"Over the Hill—"
How many readers have speculated on the future of the novel as a literary form? It has certainly had a good run. Yet, in prose, we have the essay form, the biography, the history, the autobiography, the diary and others. All these forms have their ups and downs ; and yet each one seems to embody bits of each of the others. Dr. Moran, the author of a book called Viewless Winds, a successful autobiography, has written this further volume, which, as the publisher's blurb puts it, "incorporates much of his own experience though the book is cast in fictional form." The distinction in the form of the two books is hard to recognise though the actual experiences are different in place and time ; Lid Beyond the Hill
Lies China is even better reading than is Viewless Winds. The book is humorous, often rather grimly so—as in the story "Some leopards go uphill to die," which deals with the final illness and death of Jeremiah Glogan, the founder of "Venerable Morticians, Ltd."; the coiner of the phrase: ." Better and ,brighter funerals," and tilt patentee pf "The Zed, the only hygienic coffin." Glogan was shrewd enough to realise that no section of the public is more useful to a funeral director than are doctors and clergymen. He therefore looked always to them for support. "No one ketter than they knew how lucrative the funeral business was. No one, if so interested, was in a better position to push business for a funeral company."
The period covered by this work of fiction begins in the eighteen- nineties, when the author (or, rather, the central character) was a first-year medical student at Sydney University ; the chemistry pro- fessor being "a mild and humble man of science, something like the caricature of ut old-fashioned German lecturer. His hair was iron grey and his vision short-sighted. Worst of all, he had a slight impediment in his speech which the students, with childish glee, were quick to greet each time with stamping. Before each vowel he would place the letter n, so that oxygen became n...n...noxygen." The book takes us right through the period of the last world war and ends up in London with the central character, Dr. Challis, rendering first-aid to the people half buried or wholly buried in the bombed wreckage of the last few years. "Why had this tiny shop escaped the caprice of the blast? And how had that house been spared from the general devastating fire? Quite close, great girders had been twisted like the fibres of some weak reed. In a moment he was lost. A mass of rubble had forced him to make a detour, and soon he found himself in unfamiliar territory. In this forest of darkness there were no landmarks. He smiled, saying to himself, "I should be looking for notches on a tree." Peering, he saw the half of a bedroom above him, with a wardrobe balancing itself precariously. The streets were deserted—all the human rodents seemed to have burrowed deep down into the earth. Some- where below these buildings, he thought, are men and women wearing the mask of a grim fortitude. He thought of his own countrymen, hard-eyed and laconic, in a time of drought, staring up at the ever pitiless sky, waiting."
The title of the book needs some explanation. Among the original convicts of New Holland, there was a general idea that China lay "over the hill and across the bay." Dr. Challis, the - name allocated to the hero of the present book, discovered himself to be the descendant of such early convicts. He comes to identify himself in spirit with those early transported felons, and, like them, "he also seeks to break bounds and escape from his environment, which he feels is 'debasing turn." There is plenty of romance in the book, as well as accuracy of detail, medical and sociological. The style is unaffected ; just plain, straightfoiward English. There is humour and pathos, and it is free from sentimentality. I should think that everybody who reads books at all would like this book.
HARRY ROBERTS.
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