Childe Rosie in Italy

A FEW FLOWERS FOR SHINER (372 pp.) --Richard Llewellyn--Macmillan ($3).

"Writing is easy," Welsh Novelist Richard Llewellyn once said. "You just go home and roll up your sleeves and it comes." This method, which might only bring gooseflesh to the ordinary arm, has produced a rash of virulently contagious novels from Llewellyn's. He first broke out in 1940 with How Green Was My Valley, which spread to over 700,000 customers and also flared up in a Hollywood movie. While the fever raged, many readers and a few critics raved that it was a great novel. By 1943, when None But the Lonely Heart appeared, Llewellyn's germ had lost some of its potency with critics, but it still took hard on the reading and moviegoing public.

In A Few Flowers for Shiner the strain is notably weakened: plenty of people will still take Llewellyn, but few are apt to be knocked off their feet. But in Hollywood there may well be an epidemic of ecstasy; a clod could scarcely fail to make an exciting movie out of this book. How can a director miss with a story whose heroine is a truck?

Doves in the Blue. Heroine Rosie, a camouflaged veteran of Alamein and Tobruk, starts south during the battle for Italy, driven by her lord & master. Craftsman Snowy Weeks of the British Eighth Army. His mission: to plant a few flowers on the grave of Shiner, his late truckmate ("Best bloke ever lived, that's all"). Snowy begins the trip with another British soldier, soon picks up an American deserter, then a beautiful Italian princess, later some university professors and their families. Before Rosie reaches her destination, she appears to have effected a major southward shift of the Italian population.

At Shiner's grave occurs a scene to raise a lump in the gullet of the steeliest projection machine. Snowy potters about, planting flowers, leaving a cross and "a glass dome, full of waxen flowers and fruit, with a marble scroll curling through the flowers, and SHINER, in fine long letters cut in it." He takes pictures of the grave, "and a heat of grief bit into him." He looks up, past "doves flying white in the blue," and prays, "Oy, you want to watch out. There ain't all that many of 'em. Please. Look after old Shiner. Hear me?"

While this is going on, Rosie is hijacked by a gang of deserters. The second half of the book is spent largely in playing a rough game of ring-around-Rosie with the hijackers. In the end, Rosie is recovered, Snowy & Co. help bust the deserters' racket, and Snowy and the Italian princess nave made a night of it without class distinctions.

Hands in the Brain. Childe Rosie progresses through Italy to the accompaniment of a mighty lurching, whanging and screeching of the prose mechanism. Anybody with half an ear would call for a garage stop, but Author Llewellyn doggedly goes on piling up mileage. His princess does not get angry: she "looked through scarlet lace." A soldier does not feel regret: "hands were wringing in his brain." Snowy's leg is not suddenly weak: it goes to "laughing gristle." Other Llewellynisms that would flood any ordinary carburetor: "A quick thrust of pity alchemised her feeling to a silt of motherly impatience"; "she rolled over, drinking coffee."

A Few Flowers is dedicated confidently "to ALL WORKMEN." Among literary workmen, to whom writing is not so easy as it is to Author Llewellyn, those words could be sufficient cause for a general blowing of gaskets.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.