Myth and poetry
WILLIAM BUCHAN
The Shadow Land Peter Vansittart (Macdonald 16s)
In their very different ways these two books would make a good addition to the library of any intelligent older child, especially at the time when myth and dream and poetry begin to need squaring with the facts of history and life.
Papas brings, to this fourth volume in a series which has touched on the press, the law and Parliament, his amused, unflattering eye which, if it sometimes makes choirboys or curates grotesque, almost villainous, never denies them their humanity. In his treatment of architecture there is a touch of the exotic, making Hawksmoor more baroque than he meant to be, and Bath into a kind of scrambled St Petersburg. But there is life here; ecclesiastics and their surroundings seem thoroughly real, and there is a brilliant portrait of the Archbishop of Canterbury. By contrast, Geoffrey Moorhouse's text, of necessity con- densed, is factual, undecorated, cool but not unsympathetic. Somehow he has managed, in speaking (again of necessity) only tif the Angli- can Church, to press a lot of useful facts into shape with a fair assessment of the Church's actual and continuing role in English life. Something difficult has been attempted here and the result, given the severely set limits, is most successfuL
Peter Vansittart's book is subtitled 'More Stories from the Past': they are his retelling, perhaps, but there is nothing about them of the rehash, nor of condescension, nor of any wish to make things particularly easy for the modern reader. This author does not deal in pastiche: he is of the true race of story- tellers, and the blurb is right when it says: 'He writes as once minstrels recited and sang, who never told the same story twice in the same way. . . Once embarked on these stories, the reader will very likely find himself coming back to contemporary things as if from a long dis- tance.
Yet there is nothing consciously olde- worlde in these artful pages, and the writing has real magic: 'In a quiver of dark cloud, a shudder of leaves in a thicket, in a dog's startled eyes, a cold cloud over the summer sun or a sudden, baffling image in water, Merlin lingered.'
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