Paperbacks

Tie paperback may not yet be quite the queen of all she surveys, but we think it high time to introduce a regular column devoted to the best and the brightest of the weekly selection. And if we don't catch the best, we will find the most noticeable.

There is nowhere to begin except the middle, but what more reassuring a start than some recent Penguins, whoops, Pelicans I mean. The best of the recent ones is a selection from the

work of the nineteenth-century journalist and social critic, Henry Mayhew, entitled The Un known Mayhew (£1). Now that the Pelican Books deluge us with a flood of fashibnable sociological writing, it is something of a surprise

to read Mayhew's accurate and vivid portraits of the labouring poor in nineteenth-century London. He has an ear for the colourful and for the particular, and his evocation of the misery of the poor is a much stronger thing than the trendy ideology which is sometimes offered urder this imprint. ,

Two other heavies from Pelican: one, Mary Barnes (60p), is an autobiographical account of madness, with its roots in conventional family life and its enactment and alleviation in that new Eldorado, Kingsley Hall. The narrative is real enough, but the Laingian paraphernalia which su.Tounds it is a little suspicious. Another recent Pelican describes a disorder on a. larger scale: Kings Depart (£1), by Richard Watt, is a detailed history of the revolutionary period in Germany 1918 and 1919. It is a lengthy book, but the

narrative has a brisk, reportorial pace which keps clear of any march-of-time portentousness and presents a very readable account of the ite.sonal and historical muddles of the period.

n another mood, Pan's reissue of The Crock of Gold (30p) by James Stephens. Originally

published in 1912, it retains what the blurb wculd call its Irish charm. It is the story of what we could once have called fairies, but now we say faerv. It has a simplicity of style and a sly humour, but don't let that blind you to the imaginative and technical expertise of the story. To be recommended to those who are tired of To kien and Carlos Castelanetz.

An Irish writer of another ilk, as they say, is Eugene O'Neill. Jonathan Cape have been doing a good job of re-issuing his plays in paperback editions, and there are now three more: The Ape, All God's Chillun Got Wings and Ah, Wilderness (95p). What O'Neill shares with Stephens is a close attention to the harmonies of the language, and he has besides a very powerful rhetoric of feeling. These three reissues confirm this; hats off to Cape for perseverance.

Calder and Boyars continue their paperback seres of contemporary French drama with the

memoirs cif that academician. Eugene lonesco. entitled — in fashionable lower case — present past past present (E1.25). It is a predictable amalgam of the portentous and the quirky, but there is a certain lightness of touch which keeps the ramblings in trim. A title which sounds on a similar theme, Laughter And Despair (University of California Press E1.40) wins the dullness award of the week. Mr U. C, Knoepflmacher dissects the Victorian novel in terms of its dichotomy between, wait for it, ' laughter ' and ' despair.' Like discussing a car in terms of its dialectic between window and upholstery. Enough said.

For those who have been watching the TV series, Penguin Modern Classics — that grand hotel for twentieth-century antics and failures— has reissued Katherine Mansfield's Bliss And Other Stories (40p). Watch out for what used to be called the " feminine. Also watch out for Linguistics And Literature (Edward Arnold, 80P) by Raymond Chapman, straightforward account of the interaction between the technical and stylistic forms of literary criticism, which lifts the skirts of that old bugbear literature with a very modern mind of seriousness. It should find a large readership in the schools and in the junior level of the universities.

Two other books are of an even more uplifting nature. A Catholic Humanist Dialogue (Pemberton Books 90p) contains a series of dialogues and lectures that attempt to find common ground between liberal atheism and conventional catholicism: no longer irreconcilable, it seems, in our ecumenical times. Obviously serious and well-Intentioned, but only that. The Church Of England, The Methodists and Society 1700-1856 (University of London Press E1.05) has a similarly workmanlike note. It is a history of Methodism, atid its stormy relations with the Established Church during the time of the Industrial Revolution. Not perhaps a book for a long trainjourney, but detailed and informative just the same.

The Institute of Development Studies have just published The Chilean Rood To Socialism (£2.50), the proceedings of an international conference convened at Santiago to discuss just that. For those of us who aren't carried away with the orosoect of a Marxist paradise, this book doesn't offer much evidence either way. Although it did seem to be biased toward the present government of Chile, which didn't help its objectivity very much.

And, finally, a reprint from4Penguin Books of P. G. Wodehouse's Big Money (35p). Here we are presented with the Society road to capitalism, in the dialogues and seminars of T. Paterson Frisby and Lord Biskerton (known as ' Biscuit' to his friends, who include me). A book to rely upon.

Bill Platypus