Genuine Magic

GREENSTONE by Sylvia Ashton-Warner. 217 pages. Simon & Schuster. $4.50.

Nothing is more boring and embarrassing than an amateur conjurer. Magic must be perfect; real rabbits must emerge from the trick hat. The reader, noting that Sylvia Ashton-Warner's novel is dedicated to a river (New Zealand's Whanganui), that among the chief characters are 13 darling children, most of them under one tin roof, and that various Maori gods and spirits are freely invoked, may suspect that he is being conjured into accepting a crock of anthropological whimsy. Not so; the magic here is real.

Greenstone is a story of two races--the Polynesian Maori, who came to New Zealand from their legendary oceanic island homeland in the 14th century, and the Scotch-English, who arrived in the 19th with the usual guns, Bibles and technological superiority. This, however, is no sad, simple story of savage innocence overwhelmed by progress. Miss Ashton-Warner grinds no stone axes against the bad white man. She does something a great deal more complicated and valuable; she sets in motion a sort of dance of language and imagery in which the childhood of the sophisticated race meets the stubborn memories of the aborigines in a celebration of life.

Door to Childhood. The plot serves as staff lines for the musical notes.

Richmond D. Considine, an ex-writer, "once a celebrity in the outside world where celebrity seems to matter," is crippled by arthritis and presides over his family in a remote forest clearing on the Whanganui River in the North Island of New Zealand. His wife, mother of all but one of the children, buys groceries by teaching school. Seasons pass; in the end the family is "rescued" from rural misery and taken downriver to a big house in town. Only Huia, a half-Maori girl sired by one of Considine's sons, remains behind to live as a Polynesian princess with her people across the river.

The book is written in the present tense, an irritating literary affectation as a rule. Here the device becomes a knob opening a door to the trancelike continuum of childhood--particularly that of the magic child Huia, with her ancestral talisman, a carved greenstone, and the grace of an imagination that has been touched by the best in two worlds. Sylvia Ashton-Warner does other things easily that most current writers would not attempt to contrive. Huia watches a fight between a brown-skin Maori and a white boy. They are not fighting for status, or out of racial bitterness. The boys are fighting over something real--her, a princess.

Across Creation. Huia is not crudely awakened to sex. A flower passes under her nose, and "a child is clutched by primeval rapture to which she knows but one answer: turning to a shaggy tree trunk she embraces it passionately. She presses her slight person against its bulk and kisses it with ardor until, flung so carelessly on the storm of instinct, she swings into fantastic dancing, calling to the others, 'The marriage ceremonial, the marriage ceremonial. See me dance at my marriage ceremonial.' Never up, down or across creation could there be a lovelier sight." An unobtrusive miracle is accomplished; the ceremony of innocence is not drowned.

The New Zealand author, a teacher whose theories in practice (TIME, Sept. 6, 1963) have made her a legend in education, does not have a flashy literary genius. But she possesses talent enough to sustain genius of another order--the power to see into a child's mind and find there the river of time, in which, as they say in the clearing, only the "sillies" get drowned.

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