Book Review ...

The Witch's Thorn

Angus and Robertson

A Couple of years ago Ruth Park's weekly feature from Sydney in the "Auckland Star" was among the best printed in New Zealand newspapers. The strange and interesting incidents and people she found around that city, and her reports of everyday life there, were unique in that Sydney came to emerge from her column as a place with a character all its own.

And in her latest book Miss Park has done the same for Te Kano of the twenties. The little town, with its geyser, its whare and Maori huts, its Convent of the Sisters of St. Joseph, and streets hideous in corrugated iron and dust, is drawn clearly and precisely. Miss Park has captured the slovenly Americanised accents, and the attitude of the town to progress and culture—the accounts of Kingsford Smith and of the visit of the Thrush of Erin are among the funniest in the book.

If Te Kano itself is real, and the Wis are one of the beat Maori families in our literature, the other characters are less successful. With the exception of the dinkum Aussie, Sister Eucalyptus, they can easily be typed: Mrs. Minogue, the female Pharisee; Mr. Minogue, the male of the species; Jellicoe Minogue, lust combined with an unfortunate complexion; Johnny Gow, the Good-for-Nothing; Mrs. Hush, the Rough Diamond, or, maintaining the lapidary metaphor, the Heart of Gold . . . and so on. Bethell, the child of the story, and its main character, is not memorable: events are caused by the circumstances of her birth rather than the child herself.

There are many cliches—Bcthell's head is frequently "defenceless"—and some awkward situations. Mr. Minogue's accent, and the scene where Johnny Gow, feeling "a surge of comradeship" with a group of small boys, tries to join their game of marbles and is repulsed, are awkwardly conceived and written. Another clumsy, and, I felt overdone passage, was the opening of the final chapter: it would have been more effective if everyone in the Gow household did not beat Bethell up, all the time.

These are relatively small points, however, and the fact remains that. Miss Park's style is considerably more fluent and unselfconscious than that of most New Zealand novelists. This is not the great N.Z. novel; but it is one of those which must be written, with competence, before that