Rocky Going
THERE are too many bits and pieces in this book for it to be much of a literary success, which is a pity because Fisher is a good writer, a very good biologist and a first-rate Good-Lifeman. The fact that he has had to devote nearly a couple of hundred pages to crystallise one of the passions of his life in a book might have Persuaded him to spend more time in putting the material together. It's unlikely that many others will bother to take a running jump on to that nubbly nipple of rock, the top of an old volcano 'way out in the North Atlantic.' As it is, the book doesn't quite come Off. The information is all there. Fisher has been collecting it for years. He has also sailed to this freak island in a yacht and a destroyer; he has flown over it in a big plane and has been dropped on to it from a helicopter on a certain occasion last year When it was claimed for the Queen; but despite all this first-hand knowledge the book looks like a scissors-and-paste job in places. It's difficult to say why. The photographs are superb and so is some of the writing, here and there. It's the bits in between that give the whole work an odd shape. He ought to have another try at it in ten years' time.
JOHN HILLABY
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