2
BOOKS OF THE WEEK
The George, Stamford. One of Henry Rush- bury's delightful illus- trations to "Fenland Rivers," by Iris Wedg wood. (Rich and Cowan, 73. Ga.)
SATIRE should be
W
E are not-as-a-people, very partial to satire. Nearly two hundred years ago Benjamin Franklin said, "Strange! That a man who has wit enough to write a satire should have folly enough to publish it." A remark which, I am afraid, would be echoed too often to-day.
But our complacency is being especially by those shaken, younger novellsts who have dis- covered that the secret of suc- cessful mure is speed. The race is still to the Swifts. For that reason, among others, I welcome Maurice Richardson's The Bad Companions (John Miles, 78. Gd.). It in that refreshing rarity-a novel Which is funny, not to say farcieni, and Fet makes good sense. The pace, as well as the altre, is simply killing.
The author has planned his social attack on broad lines and carried it through with a breezy vigour that does not obscure the acid criticism of the shape of things to-day which la impllelt in the story.
His two che tours set out from pron on their astonishing adventures, playing the Old School Tie trick on the governor as they go. Before long they meet an anlable and harmless mad- man on parole. And, after Lidying him up, buying him a top bat and bestowing title on him. they proceed to the
SWIFT
conquest of such fools and snoby na come their way..
A
It is, tus you may imagine, a riotous pilgrimage, though the fun flags now The and then towards the finish. lunalic relapses and has to return to detention. One Togue marries wealthy widow and becomes ten- porarily respectable. A retired-generat takes over the Stufted Shirts, those And glorious rivals of the Faeclats. the last rogue, who invented the B.A., destroyed by the monster which he created and retreats to Jall once more.. I found it fast and furious going while insted. So long as there are folk to be flattered, folk, with preju dices to exploit and lusions to foster, o rogue, it seems, can live.
You will certainly laught over The Bad Companions. But I fancy you will end it with the chastening reflec- tion that, for all its extravagance, it is very nearly true. An exhilarating and salutary tale,
J
AMES LAVER is also in satirical mood in Panic Among Puritans (Heine- mann, s. d.). But it in a light- weight affair compared to Mr.
FRANCIS & DAY'S 60th, SONG & DANCE
ALBUM
CONTAINS
Thanks A Million, Roll Along Prairie Moon. I'm in the Moad, for Love, Music Hath Charms. You Are My Lucky Star, A Little Bit Independent. I've Got a Feelin' You're Fooling, Lonely Villa, Sing Before Breakfast, Poor Little Romany. Sailin' With the Breeze, Headin' Home. When You're Only Seventeen. Every Night at Eight. The Duchess-is-Learning to Rumba. Star Gazing. The Missus & Me, Whenever I Think of You. Riding Up the River Road, With All My Heart. Stars Over Devon, Little Toys in the Corner. And The Great Big Saw Camo Nearer & Ngaror.
TSANG FOOK PIANO COMPANY, Marina. Houso, 19 Queen's Road, Central. Tel. 24648.
CANTON
for
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WM. FARMER & Co.
Victoria Hotel Building. ' Shameen, Canton:
Tel. 13501.
EAT AT-
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Kowbon Branch 10, Hankow Itoad. Tel. 62824.
To-night's Supper
From 9 p.m.
Chicken Salad Mayonnaise
Ice Cream Coffee $1
Edited by Roger Pippett
Richardson's novel, and I thought it finally disappoint-
Int. despite the attraction ok the theme.
Tired, presumably. of the everlasting boredom of life on Olympus, the gods and goddesses decide to "Sec England First." Nymphs are found sporting in rural atreuns, to the great discomfiture of the local pollee. Centaurs are sech gulloping across the Yorkshire moors.
Venus puts that dimdent Londoner, Mr.
the Hargreaves, to
trst of Olympian love and Beds him idly
cinati wanting: Jupiter frightens quin. Bacchus causes & riot at no Albert Hall ball and is defeated by the closing-hours. Only Mars ia atisfied and decides to stay on....
And we leave Mr. Hargreaves wist- fully foresceing a time when "from the earth shall have faded the very memory of Bacchus and Glenus, of Venus and Apollo and Diann, of nymph and nalad and satyr, of Saturn and of Jupiter himself, and the old gods shall return no more to trouble the imagina- tions of men."
I fast that Mr. Laver has mused a first-rate opportunity of troubling our iraginations. He might have borrowed nline from Anstole France, who often stayed on Olympus, and laken' an un- conventional plek to the foundations of our manners and our murals.
Instead of which, he has been con tent to make a too conventional attack on the conventions, and the signin- cance of his fantasy is frivolously trittered away,
COMMEND Owen Ruiter's 11cw novel, Clear Waters (Michadi Joseph, s. 8d., to anyone who is still convinced that human nature can't be changed. It is a story of life in Borneo before the white man arrived to carry the black man's burden.....
The social vahres and ideas of the people are pales apart from ours. But, once you realise that there is scarcely a conception of what is mcet and proper and righteous and necessary in one part of the warld that can't be flatly contradicted in another, you will succumb to the fascination of this tale
*****Mr. ~~fatter-haa-Ingeniously-Aui). ordinated his anthropological fearning to his narrative skill, With the result that his books deflitely Hot A treation on the head-hunters, but a fanching acemint of the day-to-day existence of men and women under conditions which neither you our I would loog survive.
No attempt is made to judge the charnelers by our standardis, nor to ex- lbit them as something out of a museum or a cage in the Zoo, They remain credite and memomble human beings.
S
Vicki Baum INCE swung through the shin- ing dours
Grand of Hotel, many a novelist has followed her, dazed but pursuing.
But no une need trouble to unilate the plat of her new story. Carcer (Geofrey Bles. 7s. Gd., for it laas old as the earliest melodrama in which a girl- genius struggled against poverty and destiny and the fell clutch of cireum. stance only to die in her lover's arms.
The author's vivacious touch slik appears here and there, Jangling the dusty wires and jerking; the puppets out of their conventional capers. But puppets are puppets: they cannot escape their nature.
In short, they have given Frau Baum an unexpected holiday, and 11
her least interesting, tale.
R. P.
SALESMAN SAM
YOUNG MAN, YER CHARGED WITH.... UNLAWFULLY PARKIN' YER HOSS AN' SULKY NEAR A FIRE PLUGI WOT YA
GOT TA SAY TO THAT?
A NEW RACE
TO CONQUER?
›
Tis growing increasingly dim- cult to find a spot on the earth where native races have not met white men. Which lends added Interest to a fascinating book, Papuan. Wonderinud, Jack Hildes (Blackie, 5. d.), the atory of a memorable Government expedition which the author ied through unexplored country Inst year.
by
The diveries he made, and the Islavery welcache and the whole ex- pedition showed, made him a national hero in Australia on his return.
For months Mr. Hides and Patrol Officer O'Malley, "outside men" of the Papuan Bervice, assisted by a tiny band of hand-picked police and carriers, stumbled and tore their way through the hinterland of Papua, meeting tribes who had never before meet, while men.
Theory Upso!
YSENTERY, thinned
De ranks and crippled
their marching powern. Starvation made it agony even to take a step. Limestone rocks mado their passage almost impossible for mea with nil their strength-and on each side of. them lurked natives in the bush, with arrows in their bows, ready to shoot at the least excuse.
even
To me this a casily the Anest travel book of the year. Its language is restrained and simple, I tell al amazing things.
They discovered a new people in the
If Only they played CRICKET
HERE was once a traveller to 10 America who did not go
Afterwards he Hollywood. wrote a book and did not mention Mac West. Colonel Lindbergh, Mickey Mouse or Bing Sing. This is not a bedtime story, but the Leslie's Shane truth about American Wonderland (Michael Joseph, 189.).
The nuthor is a real explorer. He presents to you the America beneath the surface of the sensational legend. Most travellera, are knocked over by that legend. B Leslie, nephew of a cowboy and cousin to a former Chan- erior of the Exchequer, has two ex- cellent hiredilary reasons for being able to keep his balance.
In Chicago, alleged citadel of crooks and gunmen, he found a huge univer- sity just the same as Oxford," said his guide. "only the plumbing is better" and the finest Chaucer re- search in the world. In Washington
10 saw seventy
centre of the island, a tribe of "pretty. light-akinned men," intelligent and artistic, wearing wigs of human hair und using axes of stone.
"Whenco they came," says Mr. Itles," is something that is not for mo to aswer. Upon my return to civilian- tion, one anthropologist was openly annoyed at me for discovering such people. I think he had been writing a book, and my discovery had completely upset his theory."
I must be content with one quotation which shows the whole spirit of the rxpedition:
"I knew they would attack us if we Tried to push through their territory, We made appeals to them, but always with the same respouse. Then I saw a
, very thin and very binck figure start to harangue the crowd. He was mounted on the shoulders of another native, to give him a higher command, I suppose, and appeared to be urging the men to attack. The high priest was ordering death for the devils.
Then he began Venting a drum, at the same time moving his body with a backward and forward motion. . .
High Adventure
W
VERYTHING was very
Eserious to the butto
us it was now'an amus- ing situation, and O'Malley, un- able to contain himself any longer, put two fingers to his mouth and whistled shrilly. The change was The ceremony stopped electric. and they stood still for a second. Then the crowd broke and scat- Lered for the shelter of the bush.
The high priest was dropped in a most undignified manner and must have been one of the rnt out of sight." All who are interested in ethnology, in a true tale of high adventure told with a keen sense of humour, in the growth of an empire coridueled by peaceable means rather than by aerial torpedoes and gas bombs should read this book.
CARR JONES
Penniless London Ex-Soldier
COMES INTO SMALL FORTUNE
London, May 28. GOLDEN surplus has come to a pennilessį man who slept for years on la Thames Embankment seat. Edward Merrell, aged sitting forty-seven,
was
Shakespeare first reading in his niece's kit.
chen in Clerkenwell, London,
folios and a pair of Queen Elizabeth's In the Middle West he met corseta. not cowboys or rodeo riders, but bird fanctuaries, wild flowers and primitive foresta.
Barbarous America
In New York he heard Wagner snw Rodin's superbly performed." linnd of God" and found the works
of "every imaginable front-rank Eng JR author in cold storage in the
Morgan Library,
We get a glimpse of barbarous America when Bir. Lesite writes of his ' return there in 1933-after an absence of fifteen years. He picked up a news paper. There was not a name he could Tom Mooney recognise-except one. was still in jail,,
Later, in a provocative, discussion of the Negro problem, we are reminded that in eleven states there are alx million Negroes, but only two and half million line the right to vote."
Vegetarian's Paradise
Mr: Leslie found the American middle-class the most hospitable in the world. As for food, the continent "Rel- "is a vegetarian's paradise." glon," he says. "needs an encyclo- predla. America
unreligious country, yet it contains more secia and differing churches than any other Nevertheless, country in the world. only one child in three receives relt- glous training.**
13 Dn
American Wonderland is brisk, The witty, enteriaking and honest. Literary Man's approach to the New, World is a novel one and is only occu sichally tainted with the old-Etonian anubbery of such a classic phrase as "The great gulf between the two coun- tries will always be tint Amerien does
olay cricket."
GUESS I'M'
GUILTY 'YER HONÖR!
"6. F.
when a solicitor knocked at the door.
THE HONGKONG. TELEGRAPH. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 17, 1936.
DINNER DANCES :-
AT
THE LIDO
REPULSE BAY
EVERY
WEDNESDAY
AND SATURDAY
THROUGHOUT THE
IN THE EVENT OF INCLEMENT. WEATHER THESE DANCES WILL BE HELD AT THE→→→→→
REPULSE BAY HOTEL
SUMMER
JUNE
24th & 27th NIGHTS
OPENING
OUR BRITISH CROSSWORDS
122
124
26
ACROSS
Was this ancestor of yours i
Ume-keeper!
7
where we buried him softly
at dead of night."
a Severe.
10 This
the
not does
afford modern woman much practice at keeping her hand in. He brought news that the Probate Court had admitted the 11 A woodman, perhaps.
115 Aline on the river? once homeless man's claim-to-a13 A beast to carry! small fortune left by a miser 17 Something to keep a saflor uncle, James Linkerson, ex- road-sweeper, of Islington.
1
warm. 19 A striking episode of Indian
unrest.
Linkerson, who was sixty-nine 20 This failure is fatal. years old, died in hospital after 21 This may cause a tear or two. collapsing in the street. Search of 23 A dog.
his on-room home revealed a hoard 25 Is the policy of this body to reverse any docking of wages? of gold and notes worth nearly
In hond 28 Something £2,000, Linkerson must have lived 27 Part of the foot.
facing the music. on about 1/3 a week during the latter years of his life.
Meanwhile, his nephew, Edward Merrell, ex-soldier, was penniless in London-unaware for months after his uncle's death that he had left, fall his wealth to him.
уля
ago Merrell Six months sleeping on a bench in St. James's Park when he was recognised as the long-sought claimant of the Julington miser's fortune.
Other
Legal difficulties arose. elalmants presented themselves; a woman entered a caveat in the High Court. The miser's fortune re- mained untouched,
|
when
29 Try this 30 down for a vocal
evening
32
There's honour in babel but it is not harmless.
33 A personal record.
31 When serenading is no light
lover.
DOWN
He lives on high fare,
2 A relative,
3 He writes his cheque and gets
his recompense back.
4 He should make a
warden,
good
5 Use 10 across to keep this in
hand.
B This is going back. 7 This makes
squash
from
lemons.
9 Walt, if you like (two wards). 12 The work of 11 nerosa, but of
an artist.
14 Lure.
10. This bird has no relationship
with Mrs. Ruble.
18 Part of 3 down.
19 This sock is not put over the
foot.
22 Disorder in which 25 across
js..outof order,
24 Employ,
25 Ability to show there's snine- thing explosive about drink. The
- 26
fugitive may have cause to, dislike this inclusive circle.
30 The price of a real burgalra.
31 The reverse of an alphabetical
fact is territorially large. Yesterday's Soluţion BUCK JUMPER CAR IHAHAHABHARTHIS O
D 18 BUA BI VEWITS DU NE SHERWETE DEATHEN SEGHAM O AMADO EM A DISTEMPER VIEWS DEBELEA MORINTHT FLUKE REPULSIVE EMME VATERCR LAPSE AGENCYEK LETE NAKLE OPI EMINUTEHAND WHOKERNE DA ADVER BANDAGREEMENTS
Then came dramatically into the will fight a man more than seventy years old. He swore that he saw old James Linkerson in his candle-military review which will take placements concentratal along set routes
A full dress rehearsal of the the late afternoon troops and detach-
went through the
lit rtom put his cross to the will on June 23 to commemorato King at Happy Valley where they took up form which left everything to the Edward's birthday, was held at Happy positions and nephew he had not seen for years. Valley yesterday evening,
Tossed Out. Instead Of In
(WELL, YOU'LL BE THRUN
INTA JAIL, LESS YA KINĮ FIND SOMEBODY TA GIVE YA A REFERENCE OF GOOD CHARACTER!
HOW 'EOUT YOU. DOIN' IT, JUDGE?
ME?WHY, I NEVER SAW YOU IN THIS COURT BEFORE!
WELL IF YA NEVER- SAW ME IN COURT BEFORE, DOESN'T THAT PROVE I GOT, GOOD CHARACTER'
During parades,
By Small
BY CRACKY, 16 IT DON'T!
CASE DISMISSED!
FER
ONLY
. SELL EL. À PẤT, DEV.