[In this review of The Burnt Ones, the critic provides a negative assessment of the short fiction collection.]

In Mr. White's more recent novels a centrifugal tendency has been increasingly apparent: things do not fall apart—Mr. White has too much control to permit that—but they do tug apart. In Voss the centre holds only by a dream communion between Voss and Laura Trevelyan which intensifies and tightens as the physical distance between them increases. In Riders in the Chariot even Mr. White's technical ingenuity is hard put to it to keep the reins of his quadriga; and the real unity of the novel depends less on its structure than on the burning vision which informs it. Now, in this collection of stories, sparks from his anvil rather than chips from the axe which shaped that holy rood, the most unified of his novels, The Tree of Man, he seems to have accepted a further fragmentation.

If a reviewer confesses to a gratitude tempered by disappointment for The Burnt Ones, this cannot be attributed to any failure in his technique. The skill is as pervasive as ever and the flaws too minor. For there are flaws: certain characteristic devices seem to recur because they have become a mannerism rather than because they have a specific function. This is particularly true of his elliptical trick of beginning a sentence with a conjunction and dropping the subject pronoun:

Nora could have been beautiful, Eileen thought. And suddenly felt old, she who had stripped once or twice at amusing parties.

And there are times when he allows the device to intrude into dialogue and become dramatically damaging: we realize it is Mr. White writing, not the character speaking.

Of the eleven stories four are set in Greece, seven in Australia. They are not separately grouped and it is difficult to penetrate the significance of the actual arrangement, though Mr. White does nothing without a reason. And his reasons for taking modern Greece as his second milieu can only be guessed at. Merely because he has lived and felt and worked there? Because of the challenge—successfully accepted—in the difficulty of being inward with people of an alien race? Because he sees something common, besides humanity, to the inhabitants of these two sun-scorched countries? Or for the pleasure he takes in the contrast between an ancient culture and the one, brash and jejune, which bred and angers his own fastidious sensibility?

The title at least, The Burnt Ones, belongs to the whole book and must imply that the chief characters, Greek or Australian, are alike unfortunates, burnt by life, or seared by experience. Yet the tragedy which such a title seems to bespeak is seldom matched by the characters themselves. Anthea Scudamore of “Dead Roses”, for example, is far below the tragic scale: she is not burnt by life; she fails to live it. Tragedy is missing also from “Willy-Wagtails by Moonlight”. This story savagely develops the theme which Katherine Mansfield handled so beautifully in “Bliss”. But in her denouement we feel with the heroine. In Mr. White's we grant the situation established but no character in the story alleviates our sense of being uncomfortably present at a squalid mess created by commonplace people.

In fact, as one reads story after story, admiring the accuracy of Mr. White's observation, his economy, his ear for dialogue, his resource of language and resourcefulness of technique, his tight-lipped comedy, one begins to feel that the common misfortune of these unfortunates is that they have been seen by Mr. White and it is his vision which has burnt them. There remains the unsatisfying sense that the short story has not only caged the eagle and confined his epic scope (this was inevitable) but has contracted the range of his sympathy. His ear receives and records, nothing escapes his eye, but his heart rejects. One misses the major characters who would give scale to the weaker brethren of Smyrna or Sarsaparilla: the mystics, the visionaries, the artists and the mad, who in the major novels incurred his love.

A scale of values is implied, of course. We know that these mean, or at most minor, people are being chastised for their failures in imagination, generosity, magnanimity, love, and in the grander qualities for which Mr. White conveys by implication a proper and passionate regard. But that regard is expressed too often by negation, left to be inferred from the sardonic and severe portrayal of those who fall short and are ignoble. It is too seldom embodied, incarnate and breathing, in the characters themselves. Love of life is not incompatible with a disgust for the way we live. But too much disgust puts us out of love with the art that shows it, if not with life. Mr. White's admirers are left in trepidation. Will burning indignation dominate and dehydrate his talent, and the moral satirist take over from the universal novelist? We think of Tolstoy and the way that led from Anna Karenina to The Kreutzer Sonata. At least if he is heading for Jerusalem, however, it is no rough beast we need fear.