PAPUAN EPIC
By Keith Bushell
Mr. Bushell, who has served as Native Police Officer and Magistrate in New Guinea, has made a praiseworthy attempt to strike a new line in records of colonial service. Perhaps he knew that his book (Seeley, Service, 12s. Gd.) would have to face the rivalry of several recent accounts of work among the cannibals of Papua. Unfortunately he seems to have been unable to decide whether to write a novel or a formal third-person account of his adventures. This is not to suggest that any of Mr. I3ushell's adventures are fictitious, but that it would have been more satisfactory if he had set them down in the first person, and in simpler language. The mere facts of the patrols which Mr. Bushell led into the unexplored Pai-wa regions in search of the murderers of two white men and into the interior of Fergusson Island to catch a cannibal who had been terrorising the coastal settlement, are exciting enough in themselves and are only made tedious by the purple patches and humorous interludes with which Mr. Bushell has decorated them. -But it was certainly a good idea to build the narrative round the character of Donovan, an old white " savage," found by Mr. Bushell on a small island off the coast, and who accompanied the author on his patrols. The story of the gradual recivilising of this wild old Irishman gives a progressive interest usually lacking in books of this sort.
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