Gynecomorphic Goddess

THE DARK ISLAND--V. Sackville-West --Doubleday, Doran ($2.50). Civilized man has seldom made God in the image of a woman; she ranks high but not highest in his holy hierarchy. In practice, however, the private shrines of even heterodox moderns are as apt to contain less as a god. In The Dark Island Author Sackville-West has enshrined such a figure. To masculine readers her goddess will seem a human but incomprehensible creature; women will recognize in her a gynecomorphic ideal.

Shirin (pronounced "Sheereen") was the child of a respectable middle-class home in a London suburb. From her blind and henpecked father she had inherited a secret strain that lifted her beyond her shoddy environment, made her seem like a changeling. On the annual family outing to the seaside, Shirin worshipped from afar the grim islet of Storn, was content never to have a closer view. But when Venn, Storn's spoiled young heir, rowed her over one day and presented her to his grandmother, she fell in love with the place. Years later, after a tragic but successful marriage, she met Venn again. He proposed immediately, and she married him. When he discovered it was the island she loved, not himself, he spent his life plaguing her, trying to change her allegiance. Until his jealousy drove him into murdering her confidante and only friend, Shirin was imperturbable. But then, knowing she had diphtheria and that if Venn caught it he would die, she gave him the Judas-kiss he wanted.

Old ladies who chuckled and wiped their eyes appreciatively over All Passion Spent will rub their spectacles and frown before they get far into The Dark Island. A creative experiment of a more ambitious sort than Novelist Sackville-West has tried hitherto, The Dark Island adds a dubious but disturbing hypothesis in the case of woman as she might be in a world that is.

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