BOOKS Ouistanding new novel woven around lives of Native Indians OME Canadian novelists seem to find their native scene too drab a setting for their work and choose instead some alien back- ground where, no matter how vividly they present them, the problems they probe are not those of their own people. Some, with an eye to the larger audience abroad, so distort the Canadian seene that they achieve “no more resemblance to reality than the romantic fallacies they perpetuate. And others so pre- occupy themselves with infinite analysis of the shallow characters they place in selected ‘settings that they never touch the broad canvas of real life which alone can give immortals to our liter- ature. Hubert Evans in his new novel, Mist on the River, does none of these things. His setting is our own Skeena River country which he knows and loves no less than the people of whom he writes. His char- acters are the Native Indians who live along the river and go to the Coast in summer to fish and work in the canneries. Out of their apparently simple but profoundly troubled lives he has created one of the finest Canadian novels to appear in this or any other de- cade. The people of Mist on the River come to life from the first page because Evans has drawn them as they are with rare sensitivity and insight. His sympathy, temp- ered by his understanding of the. conflict between their traditional way of life and the life the white man has foreéd upon them, leads him neither to idealize nor to depreciate them. This conflict, the impelling force of the Native Indians’ own existence, is the theme of his novel. 53 es oe June Pitts, who is determined to escape the constricting life of the village on the reservation and find herself a place as the equal of white girls in the city, has a thousand prototypes in real life. So unhappily, has Dot, the girl of June’s crest, who yearns, for the pleasures of the city and takes them in the only easy way ® man to another. open to her, passing from one Dot’s counter- parts in life walk the streets of Prince Rupert — and Vancouver — as she does. June finds an opening which in life is rare indeed. For many more Indian girls the road to the city ends as it does for Dot, in a shabby room on a shabby street. Cy Pitts, June’s brother, also wants to go to the city. But in him the conflict between the lure of the city and the pull of the village is intensified by his love for Miriam. And Miriam has been reared in the old ways by her stern, uncompromising grand- father, Old Paul, the village chief, whose hatred of the evils brought upon his people by the white man’s civilization leads him to cling to the old ways as his only despairing defense. Through Dot, through little Stevie, Dot’s son, who might have lived had Cy been able to resolve his problems as decisively as his sister, Evans expresses the trage- dies engendered by this conflict. ‘Cy, torn between his respect for the traditional ways bred in him by Melissa, his mother, :and Matt, little Stevie’s grandfather, did not insist that little Stevie be sent to the sanatorium at Miller Bay as the white doctor wanted. He deferred to Melissa and Matt, who knew only that those who went to Miller Bay came home, as Elora did, to die. But the roots of the evil lie deeper. Cy voices them from the park bench in Prince Rupert — and you know that his reproach- ful words are Evans’ own: “Oh, you white race! What have you to do with us and what have we to do with you? ... “Our strongest you accept and our weak ones you belittle. You are so positive you are right and we are wrong. You teach us your ways, but you teach us also to scorn our past which alone can lift our heads and keep us whole. We imitate and resist you, depend on you and suspect you. You shield us, like chil- dren, but deal with us as lesser men you cannot trust. Yoa are the builders and the breakers down. You think you under- Ve AS Oy SL Dur stand us, but you will never know what it is to be an Indian in our land which you have taken for your own.” Pek He ae Mist on the River is an angry novel. It is a ery against the government’s false paternalism ‘which neither fosters in the Na- tive Indians’ pride in their own culture nor creates the material conditions essential to their tak- ing their place as full citizens in the future. It is a protest against racial prejudice which tardily, and then only partially, accords Indians the franchise, but re- stricts all except the most detez- mined of them to work in certaia occupations, just as there arc hotels and restaurants where they are not accepted. The weakness of the novel is that it exposes the evils but indi- cates no real solution. ’ It closes on a note of hope but‘the hope is given no tangible form. The weakness arises from the -fact that Evans’ forcefully paint- ed, sensitive canvas is lacking in certain essential detail. In life, the Native Indian peo- ple have their organization, the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia. They have their close ties with the United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union,: with whom they have a common ~ legacy of struggle. And Evans, as a former fisherman and a mem- ber of a fishermen’s union, knows something of this struggle from his own experience. Yet nowhere in the novel is the conclusion gf organization and struggle drawn. The life of the Native Indians at the canrery is drawn from Evans’ own ex- perience but it does not embrace the organization which is a part of that life. We are given a picture of Caleb, the Indian who is the go- between in all dealings between the company and the Indians. But, although there is a sugges- tion that Caleb uses his power. and prestige among the Indians to the company’s advantage, he is largely a sympathetic figure. There is no counterpart in Evans’ novel of those other Na- . tive Indian leaders’ who abuse their power to the detriment of © their people and, because per- petuation of their power depends upon it, strive to keep their peo- ple isolated from the progreszive ‘white organizations without whose help the Native Indian people can never achieve their full rights. Mist on the River would have been a stronger novel had it been drawn in this fuller perspettive. It remains nonetheless, one of the finest Canadian novels yet to ap- pear and a major contribution to our literature. .As such, it should be read by every reader of this paper (it is obtainable here at the People’s Cooperative Bookstore, 337 West Pender Street, price $3.50). Its wide circulation will be not only deserved recognition of Canadian talent but the assurance to Cana- dian publishers that the publica- tion of such novels is justified by their reception, : —HAL GRIFFIN. This is a scene from the new Soviet film, Maxima, which will be shown in Toronto this month and tour western cities in December. ~ Based on an authentic historical episode; the picture tells the story of a Negro boy and the Russian sailors who rescued him from Am- erican slave traders. Every sin but never virtue in the Egyptian Hiss: wide and vulgar in a manner that CinemaScope is likely to make all too familiar, The Egyptian is typical of its kind. Almost every twist of sin, sex violence and religion which has ever embellished a Hollywood epic finds a place here. The re- sult is two hours 19 minutes of almost stupefying boredom, re- lieved here and there by the sight of old friends battling gamely against their scripts. The Egyptian of the title, play- ed by Edmund Purdom after Mar- ion Brando had read the script and fled, is a foundling of royal birth in ancient Egypt who be- comes’ a physician, saves the Pharoah’s life, ruins himself for the sake of a Babylonian prosti- tute, regains his fortune. abroad, returns to warn Egypt that iron has been invented by her enemies and stays to take part in a palace plot to poison the Pharoah—who manages to invent something lke Christianity before he dies at about 1300 B.C. Somewhere in the course of these adventures, so discreetly that I hardly noticed it, he con- trives to become the father of a boy by an adoring tavern-maid. Purdom, a good-looking young English actor, manages to suggest that he could probably show us some acting if the script called for it. Victor Mature finds the transi- tion from ancient Roman slave to still more ancient Egyptian sol- dier just a matter of changing his . clothes. Michael Wilding, as the Phar- oah, is supposed to be an epilep- tic religious maniac. He struck me as being merely horribly em- barrassed. Only Peter Ustinov, as always, succeeds in imposing his person’ ality through the lush setting, absurd goings-on and poor script. His touches of humor make his all-too-rare appearances refresi- ing in a notably owlish picture. be xt x The new British picture, Father Brown, Detective, enhances the reputation of Alec Guinness, who plays the priestly amateur detec- tive, but not that of G. K. Ches terton, who created the character. For Guinness, practically sin- gle-handed, works hard to make the good father a human being of some depth and subtlety instead of a lay figure on which to hané some rather dated Chestertoniat quips and a muddled story for which Chesterton cannot . be blamed. Surprisingly often he succeeds; but the script, which retains much of the authentic Chesterton man- ner, is against him. © This story of a battle of wits between a master thief (a duke of course). who steals rare treas- ures, and the poor Catholic parish priest (aided by a titled widow parishioner of course) who tracks him down and redeems his sou is much too anaemic. to survive the rigors of a full-length feature- Some of the quips, howevel, get across, and Guinness makes the most of them. Joan Green- wood, as the widow, and Peter Finch, as the master-thief, ¢22 make nothing of their parts, be cause there is nothing to make of them. . On this showing Chesterton must be written off. as a source of film material. —THOMAS SPENCER: PACIFIC TRIBUNE — NOVEMBER 12, 1954 — PAGE 8