Bright Black
Whale Adventure. By Willard Price. (Cape, 13s. 6d.) Dangerous Journeys. Selected by Leonard Roe. (Hamish Hamilton, 8s. 6d.) IT used to be the fashion—perhaps it still is—to sneer politely at the books inflicted on Victorian nurseries, the earnest, morally instructive tales that now seem so foreign to the interests of real children. But will today's books get any politer treatment at the hands of our grown-up grand- children? What will they make of At home with the Meson, My old man's a ''.1unk pilot or Son of flow: the tale of a redskin lad? The books we thrust on our children are often just as earnest, just as instructive as those old Sandfords and Mertons, but without the moral tone, which is temporarily unacceptable. Nowadays the Top Little People are encouraged to 'know about' the world of science and the lives of Other Peoples and the hairbreadth adventures of men of action. And the moral of that is: that we shall be landed with a generation of insensitive little know- abouts. perfect candidates for the quiz panel but without a shred Of imagination between the lot of them.
All the more reason, then, to thank heaven for The Tokolosh. Ronald Segal has chosen an un- promising enough theme for a children's book- apartheid—but treated it with such sincerity and imagination that he takes us into the heart of the problem. The Tokolosh of the title is the genius of the black people—`A tiny old man he was, the size of her middle finger, bright black as a piece of coal, with a white beard like a goat's and eyes that turned up at the corners.' He lies behind and symbolises the unity, the aspirations and the in- vincible laughter of the Africans, in the face of white stupidity and oppression. He is the moving spirit in their endurance of the pass system, of arbitrary arrest, and of a shooting on the Sharpe- ville pattern, all seen through the eyes of the other central character, an African boy named Peter. At the end, which is really no end but only the end of the beginning, Peter is home again with his parents, the African leaders are in gaol, and the people of the townships are once more subdued and at work. But the future is clearly with the Tokolosh. Through all the ten- sion and bitterness implicit in the story, Mr. Segal keeps his touch light, light-hearted even, and by his use of a medium that is one half folk- tale and one half ironic fantasy (beautifully sus- tained in David Marais's striking illustrations) he gives to the facts of current history the extra imaginative dimension children need. Adults, too, for that matter.
Taya Zinkin's is the story of a childhood in India, as rambling and shapeless as The Tokolosh is pointed and controlled. But it is the sort of book that one can happily lose oneself in. It is instructive, but the information is given in the easy way of a friend with whom one is staying in a strange country. Rishi is the son of an Indian Civil Servant, born a year or so before the coming of Independence. We see him first as a baby. With the outbreak of the riots, he is flown to England for a couple of years with his grandmother. But before his fourth birthday he is back with his family in India, and the greater part of the book shows him growing up through the next three or four years. We meet Abdul the bearer, Ranoo the gardener, Pish the pie-dog and Asha the lion cub. It is an enchanted world, absorbing enough for a child to overlook a cer- tain naivete and inconsequence in the story- telling. He will feel, too, that he has got to know the people of India intimately, and not merely know about them.
The aim of Joan Carnock's study of Russia is, quite openly, to create a better understanding of the Soviet way of life and so help to preserve peace. It has several faults: it tries to cover too much ground in 170 pages of text, including geo- graphy and history and everyday life, and throw- ing in the arts and sciences for good measure: it is written in an unattractive style, too reminiscent of a textbook and the general attitude is one of starry-eyed enthusiasm. Many parents would regard it as dangerously misleading.
The Arabs proclaims itself lower-grade Ameri- can by its typography, its brash illustrations, and its unwearyingly informative and overwritten text. Schools might find it a useful reference book in the library, but it would be a determined child who would sit down to read it for pleasure.
Gunther's Meet Central Africa is much what one might expect of this restless writer. In his Meet the World Books he turns to writing specifi- cally for young people, with very little change of tone, though somewhat lighter anecdotage. In fact the anecdotes are the best thing about it. Apart from them, he has a matter-of-fact style, scrappy in narrative and flat in exposition. This is a liberal newspaper man's view of Central Africa with the lid off—good for dipping into, but not a reliable survey.
With Whale Adventure we turn to the docu- mentary novel. Hal and Roger join an old-
fashioned whaling vessel, and meet more than their share of excitement and brutal discomfort. The book is packed with violent events and with sailing and whaling lore, but thanks to a singu- larly inert style it never properly gets under way.
Finally, travellers' tales. Dangerous Journeys is an interesting though not entirely successful attempt, in this genre, to blend the eighteenth. nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There is no discernible pattern in a book which alternates between Bligh of the Bounty and Guy Gibson of the Dambusters, Fitzroy Maclean and Captain Cook, Spencer Chapman and H. M. Stanley. The styles range dizzily from the Flying Doctor's "His last fit, it took four men to hold him down," alleged my informant. I shuddered . . to Stanley's 'But see! we have arrived at the confluence of the Lualaba with a river which rivals it in breadth. Down the latter, a frantic host of feathered warriors urge a fleet of mon- strous canoes.' Still, it would help to pass the time, I suppose.
RICHARD JAY
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