Theodore Dalrymple
Dream Lovers by Jacqueline Willcox-Bailey (Wakefield Press, Australian $14.95) is a series of riveting interviews with several Professional and middle-class women in Australia who fell in love with prisoners Who had committed serious crimes — a romantic phenomenon far from unknown In this country. As a record of human folly, Dream Lovers could hardly be exceeded (One of the women was murdered three days after the release of her husband, while her sister, who also married a prisoner, was SOON very nearly done to death by her loved one). The book tells us a great deal about the frivolity and superficiality of modern 'Ian: these women thought they were Praising themselves when they said they were non-judgmental.
The Hand that Signed the Paper by Helen Darville (Allen & Unwin, Australian $13.95) won several prizes for fiction in Australia before its author, a young woman of English descent who claimed to be of Irish-Ukrainian background, was exposed as a hysterical fraud. It is difficult to know whether her book is worse from the literary or historical point of view, or whether it is more alarming that a reputable publisher should have seen fit to publish it, or that successive panels of judges should have seen fit to reward this callow, vicious, unfeeling tripe.
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