(Or Somewhere)

People And Their Emotions In

The New Hebrides

Although the action in A Boat Load of Home Folk, by Australian novelist Thea Astley, appears to take place in\he New Hebrides, readers shouldn’t be fooled. The novel is about people and emotions and not about places.

The New Hebrides supplies a con venient port for the home-folk to visit; a compliant native youth to partner the homosexual priest; and a hurricane at the psychological moment. Otherwise any place that could supply these same ingredients would have done as well.

Father Lake is, of course, shore based; his aberration discovered on the eve of arrival of the Malekula.

On the ship are the other characters —Stevenson, the government agent, returning from leave and to his mistress; two frustrated elderly spin sters, one sentimental, one still actively optimistic; womanising Gerald Seabrook and his disenchanted wife; and the captain who carries on a running battle with the government agent.

The emotions of all Thea Astley characters are always several sizes

larger than life and these are n* exception. Given heat treatment exotic surroundings, an impendini and finally actual hurricane, the 1 ' develop to lethal size and final!: destroy their owners as surely a.

Malekula spits herself on a reef ai the height of the storm.

This writer’s prose always seem: to be achieved with a scalpel rathe; than by normal means, and it is £ tale with small comfort in it. Nc happy endings; no softening rounc the edges. Instead, black, soul searching, men with cancerou? lumps and sex problems and women fretted by their inadequacies. Devoid of humour but with plenty of the comedy of human absurdity. None theless, excellent in its own peculiar way.—JT.

(A Boat Load Of Home Folk.

Published by Angus and Robertson. $3.25.)(