Short Stories
The Wild Honey. By Victoria Lincoln. (Faber and Faber. 12s. 6d.)
nurse; the subject turns up again, predictably, in Victoria Lincoln's The Wild Honey, a collection of stories concerned mainly with 'children, adolescents, and women facing middle-age.' These, Miss Lincoln contends, 'constitute the incurably personal class.' But they also—unhappy children, lonely college girls with emotional problems, despondent housewives—constitute, one cannot but feel, the raw material of an immense amount of women's fiction. The writing here lacks the personality to bring the situations decisively to life: we have, perhaps, been here rather too often before.
'Every dominant passion generates' a dominant fear, the fear of its non-fulfilment. Every dominant fear generates a nightmare..: The dreamers in Lord Russell's Nightmares of Eminent Persons include the Queen of Sheba, Mr. Bowdler, Stalin (handed over to a committee of Quakers after the Third World War and encouraged to drink cocoa while contemplating repentance) and President Eisen- hower (whose vision is of a McCarthy - Malenkov pact to divide the world); the nightmares, and the two longer stories which accom- pany them, most agreeably demolish superstitions and delusions. At times donnishly facetious, occasionally, as in the story `Zahato- polk,' about the rise of a new master race, close in subject matter to the metely trite, these little fables are distinguished by their cool, elegant eighteenth-century manner, by an effortless lucidity of style. Their quality is, inevitably and enjoyably, entirely one of personality.
PENELOPE HOUSTON
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