Two Novels

of Note

In a reading world that has largely turned away from fiction, only the great reach the best seller class. Both Morris West

{The Shoes of the Fisherman) ,

and Pierre la Mure {Clair de Lune ) come into the category.

AUSTRALIA’S Morris West has gone a long way since he wrote the buried-treasure trifle, Gallows on the Sand; or Kundu, the sexy piece about a New Australian doctor in the Highlands of New Guinea.

Although we have said before that he has now joined the ranks of those who tend to make a literary gimmick of their religion, it is equally true that few have done it with less literary soul-searching and sentiment.

It is some sort of fantastic com mentary on the age of the 1960’s and its staple, paper-back literature of souped-up sex, and violence, that any writer can draw sufficient drama from a religious situation to make not only a great novel but also one that sells.

In Shoes of the Fisherman, West takes on a large proposition—one which is normally veiled by myth and mystery from Catholic and

Protestant alike—when he purports to reveal, as the central motif of the story, the innermost feelings and re actions of a Pope, newly-elected in 1963.

Although the novel was written long before, by coincidence it was published about the time of the death of Pope John and the election of his successor. But there all re semblance stops. West’s College of Cardinals does not elect a Pontiff from Milan but, to their own surprise, a Cardinal lately emerged from behind the Iron Curtain.

Earthiness The ensuing conflicts between the fixed, traditional ways of the Vatican and those of the new Pontiff who has spent more time in Communist prisons and Siberian concentration camps than in church, provides much of the background to the story; and the relationship between the Pontiff and the Russian, Kamenev, some of the drama. Subsidiary stories that run through the main theme—that of the American correspondent and his Italian mistress included —provide the essential contrasting earthiness.

Morris West is a living example to young Australian writers who are forever being urged by their betters to get away from eucalypts and the wide-open spaces. West is now well set in neutral ground in Italy and there certainly is no whiff of gum leaves in this little lot.

(The Shoes Of The Fisherman.

Published by Heinemann. 26/-.) PIERRE la Mure’s new novel Clair de Lune is, as might be supposed, the story of France’s greatest musician, Claude Debussy who, in the tradition of the 19th century, reached fame only through a series of garrets, poverty, bills and exotic love-affairs.

In a short life of 56 years, lived either at the bottom of a pit of depression or on the Olympian heights of happiness, Debussy’s music shocked the stolid Wagnerian purists of his day. Ethereal, soulful and even sinful they found it; only late in his life did Debussysm became a musical movement that revolutionised French musical habits.

Irresistible to women, his love affairs ranged from Russia to Italy but shocked few of his con temporaries until, in a Paris where extra-marital exercises were the norm, he left his first wife, ran away with his mistress and subsequently married her. Emma and their daughter, Chouchou, were with him when he

died of cancer in March, 1918, in Paris.

Like his biographical novel, Moulin Rouge, la Mure has written Clair de Lune directly into English, without the services of a translator. He was a correspondent for a French news paper in the United States when World War broke out and scuttled his newspaper. He decided there and then to write in English—with the result that Moulin Rouge took several years to write and Clair de Lune not much less.—JT. (CLAIR DE LUNE. Published by Collins. 32/6.) NO ONE could come any more in ternational than novelist Max Catto. So far as the backgrounds of his novels (and he is almost as pro lific as Mr. Gardner) are concerned he is tied to some sort of jet

propelled typewriter. His stories whip madly around between Equatorial Africa, South Sea Islands, Central America, leaving his readers faint and dizzy, and while we presume that Mr. Catto is an American, he has achieved such national interchange ability that we can no longer be sure even of that.

The Tiger in the Bed, the latest of his works, is backgrounded in Brazil where 65 womanless men have been confined to an oil drilling site so long that they have produced their own kind of spontaneous combustion.

In the explosion, seven of them have died and the story is told through witnesses at the court of inquiry pre sided over by Colonel Manuel Car denas. who has his own unorthodox methods of getting them to talk.

The story has all the well-tried in gredients—action, sex, suspense, and exotic location. (THE TIGER IN THE BED. Heinemann. 22/6.)