The semi-autobiographical narration, employed for the first time in [The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea], enabled Stow to unify and to harmonize the diverse elements which conflicted with one another in his earlier works. In A Haunted Land and The Bystander there is the uneasy spectacle of Jacobean melodrama somewhat improbably enacted against a marvellously vivid background of West Australian landscape. To the Islands and Tourmaline are altogether more impressive novels, but in both there is at least a partial failure to unite the naturalistic and symbolic levels on which the stories operate. The semiautobiographical method is able to resolve these conflicts in The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea. It provides the author with a ready-made narrative structure which is yet loose enough to accommodate his brooding recollections and his superb lyrical descriptions which have been highly, and justly, praised from the beginning. It lends authenticity to the characters, while...