Chinaberry Pie

• Modern Baptists by James Wilcox
  Secker, 239 pp, £7.95, January 1984, ISBN 0 436 57098 X
• Speranza by Sven Delblanc, translated by Paul Britten Austin
  Secker, 153 pp, £7.95, February 1984, ISBN 0 436 12680 X
• High Spirits by Robertson Davies
  Penguin, 198 pp, £2.50, January 1984, ISBN 0 14 006505 9
• Hanabeke by Dudley St John Magnus
  Angus and Robertson, 133 pp, £6.95, January 1984, ISBN 0 207 14565 2
• Train to Hell by Alexei Sayle
  Methuen, 152 pp, £7.95, February 1984, ISBN 0 413 52460 4
• The English Way of Doing Things by William Donaldson
  Weidenfeld, 229 pp, £7.95, January 1984, ISBN 0 297 78345 9

James Wilcox’s charming comedy is set in rural Louisiana, among people who read the Bible in an engagingly amateurish way, associating religion with the conventions about drinking and dancing enforced by their anxious parents, and sometimes tempted to ‘modernise’ their lives, while still seeking God’s guidance. These lively middle-aged innocents of the 1980s seem like naughty English choirboys and girls of the 1940s. Can Modern Baptists be true to life? We may hope so.