Fiction
HERE, by two writers who really know their job, are a couple of deft and well-made novels which will probably give pleasure and relaxation of mind to thousands of readers. Each might have been the better for being somewhat shorter—I think the theme is over- demonstrated in both—but they are written with freshness, energy and a controlled sense of fun—Mx. Davies's book with indeed rather more than a sense of fun—which keeps the reader enter- tained and curious throughout.
The Welsh book I found very attractive and easy to read ; but if you do not care much for Wales or for books about Wales, avoid The Black Venus, because it is Welsh of the Welsh, and gives to every Anglo-Saxon person or reference which crosses its pages a qpality of outright foreignness. The entire story is set in and around a village called Ayron, and—save for the short epilogue section—in the reign of Edward VII. It opens in the vestry of the local chapel, where the Elders and important men are holding an inquiry into the conduct of a spirited girl called Olwen Powell. This girl, only child of a very rich farmer, is a beauty, an heiress and a great matrimonial prize ; but she is accused, mainly by the matrons of the parish, who have daughters of their own to marry off, of taking excessive and improper advantage of an old local custom known as " courting in bed." This custom, which per- mitted a man to climb in at his girl's window and get to know her under a roof instead of in damp woods and hedgerows, had its own subtle code of honour and obligation, and in the opinion of most of the wiseheads at Olwen's trial, led to less mischief and to happier marriages than did more usual rural wooings. But the tradition implied that a decent girl was courted once, or at most twice, before she made her choice and married her man ; whereas
Olwen Powell admitted at her trial that she had already allowed seven men to climb through her lattice, yet could not decide on any of them. Now, as she was extremely eligible, this kept all the young men unsettled in their minds, and made it hard for other girls to get husbands. And the neighbourhood was angry with her, and impatient of her resentment of the low status of women ani her desire to educate men into a civilised attitude towards them. But in the vestry she is able to convince the Elders that she is still a virgin, abides sternly by the unwritten law of the bolster down the centre of the bed,. and will stay a spinster until or unless she can find a man whose mind and manners satisfy her. The Elders give their blessing to her-views, and she goes on with her nocturnal tests of suitors.
But there still are a great many of these—they grow indeed shade monotonous, her exasperated debates with young men over wine and cakes and under her embroidered bed-canopy. And the old men may applaud her, but the matrons are still furious, and so are the Church section, the Anglo-Saxons, who hold the local custom in horror. At last, however, the tale draws to its final issue, between a beautiful, half-mad poacher and a fat, intelligent student for the ministry. The denouement is original and satisfactory. But the book's distinction lies in its relation of a fabulous, innocent fa- tale, dewy and simple, to the tough realism and hardness of country life ; all the characters have life and oddity, there is much flying, bitter wit in the dialogue, and a vivid sense of place, and of race. The Welsh idiom is used in what seems to be literal translation throughout, and though some may find that the perpetual inver- sions of phrase grow singsong and monotonous, on the whole I think the turn of the language will be felt as a pleasing, unaffected novelty. Anyway, it fell freshly and gratefully on the ears of this reader.
Miss Gibbons takes us back to Metroland—Hertfordshire. She offers nothing that we do not all know of wartime life in that wide, vague area which we must still for convenience call the middle- class—except her very novel and cute central character, a little refugee girl from Bairamia (a small Balkan country overrun by Italy in 1938). Vartouhi, this little girl, is such that half the time, as we giggle at her, we wish she had broken in on our own war-and- domestic monotony of these years, and half the time, like the people she does get mixed up with, we wish the endearing little minx in Jericho. But in the pages of a book anyhow she is good fun, and pretty to watch. " Vary pratty," as she says herseif so often. No need to sketch the quite complicated plot here—except to say that Vartouhi dominates it, and is cunningly used so that her barbaric commonsense shows up in amusing and pathetic lights the muddles and mysteries of English family and social life. Miss Gibbons's distinguishing quality, nowadays, as a humorist, is that she keeps one chuckling rather than on the alert for sudden laughs ; she catches a gleam of absurdity everywhere, without prejudice, but she is benevolent and indeed creeps so gently about her fun-business, so mousily, that you have to keep a sharp look-out or you may miss the best of it. Some parts of this book, however, are not as coolly projected as to accord perfectly with the whole ; the Richard and Alicia idyll is too rosily viewed for commonsense, and Betty, Richard's mother, is a shade dull in her suitable sweetness. But the poor, blundering bachelor himself, his bullying sisters, his nice old cousin—all these run dead true to form ; and Vartouhi is more than a match for the lot of them, and carries off a well-earned triumph. " Is a varry good thing, too also."
KATE O'BRIEN.
Previous page
