Fiction
By L. A. G. STRONG.
8s. 6d.) Ankle Deep. By Angela Thirkell. (Hamilton. Is. 6d.) Helene. By Vicki Baum. (Mee. 7s. 6d.)
Man's Mortality. By Michael Arlen. (Heinemann. Is. 6d.) IN his new novel Mr. Church sets himself to analyse different kinds of love. His story is not a triangle, but a quadrilateral. The prodigal father is George Cromwell, double-bass player of the Royal Opera, Covent Garden. Easy-going, feckless, and living for his music, he gets little sympathy from his invalid Puritan wife. His son Robert is a disappointment to him, taking after the mother to whom he is almost unnaturally devoted, tending her and nursing her in her illness. Cromwell's easy-going nature enables him to put up with this, till a chance meeting with Mary brings home to him all he is missing in life. The friendship develops slowly into love. Mary visits Mrs. Cromwell, gains her trust, and tends her in her last illness. Robert is too busy with his religious troubles to pay much attention to the newcomer. Cromwell once more takes up his study of the viola, and with three of his colleagues forms a quartette. All animosities buried for the first concert, George's family and Mary agree to come and wish him luck. In an interval of the concert he is infuriated to see the three seats empty. The concert is a success. Returning drunk, he pushes past Robert and Mary and bursts into his wife's room. The shock of what he finds there sends him away. Mary, already sufficiently distraught, finds a new trouble, for Robert, who is unconsciously seeking a substitute for his mother, imagines himself to be in love with her. George allows himself to be packed off to Frankfurt. The other members of the quartette follow him, and, just as all is ready for a series of concerts, he bolts back again to Mary. He is that unhappiest type, the artist to whom his art is not a sufficient refuge from the shocks of life.
Mr. Church knows a great deal about the human heart, particularly in suffering. George's perplexities and anguish, the religious agonies of Robert, the stolid embarrassment of Whitehead the 'cellist, are perfectly understood—as are the passions of the monstrous Myers. These characters, and that of Mrs. Cromwell, Mr. Church has read with mastery. Mary is less complete. To adapt a phrase of Mr. H. G. Wells, Mr. Church knows a hundred things about her, but does not convince us that he really knows her. She is part myth, part angel, victim of a tendency to romanticize his heroines which Mr. Church has not yet overcome. As an organic whole the novel is not altogether satisfactory, for it changes step and loses something of its intensity after George has gone abroad. As a document of imaginative knowledge, informed with compassion and a sense of the ultimate purpose of life, it remains to delight the sensitive reader and make him careless of its imperfections.
Miss Chapman's long story has a quality unusual in a first novel, the quality of structure. Her plot is pure Anthony Hope, with a pinch of La Tosca. The telling, however, is another matter. It gives the dead bones life, and stamps the story with a new and impressive personality. The story is told by an old lady of title in the last warmth of her days. When a girl of nineteen she accepted with her father's approval the post of companion to the young Princess Dagmar of Zarayia, en impoverished and dwindling state near the borders of Russia. Revolution was rising against the royal house. Duke Andrew paid little heed, his lady-killer nephew Philip less. Only the Princess, whose betrothal to Philip had just been announced, felt the essence of the trouble. Sophie, the heroine, loses her heart to Philip. The malcontents become more and more threatening, and one of the book's many surprises is the identity of their leader. More of Miss Chapman's plot I do not propose to give away, except to say that the final renunciation comes, not from Sophie, but from the enfeebled and dying Philip, and that Sophie returns and marries a duke, her senior by many years. This long novel is in many ways a triumph for the beginner. It is too long, and Miss Chapman is as yet uncertain how much she ought to • relate and how much she ought to let us see. She is often clumsy-in the handling of episodes, and fails to surmount the difficulties of first-person narrative. It is in the sustained manner, a mixture of stateliness and simplicity, with which it is told, that the story is remarkable. It is one which I shall have to turn over and savour in my memory before I can pretend to assess it at its proper worth ; but already the characters are becoming larger, and their world clearer, which is an excellent sign. For the present, therefore, I content myself with vigorously recommending She Sate Them Go By to all readers except those in a hurry.
Ankle Deep is alsos a first novel: It would- seem that the' attraction of Threi Houses is still pulling Mrs. Thirkell • strongly, for she has not yet got back to the twentieth century. Her people "address each other in strange outmoded phrases, and the whole story is old-fashioned in thought and feeling. A woman in the thirties, unhappily married, comes home from Canada and falls in love. She decides that the most she may allow her beloved is to hold her hand. Half a case of arrested development, thanks to her upbringing, and half man-shy, thanks to her marriage, she suffers the additional misfortune of falling for a philanderer. The story has charm, and is quietly amusing. It can be safely recommended to elderly readers—and I hasten to add that I do not intend this remark in any disparaging sense.
No one is more adept than the author of Grand Hotel at • solidly documenting a story without making it heavy. The troubles which the patient and hard-working Helene, student of chemistry, meets and overcomes make a story which is every bit as readable as its predecessors, and, with the excep- tion of one incident, as convincing. Helene seems far tco sensible ever to have consented to the suicide pact for com- plicity in which she has to stand her trial. Many difficulties rise in her path. She has a miserable time working for her ' thesis. Her baby is • born in a clinic. All, however, ends happily. As always,. with this author, the writing is vivid and the background has been thoroughly studied.
In Man's Mortality Mr. Arlen has deserted the world in which he is so 'much at home for a new one of his own invention. Welcome as is this evidence of versatility, it cannot be denied that we lose a good deal by the change. By 1987 the pee aeronautica has been established, and LA. and A. (International Aircraft and Airways) controlled all nations. The triumph of internationalism seemed com- plete. However, Mr. Arlen tells us that I.A. and A. was " growing mucky and evil with too much power." Several of his characters agree with him, notably the plutocratic young inventor, David Knox. Knox collects some of the best I.A. men, who willingly desert to him, thinks himself a Messiah, and defllares war upon the League of Nations, I.A. and A., and the whole inhuman spirit of internationalism. He tries to wipe out Trafalgar Square, but, deterred by a gesture of the English Council (instead of defending it they stage a supper party there), he burns Paris instead. The • French naturally resent this, and a World War of hideous - proportions follows. After the inevitable stalemate, the former President of Great Britain dolefully begins to plan a fresh World State. Mr. Arlen has gone all out and funked nothing. He gives us politics, emotions personal and racial, intricacies of fmarkee, warfare, religion, hopes of immortality, invisible rays, and gadgets of a hundred different kinds. It is no small thing to have invented this giant framework and filled it with detail and colour. To make it live, and make its inhabitants convincing, needs more than an inventor ; and this Mr. Arlen, for all his courage and his ingenious attempts to humanize his characters, has not quite succeeded in doing. Here he is at his best : " I.A. Ossorgin II,' Moscow to New York, length 4,000 feet, was the latest and the largest of the luxury liners. She rode like a city of lights, but noiselessly as a cloud. She passed in stately splendour, her speed worn with careless majesty, like the wind's. Some of Europa's ' passengers raised a cheer. The rod monster was at once an awful and a dainty spectacle, both august and graceful. She adorned the serenity of the heavens without tumult, without impertinence. The cadets on Europa ' were silent with pride. They felt that life was glorious, that I.A. was glorious, that they were glorious. Uplifted in heart by the great rushing shadow of
Ossorgin H,' they felt incoherently that something was happening before their very eyes which permitted them to feel unabashed by infinity."
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