Word: monsarrat
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Story of Esther Costello (Romulus; Columbia) examines the phony charity racket. Following the lead of Nicholas Monsarrat's novel, on which it is based, the picture not only condemns the conscious criminals but also takes a number of lusty sideswipes at their unconscious accomplices: public sentimentality and crassness, official indifference, and the self-righteous complaisance of religious groups...
There are things more cruel than the sea, British Novelist Nicholas Monsarrat has decided. Having established his rank as a topnotch fiction craftsman in The Cruel Sea (1951), Monsarrat has now made a troubled but effective literary landfall. His second big novel tells of a bloody skirmish in a sector of the no man's land that stretches between white and black along the length of Africa...
...Deal. The Maulas who inhabit Monsarrat's island are a grave, long-winded, humorless people, including urbanized zoot-suiters down at the port and taboo-ridden jungle men up north. The older Maulas are courteous and profoundly conservative-content with the hope that their chief will one day lead them to a seat in the commodious kraal of the British Commonwealth. The chief is 22-year-old Dinamaula; seven years of English schools, an Oxford law degree and the flattering attention of progressive girls...
...young men hate each other, but before they land at London in a blaze of press notoriety, there is something of friendship between the two. The young Briton confides that he is about to be married. "A white girl?" cracks Dinamaula. Both laugh, and in their laughter Author Monsarrat hears hope for the future...
...Monsarrat's narrative is as taut as a bush tent in the rainy season. As for his conclusions, he will not please those with spurs to polish or assagais to grind. Blame, he says, lies on both sides of the color bar. Monsarrat has settled for the honest and general indignation of the 'philosophical dictum that a man born into the world with a sense of smell has a duty to cry "stinking fish...