travel, wildlife)

Pick of (horror, travel, wildlife) the paperbacks

There’s a certain kind of book that, once my eye falls on the page, will hold me in another world until the wife is shouting rude things in my ear. A ghost story transfixes me with morbid fascination and, a good travel book about a place that interests me, is as good as a holiday.

While books about animals are not my favourites, they can com pel, especially if the animals come from far-off places.

Ghosts, travel and animal themes are the pick of the paperbacks this month.

Fontana is far ahead with its

Great Ghost Stories Series.

In the daytime I’ll be the first man to agree with a sceptic that neither is there a God with a white beard in heaven or a Devil with a pitchfork in hell. But once the twilight comes, and shadows start to lengthen, it’s a different story. Especially if I’m armed with a handbook of ghost stories.

As Christianity would not have made the strides it has without the Bible to show the way, so the things that go “bump in the night” would not have such a traditional hold on the imagination without a great history of books on the occult, witch craft and the supernatural.

Arthur Machen is featured in the fifth Fontana book of ghost stories and his THE GREAT RETURN tells of the return home of the original gods of the people of a remote Welsh village—the gods who governed all Wales before the arrival of Christianity, D. H. Lawrence, Alexander Pushkin, Eric Ambrose, Robert Aick man, John Betjeman and Walter de la Mare, all appear in these editions —none of them normally associated with this sort of writing. As it happens most early writers wrote ghost stories as a form of mental exercise. The stories were relaxing and took their minds off “that great book”, and the stories could be recited, in the long winter evenings, as a form of com petitive entertainment to while away the time. It was in this way that Mary Shelley came to write her masterpiece, FRANKENSTEIN.

For me the most horrific story— one that made me shudder at a normally beautiful view from my flat of Bronte Beach in Sydney—is Algernon Blackwood’s THE WENDI GO. It tells of four hunters in the wilds of the Canadian “outback”, around Hudson Bay, where there are thousands of square miles of snow filled wilderness, wild life and the “Wendigo”.

No one believes in the animal (of course) until it comes. Then one of the hunters takes off after it, into the wilderness. . . .

Strange beings?

It appears that most countries with large unexplored areas have tales of mysterious beings or animals who dwell there. Most of them can be explained (like the orang-outang) but how many cannot? Perhaps readers in the Pacific can tell us of some. * Books on travel can be unbearably boring if written without inspiration or real background knowledge. We’ve had quite a few travel books sent into PIM recently for review which would send the most avid reader fast asleep after the second page.

You can’t say that about Hammond Innes. He’s not everybody’s cup of tea (I think his novels are awful) but his travel writing has a sort of infectious juvenile gaiety about it which I find appealing. His SEA AND ISLANDS is in two parts —one about ships and the other about the islands he visited in the ships.

He wanders through Scandinavian fiords, Agean isles, Scottish islets and Indian islands and tells some pene trating stories and facts about each.

Just the pocket paperback for one who wishes to sail but doesn’t know where.

His Harvest Of Journeys

is the same sort of thing only this time he is on foot visiting Arabia and the Persian Gulf, Norway, Morocco, Europe and Canada. Quite a hotch-potch of places and the result is, while you do not learn a lot about any one place, you do get a pretty

good idea about what a good chunk of the world’s surface is all about. * * * Books about animals can be either horribly sentimental or so objective as to take all the fun out of reading them.

The Wild Life Of India Is

a very easy book to read—one gets the impression that this is a labour of love for E. P. GEE, although he has little writing know-how. He writes about Assam, Nagaland and north India and the animals one finds there, with a love that is obvious.

These are places I have always wanted to visit (I reached Darjeeling but couldn’t get a permit to go to Assam) and the animals are part of the picture. Tigers, lions, rhinos, I’ve seen—but who has seen a golden langur or a wild ass?

George Adamson of BORN FREE fame is already celebrated for the part he played in the story of Elsa, the Kenyan lioness and her cubs. In BWANA GAME he tells of his early life and how he earned a living in Africa. It also tells how he came to love wild-life and began to live with it.

While on the subject of wild life it seems fair to include a number of paperbacks on natural history.

With a view to instructing the aver age person in the delights of his own backyard and what makes the things that grow in it, grow, Fontana has come out with a New Naturalist series.

The Snowdonia National

PARK tells you all about the geology, the natural history, the flora and fauna, the birds and the bees of this famous spot. Altogether worth

Reading. Britain’S Structure

AND SCENERY gives you the com plete break down on what Britain’s like underneath, why it is and why it has come about. THE SEA SHORE tells us all about the millions of things happening in England’s rock pools, what they are up to and why they should be preserved.

All good stuff for expatriates far from home—like those in the GEIC or BSIP, for instance. * * * If nothing else in this collection interests you, try EVERYBODY’S

Guide To Survival, A Hand

book on danger, how to prevent it or live through it. This little book tells you how to get out of a car submerged in 20 ft of water; what to do if your clothes catch fire, and so on. In other words it tells you the things you must know to sur vive the common accidents of the 20th century. All books are Fontana.

Prices range from 40 cents to $1.15. —JE.