Samoa's synergy family, but

what's a synergy?

In reading The Synergy Saga, I was constantly reminded of some painting of Raoul Dufay—unexpected dignity achieved in spite of a certain rough ness, fun and colour. Dufay is not everyone’s artist, and The Synergy Saga is not everyone’s book. It is a book for those who know something of life.

The style in which Ardent Candor writes his story of adventure in the Pacific is reminiscent of the writing in Last Exit to Brooklyn, and makes for detailed characterisation. Thus we meet people as human as ourselves, doing the things we do or might hope to do, and saying some of the things we might like to say.

Written almost as an allegory, The Synergy Saga gives a picture of some aspects of life in the Pacific, which, while decidedly real, are seldom written about. The Pacific, not unlike other places, has always been popu lated by groups of people with dif fering interests, each group having no notion what the other is doing.

When one speaks of life in the Pacific one speaks only of that niche in which one found himself. So with Ardent Candor’s The Synergy Saga: it deals with people and their doings which are certainly not known to many who who will claim to have lived in the Pacific. Similarly, a reviewer can give only those aspects of a book which appeal to him: others reviewing The Synergy Saga might have a different opinion to mine, and might even point out that, since readers have now become bored with them, the use of four-letter words dates the book as something out of a quaint past era. However, unlike most in which four-letter words figure, they are not glaringly out of context.

The story is centred around a stolen yacht, and is the account of a group of people on a Samoan island. The initial four-member “Tetra Organ” is American including a Black. The group is joined by four Samoan youths to make Synergy family.

Let’s not be snobbish. Let’s confess that we are not familiar with the word synergy. To quote from The Synergy Saga, “Uncle Bucky (Buck master Fuller) takes you farther out.

He has said that on the average only one in three hundred university students understand that Synergy is the behaviour of whole systems un predicted by the behaviour of their

parts. Now, if you’re a specialist, you don’t know what the hell Uncle Bucky is talking about. Only a com prehensivist can dig that.” Does that explain to you what synergy means and arouse your curiosity about what else of interest the book contains for you?

The Synergy Saga moves to an exciting denouement, which has the American and Soviet navies, the Samoan revolutionaries, a space cap sule and TV crews all converging on the family at once.

Maybe it’s not your kind of book.

But you should read it just the same.

The author, Ardent Candor and Ex position Press who published it, are to be congratulated on producing something which regards the Pacific as part of the Twentieth Century.

Reckon it might be the best thing written about the Pacific for many a long day. —Peter Livingston. (THE SYNERGY SAGA, by Ardent Candor. Exposition Press, 50 Jericho Turnpike, Jericho, New York 11753. $U56.000.) O Not many people are fortunate enough to have a job which is also their hobby. Robin Miller is one of this lucky breed. Flying was in her blood and she was keenly interested in medicine, so she combined the two to become a flying nurse and pilot with the Royal Flying Doctor Service in Western Australia. In her auto biography, Flying Nurse, she relates, with brisk clarity, an action-filled series of anecdotes, sometimes amusing, sometimes sad, sometimes amazing but always highly entertain ing. Mercy flights to remote mining camps, cattle stations and missions administering poliomyelitis vaccine, rescuing accident victims, coping with bone-pointed inflictions of aborigines were a routine way of life. If you think you lead an interesting life it will look 10 shades paler against this

chronicle of true-life adventure.

JG.

(FLYING NURSE by Robin Miller, Pan paperback, $A1.40.)