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BELL CALL by Sylvia Ashton-Warner. 317 pages. Simon & Schuster...
...Glorious Spoilt Children. This third novel by Sylvia Ashton-Warner, the greatly gifted New Zealand teacher and writer, displays all the qualities of style, feeling and subject matter that made her earlier books (Spinster, Incense to Idols, and the autobiographical Teacher) unforgettable. Except that this time she has pushed these qualities to an unbearable extreme, to create what is finally a fascinating and disturbing book, but a failure...
Though the novel is told mostly from the viewpoint of a middle-aged widower (and sometimes, coyly, by his wife's ghost), the central figure of Bell Call is Tarl, who is obsessed by her belief in total freedom for herself and her four children. Author Ashton-Warner has written urgently before this about the necessity of freedom in the education of young minds. "How glorious," she wrote in Teacher, "are the dirty spoilt children, never held up with fear!" But Tarl carries the idea beyond conviction to monomaniacal compulsion. "Her voice is soft with faith. Tomorrow...
Fighting such rebellious material, Author Ashton-Warner's celebrated style -a vibrantly sentient torrent of present-tense sentences and fragments-shows signs of becoming an intrusive mannerism. Bell Call has an even worse flaw...
...Ashton-Warner Teacher...