Mistress Masham's Repose

IN a satiric tale, Mr. White brings lo life again the Lilliputians of Gulliver’s Travels, places them on a little island in England, and has them rediscovered by a bespectacled twelve-year-old called Maria, an unhappy and frustrated child. Maria tries to play God or Führor to the tiny people and in turn is rescued by them from the machinations of her governess and the Vicar, as evil a pair of villains as have darkened literature in fifty years.

Mr. White’s style is ornate and sly. He satirizes the stately diction of the days of Addison and does a superlative caricature of a learned professor. He is at his best when illustrating the tortuous paths which the historic mind follows while ignoring the great event which is whirling around under its nose.

One dilemma of the book lay for me in deciding how to read it. As a tale of adventure I was glad to believe again in the Lilliputians — I knew they had existed before, why not again? — but the world to which Mr. White brings them, which he makes quite clear is in our time, I could not accept.

Maria and her governess are living in England during the war — but there is no war and they and the palace Malplaqilet become fantastic beyond belief. This was a disappointment. I did not want the very real Lilliputians to be put in a fairy tale that could not have happened. Hut the incredibility of the big people destroyed the reality of the little people and their brave fight.

The other dilemma lay in my uncertainty as to what Mr. White was satirizing. Each page has its neat digs, but I was not sure that I was not missing the big intention. It is inevitable to compare Mistress Masham’s Repose with the other satire of the year, George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Mr. Orwell used no fireworks of style, but his animals st ruggling so gallantly against their pig dictator made their message unequivocal and deeply moving.

Mr. White is sparkling and erudite. He demands the attention of the brain, he tickles the fancy; one applauds his brilliant passages, but the heart is not touched. One puts the book down with a sense of frustration that somehow the real implications, political and literary, have been buried under a mass of shining verbiage and are lost.

GRETCEN FINLETTER