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Authors: Elizabeth Jane Howard
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enthusiasms, has also to deal with them against a background of intermittent international crises. These bring about the realisation of Leacock’s dream - a vast National Park in which all fauna can be seen at ‘limited liberty’ - which is aided by the Zoo’s President, a powerful old cynic who owns a lot of newspapers and dabbles forcefully in politics. The National Park is established, and then, when it has served its purpose, abandoned. Leacock is out, and Falcon in. Further crises lead to war, and Carter witnesses Falcon’s collapse, and outside and beyond it, the collapse of the world round him. The book ends after the war and its immediate consequences are over, with Carter, who has in a sense lost everything through his painstaking loyalty to idea rather than people and through his adherence to the interest of the Society, applying for the Directorship of it.
Here is the kind of novel that is immensely enjoyable at the time of reading, and that strikes one afterwards with all kinds of excellent intricacies. Mr. Wilson has a genius for implication: he has also this time produced a structure that exactly contains another structure with no space wasted, this process continuing as far as the mind cares to pursue it. These qualities of internal balances and fittingness are a hallmark of the satisfying novel; a chief reason for making one want to re-read, because there is more to discover than one apprehends at first sight. Mr. Carter seems to me to suffer a little too much from chronic disgust at his own species to be a really happy administrator in any circumstances, and his relationship with his wife is not quite round enough to stand the passage of a book, but neither of these criticism spoil a work beautifully composed of interest and entertainment (the description of a television programme, for example is a superb instance of the latter without being simply a tangent to Mr. Wilson’s theme) and the whole work is written throughout in the author’s top gear.
When My Girl Comes Home
by
V. S. Pritchett
October 1961
Here is a delectable collection of stories by the author who seems to me just about the best living exponent of this elusive art. The title story is the major work, showing, apparently casually, a wonderfully clear and particular picture of a family in London faced with the return of their Hilda after thirteen years in the Far East and two marriages. Hilda, who is an exotic enigma to all of them, arouses curiosity, envy, protection and excitement - all lubricated with their various family relations to her. They never discover her, they never see how much she has discovered them, and when she goes they are left with their distant speculations - she is again a chronic topic of family conversation. I think I liked The Wheelbarrow best, as it has a character fraught with layers of innocence and guilt at which Mr. Pritchett excels, but there are several fascinating portraits in other stories - an accountant suffering from a film star brother, a very old and redundant gentleman who has fallen back upon food; a woman living on the telephone and calamity who collects a pulverising bore with whom to bank her best memories, etc. There is a continuous sense of the ridiculous in this writing, but the author also keeps a kindly eye on the truth about his people, so that they are never simply comic inventions; while you are laughing at them, you also entirely see what they mean. The narratives are studded with exact observation, and the dialogue and constructions are so good that one cannot think why Mr. Pritchett does not write some one-act plays.
Consider Her Ways
by
John Wyndham
October 1961
This is also a collection of stories by an author, some of whose work, at least, almost everybody must have read. The Day of The Triffids is not easily forgotten - nor is The Midwich Cuckoos . Most of these stories deal with confusions about time - the confusion induced by drugs, electronic experiments, and so on.
Here is the kind of novel that is immensely enjoyable at the time of reading, and that strikes one afterwards with all kinds of excellent intricacies. Mr. Wilson has a genius for implication: he has also this time produced a structure that exactly contains another structure with no space wasted, this process continuing as far as the mind cares to pursue it. These qualities of internal balances and fittingness are a hallmark of the satisfying novel; a chief reason for making one want to re-read, because there is more to discover than one apprehends at first sight. Mr. Carter seems to me to suffer a little too much from chronic disgust at his own species to be a really happy administrator in any circumstances, and his relationship with his wife is not quite round enough to stand the passage of a book, but neither of these criticism spoil a work beautifully composed of interest and entertainment (the description of a television programme, for example is a superb instance of the latter without being simply a tangent to Mr. Wilson’s theme) and the whole work is written throughout in the author’s top gear.
When My Girl Comes Home
by
V. S. Pritchett
October 1961
Here is a delectable collection of stories by the author who seems to me just about the best living exponent of this elusive art. The title story is the major work, showing, apparently casually, a wonderfully clear and particular picture of a family in London faced with the return of their Hilda after thirteen years in the Far East and two marriages. Hilda, who is an exotic enigma to all of them, arouses curiosity, envy, protection and excitement - all lubricated with their various family relations to her. They never discover her, they never see how much she has discovered them, and when she goes they are left with their distant speculations - she is again a chronic topic of family conversation. I think I liked The Wheelbarrow best, as it has a character fraught with layers of innocence and guilt at which Mr. Pritchett excels, but there are several fascinating portraits in other stories - an accountant suffering from a film star brother, a very old and redundant gentleman who has fallen back upon food; a woman living on the telephone and calamity who collects a pulverising bore with whom to bank her best memories, etc. There is a continuous sense of the ridiculous in this writing, but the author also keeps a kindly eye on the truth about his people, so that they are never simply comic inventions; while you are laughing at them, you also entirely see what they mean. The narratives are studded with exact observation, and the dialogue and constructions are so good that one cannot think why Mr. Pritchett does not write some one-act plays.
Consider Her Ways
by
John Wyndham
October 1961
This is also a collection of stories by an author, some of whose work, at least, almost everybody must have read. The Day of The Triffids is not easily forgotten - nor is The Midwich Cuckoos . Most of these stories deal with confusions about time - the confusion induced by drugs, electronic experiments, and so on.
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