\s mYevtew ELECTRONIC ADDITION - University of British Columbia

OPINIONS AND NOTESThe books of cartoons by two of the mostsuccessful of current Canadian cartoonists —Jim Unger and Lynn Johnston (both publishedby Andrews & McNeel) —are marvellousprecisely because they manage so shrewdlyto marry visual nuance with cultural observation.Unger's Herman, you were a muchstronger man on our FIRST honeymoon ismore astringent than Johnston's It Must BeNice to Be Little. Unger relies on the exaggerationand bureaucratic denseness, Johnston onthe normative nature of domestic chaos; betweenthem they lay open a good many of thefoibles of contemporary life. Unger portrays aman with a bow tie on his head, looking likerabbit ears; an Official Person says to him,"We've had to remove your brain for a coupleof days, so just try to relax." Art criticismcomes in for its own, too. An Unger characterlooks at a Roman bust and says, "Was he asshort as that in real life?" Johnston's characteris less phlegmatic, but no more in control: "Idon't care what you saw at the art gallery," shesays, " — from now on you make your snowmenwith their clothes on." I also like TrevorHutching's cartoons in Funny Things, Computers(Lorimer, $6.95) : Merlin the magiciandiscovered using a home computer, a dogbarking at electronic mail. But the line betweenfunny and schlock is sometimes toothin, and Hugh Brewster and John Forbes'The Complete Hoser's Handbook (Prentice-Hall, $8.95) crosses it: "The Shrine Monumentto Maria Chapdestick in Kakatoque,Quebec" is a Nudge joke that never got outof the "Wouldn't it be funny if?" stage . . . theanswer is no.W.N.REPRINT SEASON is recurrently upon us:everything from Terry Sturm's admirablyedited Portable Christopher Brennan (Univ.of Queensland, $25.00; pa. $14.95)an dAndré Siegfried's Democracy in New Zealand(Victoria Univ. Press, $I6.5ONZ, with notesby David Hamer) to Joy Cowley's strikingnovel The Growing Season (Oxford, $10.95)and Bill Scott's The Penguin Book of AustralianHumorous Verse ($9.95). Scott assemblesa motley stew of bush songs and contemporaryparodies — "The Ballad of Bloodthirsty Bessie"is here, along with a version of Horace onBondi Beach, C. J. Dennis's "The Australbloodyaise,"and a Bruce Dawe Beatitude thatopens "Blessed are the files marked ACTION inthe INWARD tray. ..." Sturm delves bravelyinto the work of a poet more widely admiredin Australia than outside it, but manages togive Brennan a more interesting face thanusual by selecting instructive passages from hisletters and reviews to accompany the lines ofverse. Siegfried, the French political analystwho also visited Canada at the turn of thecentury, turns a hopeful but shrewd eye onsocial structure and social behaviour in theBritish Dominions, and his comments are stillrelevant today.Reprints, selections, autobiographies, obituaries: so often the eye is cast back over timeto retrieve person and history, and to sustainthe person and the present. M. H. Holcroft'sThe Way of a Writer (Cape Catley, $19.95)is a rather woodenly told set of personal recollections{then, then: meetings and partings);Graham Greene's Getting to Know the General(Lester & Orpen Dennys, $16.95), bycontrast, lives up to its subtitle ("The Storyof an Involvement"). It is a memoir of apolitical and personal drama, a dramatic accountof Greene's encounter with Panama inthe 1970's and with its leader, Omar TorrijosHerrera; it is at once a tribute to a friendshipand a testament to the intricacies of powerand connection in Central America.Vincent O'Sullivan's play Shuriken (VictoriaUniv. Press, $7.50) looks back at WorldWar II, and at the Japanese military code, inorder to examine the issue of culture conflict,to consider how public expectations as well asovert structures influence misunderstanding.Lauris Edmond's Selected Poems (Oxford,$14.95) traces the poet's "exact and judiciousmagic" of imaginative creation; most characteristically,Edmonds responds in tranquilityto observed scene, remembered event. TheRemembering of the Elements (Wai-te-Ata,$6.75) is more personal still — the last poemsof the late Judith Lonie, the whole collectionstruggles with images of framing (being "putin the picture") and of disintegration; amongthem is a chilling four-line verse called"Loneliness" : "Mother's looking pale andthin : / God put baby brother in the rubbishtin. / Daddy says nothing but his eyes aregrim / / I'm the only one didn't want him."Even in memory there is separation.Many works of biography and criticism areacts of memory, too, from Kristin Brady'scompetent attempt to come to terms with TheShort Stories of Thomas Hardy (Macmillan,$20.85), resurrecting a world-view from thepages of Hardy's Tales, to Bill Pearson'sMacmillan-Brown Lectures, Rifled Sanctuaries(Univ. of Auckland, $11.45), a splendid accountof early Western literary responses tothe Pacific Islands: Pearson lays bare the204