the prize-winner, the period is the same about 1927 and Miss Langley does not appear to have written anything in between.

For me, she might just as well have remained in seclusion.

For Topee, although it may be “brilliant” and “original”, to me epitomises everything I dislike most in Australian “clever” writing!—it is so infernally clever that it be comes incomprehensible.

Topee has no plot, which these days is, of course, not unusual; and it concerns a young woman called Steve. One gathers, but is never told, that she has Greek or Italian forebears somewhere along the line.

For some unexplained reason she dresses like a man (blue serge suit when not in breeches), acts like a man and divides her time between working like a man in the fields and writing and poetry. This —the earthy work plus the poetry —is supposed to make up a wholly satisfying Life. (Life spelled with capitals, if you please).

The setting is around Lakes Entrance in Victoria’s Gippsland— on a tea plantation. Tea plantation, mark you. It is news to me that tea was ever grown in Gippsland— but that I am willing to pass, apart from the observation that if it ever

were, then that in itself is worth a story.

However, Miss Langley belongs to that school of novelist which does not pander to the reader who likes to be first orientated or have basic facts explained; she flings her statements into the brew she has concocted, and the reader accepts them as is, where is—or else.

For this reason, the story appears to have no beginning and no end, and the normal reader and I insist that the average reader is still normal in spite of much literary evidence to the contrary— finds himself in a perpetual state of asking why. The cumulative effect is much the same as a hang over.

Gippsland, as described in Topee is a cross between the burning heat of Sahara and the jungles of Sumatra which is far from my recollections of that neck of the woods, which I imagined I knew reasonably well. I quote: “Stiffened and paralysed by the great heat, we lay about in the shade; after 11 o’clock McLachlan said that there must be no more work in case of sun stroke or fevers.”

The heroine and another character suffer occasionally from malaria.

Perhaps if I had read Pea Pickers I should know where they had picked that up.

Most of the bit players are Italian; and Italy is Steve’s spiritual home. Such Australian characters as exist act like morons —although the book is described as “interpreting Australia and its people as no other writer has done”.

IF this is Australia, then I’m a chimpanzee; if this is art, then I, too, am a moron which readers of these columns probably have long suspected. But tackle it, dear reader, by all means—and see if you do not emerge acting like a wild-eyed steer; or beating your literary chest, ala Steve, and declaiming that the world is well lost for a poem.

The story (if I may call such an artistic compilation such) is heavily larded with verse. I found this, on the whole, much more tolerable than the prose that surround 3d it.

This fact, I hope, proves thac I, too, have a soul. (Published by Angus and Robertson, Sydney. Australian price, 16/-.)

It’S Fun In The Sun

In Tahiti

Disappointment, disillusion—

and then it grew on them.

That was Tahiti to the Hunt ingtons David, Fritzi and their young son Tod. (Over)

-mlL ha K P r £ babl y been Tahiti to many but David makes it sound convincing, in his Tahitian Holiday an entertaining account of their hve month 5 ’ sojourn in that Pearl Pacific which has had more highly technicoloured nonsense written about it than all the other Pacific islands put together.

Huntington had a beautiful wife a son and sufficient of this world’s goods (in dollars, of course) to please the French, who are anti peachcomber. Perhaps this was a better background than most from which to take a sane view of the more obvious pleasures of these islands.

The family adventures, and the shrewd observations of every (re peat every) aspect of life in Tahiti, make amusing and entertaining reading. &

Although the lotus-eating aspect

* s . stressed—quite the reverse initially—the book is not calculated to drive Tourists away. Even a crusty, other-islands dweller might be encouraged to feel that a little relaxation under the palms of Tahiti could be in order, and verv pleasant. J (Our copy from the publishers, Henry Hold and Company. New York. US price, $4.95.)

Brief Excursion

Among The Amazons

THERE is something of psychology m this story, Miss Pym Dis poses, by Josephine Tey—the kind of psychology that one is likely to find in an all-female institution, which is, in this case, a physical training college. (We whip the psychology in for those who must have that ingredient in their

present-day reading).

However, the story is not (thank God) designed to “make you think . It is just a pleasant sort of story to fill in an hour or two with the psychology aforesaid, and a mild plot, of sorts. After all, a large institution full of young women is bound to create static electricity of some kind.

Inside the jacket-flap (and I am peginning to have a profound dis trust of jacket-flaps) it says that it is a “crime story of masterly elegance .

Perhaps that is gilding the lily— but it is good writing without being so clever as to be unintelligable.

It has humour and the characters are comparatively normal — which is, in itself, a literary achievement of no mean order these days.

A book you would not hesitate to give to your teenager to read; at the same time, you will probably enjoy it yourself. , (Published by Peter Davies. Australian c price, 13/3.) J