The Month's New Reading

Australia in Asia has many advantages over many other nations, says C. D. Rowley, principal of the Australian School of Pacific Administration (through which New Guinea patrol officers pass at some time or other) in his new book, The Lotus and the Dynamo.

IN the eyes of most Asians, Aus tralians do not yet stand com mitted to policies of advancing European interests at their own ex pen s e. Nor is Australia to be feared.

Australia’s insignificance has pre vented the emergence in Asia of a widely accepted stereotype of the Australian, such a stereotype as, for instance, the Rich American who despises coloured people, poverty, absence of plumbing and the short age of soap. This stereotype appears common among Asian villagers, so that they forget that they may owe their very lives to the cleverness, industry and far sighted generosity of the United States community. Many Asians be lieve that the United States, in her efforts to contain communism, is preparing war against the Com munists in Asia to save her own people.

Such views may not be very sound, says Mr. Rowley, but they com plicate the Asian policy of the United States and pose a real dilemma for the Australian Gov ernment.

Australia is in Asia, and the United States is not. How far should Australia play Little Sir Echo to United States foreign policy?

Must not Australia come to terms with Asia, capitalising her ad vantage as a small but highly in dustrial society, with no power to threaten but real help to give?

Mr. Rowley makes it clear he be lieves that Australian security de pends on Asian goodwill, and that he has little patience with what he describes as Australia’s isolationist and racially biased attitudes.

But he does not take his argu ment much farther than that, and gpes ahead to give a book-length picture of what he saw in his travels m Thailand. Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam in 1955, when he was working there for UNESCO and the International Labor Organisa tion.

He tells of how the farmer lives and what he wants from life how the unions are attempting to operate, how the governments—or more par ticularly, the little people in the employ of the governments—a r e lacing up to their many problems and he offers this conclusion: Who can predict the outcome of SE Asia s struggle between the dynamo

(symbolising industrialisation) and

the lotus (for the old values) ?

Although the West, he says, might assume that these people are in a stage of learning to be like the West, Asia would find its own answers to its problems—the lotus might yet prevail, the fascination of material things decline, and Buddhism yet provide a basis for social integration in the complex world society, where the message of Christianity had failed.

All of what author Rowley has to say of his Asian travels is of in terest and of importance to Aus tralia, for he is a competent and erudite observer. Unfortunately his erudition in this case is something of a handicap, for it does not give him the ease of language which would have made this book better equipped to attract the multitude of armchair travellers who should be reading it.

Armchair travellers like entertain ment on their travels, if only by

way of a colourful turn of phri or an occasional illustrate anecdote, but both are as scarce! the book as in the same autho) more serious Australians in Ge. man New Guinea 1914-1921. Histori or travel books don’t have to be 1 the heavy side, as New Guinea q hand Dudley McCarthy showed la year with his war history, Souq west Pacific Area, First Year. 1 However, this is merely an oppd tunity missed. The Lotus and t\ Dynamo is a book to be read neve theless.

(The Lotus And The Dynamo. Pi

lished by Angus and Robertson, Austral! price, 30/-.)

The Ballad of a

Character

MURIEL SPARK’S The Ballad Peckham Rye is a very fum novel. It is fantasy of the kii too few authors attempt these da; and those who do rarely combi the wit and perception that Mur Spark provides in this ballad Dougal Douglas, the intellectual c: man who comes to Peckham R; an English working suburb—to t: discomfiture of the common fc who inhabit it.

Dougal Douglas has learned th if you want to put one over in ii dustry you start at The Top. Less employees may soon wake up to t; fact that you are not providing ya

aey’s worth, but so long as the uutives continue to be bewitched, »oesn’t matter. It is, in fact, pos ■ to run two or three jobs at the time if you play your cards eectly, as Dougal does, that makes Muriel Spark’s de :±ful story most successful is the dsm with which she has painted [ her characters, despite the i.asy and humour with which she surrounded the whole canvas, mere is never any doubt in the iJler’s mind that this is a slice life and that Dougal Douglas aself knows it. But whether naps he is just a little bit mad sees only his own side of the jure is not clear and this itself os to extend the illusion of ;±asy. the Ballad of Peckham Rye can :read in an hour or two, but it be remembered for a lot longer ra that. [he ballad of peckham rye. xished by Macmillan, Ltd. Australian £2, 18/9.)

:: irst Class Novel

Modern India

NOTHER piece of first-class reading among this month’s novels is He Who Rides a Tiger, Bhabani Bhattacharya, who r ws how to tell a story that has se appeal against a background )ch is not everyone’s cup of tea nat of India.

Lhattacharya writes of modern iia and its many facets —famine, gion graft, the caste system, itics and the place of women, [handles it all with an ease which fascinating. What he has to say Illuminating. :he first paragraph sets the style rthe book; “Fond parents often ;ne their timid shrimp of a boy irrior King or Brave in Battle.

Tty, pitch-dark girls go through with the label Lightning Streak ;Lotus Wreath. But Kalo, Black, is true to his complexion, which li the colour quality of ink, and »ple said that when he sweated. x could collect the oozing fluid your inkwell. Kalo carried this mdly jibe with his usual good mour.” lalo has a daughter, Lekha, who 7 elops to be as intelligent as she Ibeautiful, although in the rigid te system she is a nobody. Kalo’s e is dead and what happens to 110 and his daughter when lean nes turned their world upside wn is the subject of the novel.

As fate leads them into one de opment after another it becomes ar to Kalo that he is riding a sr. and as the ancient saying goes, ? cannot dismount”.

There are some very moving ssages in this book.

HE WHO RIDES A TIGER. Published Angus and Robertson. Australian price, 9.)

Castles in Spain

Have Their Flaws

AFTER a writing success (The Vet's Daughter ), English novelist Barbara Comyns found herself with a small regular income, a husband who had lost his job, and a yen to escape from the fog and flu of Kensington. As bills mounted, they sold their house (thereby getting Out of the Red), stored the furniture, disposed of most of their assortment of cats and dogs, left their grown son and daughter to sample flat life, and went off Into the Blue Mediter ranean. .

Ciriaco, out from the Barcelona coast of Spain, looked like a heavenly island with white houses clustered up the hillside behind the harbour and topped by a brown cathedral. But it wasn’t long before they learned that they had merely swapped one set of problems for another. . . .

Life in Ciriaco is cheap—but primitive; though the stack of pesetas almost always seemed to give out before the end of the month.

Spanish plumbing is a brand all of its own; while Spanish policemen and servants would try the patience of Job. No householder is starved for long of either domestic catastrophes or local melodrama.

The “foreign colony” at Ciriaco proved to be the back-biting variety (a phenomenon not entirely un

known even in the Pacific). The Comyns dog, Coco, and the men agerie of animals that found a home with them always seem to be in some sort of bother with neighbours or the local over-officious dog catcher.

Most daydreams, when realised, have their nightmare passages and Barbara Comyns doesn’t shirk the telling of the other side of escape life. She uses a light touch and an off-beat humour to describe the de lights and disasters of a year on Ciriaco Nevertheless, you can almost sense the sigh of relief when Raymond, her husband, gets the offer of a well-paid job back in England and, returning, they plunge into the task of refurbishing an old Kensington home. (OUT OF THE RED, INTO THE BLUE.

Published by Wm. Heinemann, Ltd. Aus tralian price. 22/6.)

John Steinbeck

Recalls a War

IT’S not always the reader finds himself in agreement with the publisher’s blurb on a dust jacket, but what the publishers have to say about John Steinbeck’s Once Once there was a War re-intro- Once There Was a war re-intro duces a series of memorable de spatches which Steinbeck sent home to American newspaper readers as a war correspondent in England,

n. Africa and Italy. South Pacific rs would have read few if any tern before. As the publishers fiteinbeck conveys the wartime sphere among civilians and its “without fuss or super and this is refreshing in >k of this kind. nbeck’s reports completely avoid f‘this goddamn man’s army” each so beloved of American r writers when referring to i.ca’s war—an approach which, tierring that no other army ihad any men in it, can be inteed to raise the blood iire of that large handful of idiers who don’t happen to Ifought under Uncle Sam’s flag, r.nbeck’s soldiers are unmistak iAmerican, but they are real

>ican straightforward, honest,

gr more nor less happy to be i-red in the war than anybody [This is the real American in at that most soldiers will know. cursing, mixed-up, obscene ir of the lunatic fringe, which s such as the Naked and the would have us believe is the iican norm—is a widely dis- Jl novelists-eye-view, which has gd an unfair image of the iican combat man in the eyes Ee rest of the world, jinbeck’s simple stories should imething to dispel it, although nearly as much as needs to be this book Steinbeck writes of on troopships, men in Eng men in hospital, men on the les and men just being men thinking of women, iinbeck’s stories will bring back [Dries in the same way that brought back memories ttheir author. As Steinbeck in his introduction: “Once a time there was a war, no long and so shouldered out :e way by other wars and other , of war that even people who there are apt to forget. This that I speak of came after the armour and longbows of Crecy k Agincourt and just before the spitting experimental atom »s of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, attended a part of that war, night say visited it, since I went ne costume of a war corre iient and certainly did not fight, iit is interesting to me that I jot remember very much about heading those old reports sent vith excitement at the time ;s back images and emotions oletely lost.” r CE THERE WAS A WAR. Published einemann. Australian price, 20/-.)

se Quick Crimes

Some Light Reading

interesting bunch of murder mysteries this month, any of vhich should help to pass a mrable evening. ;t of the lot is Harry Carmichael’s

The Seeds of Hate, which is set in London It’s a Scotland Yard murder investigation which also involves an insurance inspector named John Finer who is about the nearest thing to a private eye that you could expect a British writer to use without making his novel read like one of those fast and furious American thrillers.

But Piper certainly knows his stuff, and so does author Carmichael, who weaves a masterly plot guaranteed to confuse even a crack cypher expert used to complicated problems, Carlton Keith’s The Diamond Studded Typewriter is one of those fast and furious American thrillers,

but this one falls short of the best of the American stuff. James Garvin is murdered, and with him goes the secret of the hiding place of a fortune in diamonds. (It won’t hurt you to know he stashed them in his typewriter).

Handwriting expert Jeffrey Green has the job of finding out where the diamonds are, and also of look ing into Garvin’s complicated pri vate life, but as a private eye he is a bit wet behind the ears. He will have to improve if he wants to come out on top in a fight and make time with the blondes, just like Larry Kent.

Donald MacKenzie, who writes

\rous Silence, is a well known ir writer who has served a or two On The Inside himself cn write about crime with in. latest book tells the story of

Kit Fraser, ex-burglar gone

nt, is blackmailed into doing jme last job, and the threat this brings to his happy home ad his important position with fsurance firm. [kenzie builds the suspense ;to the end—but the ending it-

E 3 a little disappointing.

SEEDS OP HATE. Published by ; Australian price, 13/3. THE

Jnd Studded Typewriter. Pub

by Heinemann; Australian price, : DANGEROUS SILENCE. Published tins; Australian price, 13/3.)

Ks New In Paper Backs

[RE is plenty of variety in the Itest batch—and their low "ices will continue to mean big Our copies from William

ss Overseas) Ltd., Sydney.

[RE FOR DEATH, a mystery from greasy, with Chief Inspector Roger ireading warily. One the West fans want to miss. (GREAT PAN). [NO, by lan Fleming. This is one of ig’s Secret Service thrillers, and it ippens in Jamaica. There is some stuff in it. (GREAT PAN).

BONE IS POINTED, is one of Upfield’s stories of Napoleon Bona -detective of the Australian outback.

I One. (Great Pan).

JM VENTURE, by Gerald Sparrow, ut an Eastern princess—too beautiful io sadistic to be true—who traffics in on a big-time basis. Certainly fast

R. (Great Pan).

Flower Drum Song, By C. Y.

5 another story with an eastern but this time it’s in San Francisco’s Town, and the story is bright and

(Great Pan).

HE FROM THE HILL, by William hrey. A Texan hunts both game and i and what happens is dramatic i to have been turned into a film Robert Mitchum. (PAN GIANT).

WAKEFIELD’S COURSE, by Mazo de la Roche, is another of the family saga deal ing with the Whiteoaks, of Jalna. (PAN

Giant).

Death Comes As The End, Is

another Agatha Christie. This time the Queen of Crime makes use of some of the archaeology background she has picked up from her husband. An unusual mystery. (FONTANA, Yellow).

THE BLUE ICE, by Hammond Innes, is about a man who searches for precious metals beneath the ice of Norway—and the rivals who also want it. (FONTANA, Yellow).

CAMPBELL’S KINGDOM, is another thriller by Hammond Innes, but this time the search is for oil in the Rockies and the ruthless baddies are after this, too.

Very good. (FONTANA, Yellow).

DEATH ON THE NILE, by Agatha Christie. One in a party of tourists, with enough emotional conflicts among them to rock the sightseeing Nile steamer they’re travelling on, is the killer of a young bride, an English millionairess. Like Hercule Poirot, aboard on vacation, you’ll probably pick the Who, but the How will have you guessing. (FONTANA, Yellow).

The Wreck Of The Mary Deare,

by Hammond Innes. A 6,000 tons freighter adrift in the Channel with only one man aboard ends up in the treacherous rocks

below Jersey. Why was she abandoned?

What was her cargo? If the sea has any fascination at all for you, this tense story will keep you up late to finish it at one sitting. (FONTANA, Yellow).

A MOMENT OF WARMTH, by Francis Irby Gwaltney. Tycoon of the Deep South, Robert E. Lee Hunter II lorded it over his feudal cotton estate. This is the story of heir and heir-presumptive to his empire, their upbringing, their World War II careers—and the changing world to which they returned. (PAN GIANT).

TIP ON A DEAD JOCKEY, by Irwin Shaw. Terse, dramatic short stories, mostly about Americans in Europe, pene tratingly written by the author of “The Young Lions”. (GREAT PAN).

Great Contemporaries, By Winston

S. Churchill. One of the greatest English men of all times vividly writes of some of his most notable colleagues and opponents —from Bernard Shaw to Lawrence of Arabia, from Roosevelt to Hitler. Reprint of a modern classic penned first in 1937. (FONTANA, Blue, Illustrated).

My Years With Churchill, By

Norman McGowan. Private life of Winston Churchill by his valet (from 1949 to 1932).

Close-up portrait of “The Guv’nor” at home and abroad, as husband and father, with some entertaining anecdotes. (GREAT

Pan).

A SUMMER PLACE, by Sloan Wilson (who wrote “The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit”). A deeply-etched picture of morals in a modern society that underlines the effect of broken marriages on sensitive teenage children. (PAN GIANT).

FINCH’S FORTUNE, by Mazo de la Roche. Continues the W'hiteoaks saga, as young Finch inherits $lOO,OOO of his grand mother’s fortune and goes to Devonshire, England, to fall in and out of love with bewitching Sarah Court. (PAN GIANT).

THE INVISIBLE MAN, by H. G. Wells.

Herbert George Wells began life as a draper’s assistant but became instead one of the great intellectual lights of his age.

This is one of his best known science fictions—what happens after a man stumbles upon the solution of the im possible hypothesis that he can be in visible. (FONTANA, Blue).

OFF WITH HIS HEAD, is another by that first class New Zealander Ngaio Marsh —one of three recent releases of her mysteries. It tells of murder among the folk dancers. (FONTANA, Yellow).

SPINSTERS IN JEOPARDY, is the second

M asta Ben

and Buka

aaio Marsh’s in the latest releases. are drugs, the Black Mass, a kid ■ ug, a sinister castle and, of course, ir. A good one. (FONTANA, Yellow). [AN LAY DEAD. A week-end house plays the game called “murder”, me of the guests plays for keeps and oornse” really becomes a corpse. This sigaio Marsh’s first venture in crime ? g (1934). (FONTANA, Yellow). : SUNDOWNERS, by Jon Cleary, sarmodys (Paddy, Ida and young son , after years of travelling around uustralian outback, decide to settle iin a place of their own. This is the if the search for it. Recently made la Warner Bros, film in Australia.

IIANA, Yellow).

2 Secret Sayings Of Jesus, By

Jt M. Grant with David Noel Freed- Two American professors of theology Bate the text of an apocryphal gospel tiling to Thomas. Taken from one of 3 volumes of Dead Sea scrolls found ■;5. (FONTANA, Black). 3SON IVY, by Peter Cheney. More aecial Agent Lemmy Caution’s capers «w York among toughs who get rough llames the same. Slickly told, fast >g thriller stuff. (FONTANA. Yellow).

LRECROW LOVER, by Phillis Hast- An escaped murderer hides at a xut farm where live a twisted-mind ir and his lonely daughter. There’s in and violence before justice is done.

Ftat Pan).

sstralian prices; Great Pan, 3/9; Pan „ 5/-; Pan Major, 7/6; Fontana, 3/9, ;t if otherwise marked.)