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BOOK REVIEWS 249 helpful to have a list of such as are extant and their whereabouts; but this is outside Mr. Mikhail's range in this book since he is not concerned with individual plays. He has, however, overlooked collections of letters pertinent to his field, and these, in my view, should have been considered too valuable to leave out. It is helpful to have the convenient list of criticism Mr. Mikhail provides here, but in view of the fact that the book costs $4.95 and has a modest number of entries, one wishes that critical and descriptive remarks had been added where necessary to items in the last three sections of the bibliography. This is particularly important where such a general field is surveyed. We have no clue to the particular authors, works or issues discussed in items which sport such vague, coverall titles as "Drama in Belfast" or "Literature of Ireland Today." A little more drudgery would have made the bibliography vastly more informative, and the drudgery rather more than harmless. ANDREW PARKIN University of British Columbia THE PLAYS OF HAROLD PINTER: AN ASSESSMENT, by Simon Trussler. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1973. 222 pp. £2.50. Up to the present day, more than twenty studies have been devoted to the plays of Harold Pinter, and together with the numberless essays and articles on particular plays as well as special problems, they constitute a bulk of criticism more voluminous than that on any of his contemporaries. Accordingly, yet another book on Pinter's plays is justifiable only if its author has something fundamentally new to say and does not add another heap of "rubbish" (Mr. Trussler's own term) to the dump of Pinter-criticism. Trussler's book fails in this aim. What he has to say about the plays has been stated many times before. Written in the fashion of what-the-plays-are-about, the study, for example, advances from the fact that Riley, in The Room, is a Negro, blind, rejected, abused by Rose Hudd, and presumably killed by Bert Hudd, and goes on to suggest that the play is about "racialism, anti-semitism" (p. 35). This interpretation has by now become a cliche in Pinter-criticism (cf. Hollis, p. 27; Esslin; The Peopled Wound, p. 68), as has the comment on the "quasi-incestuous nature of the landlady-lodger relationship" (p. 39) in The Birthday Party. The point about the Oedipal nature of the conflict in the same play has been pressed home by Mr. Esslin to such an extent that there is no need for Mr. Trussler to re-state it. Commentary on Davies' evasiveness and the cause for his behaviour, on Aston's frame of mind, on the possibility of a conspiracy between Mick and Aston against the tramp, and finally on the characters' aspiring to a mythic universalised status is superfluous as, sooner or later, one comes upon those views in every study of The Caretaker. One could easily go on picking out cliches of Pinter criticism, but these examples will suffice. Apart from one factual error - it is, of course, not Davies who cannot 250 BOOK REVIEWS drink Guinness from a thick mug (p. 84) but Aston - Mr. Trussler's grouping together of the plays into five stages in the development of Pinter's work to date is perhaps the most arbitrary point of the book. He states in the introduction that he has based his grouping above all on the formal devices and dramatic methods employed in the plays. But then one is hard put to see what, for example, Tea Party and The Basement, with their typically swift shifts of scene as T.V. plays, have got in common with the more static Landscape, Silence, and Old Times; or where the similarities lie between The Caretaker, Night School, and The Dwarfs. Measuring the groups by thematic aspects provides similar problems. It is easier and more obvious to find thematic affinities between A Slight Ache and the first three Pinter plays than betw~en this play and A Night Out. One can even trace a direct parallel between A Slight Ache and Landscape, a fact which has not been...

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