12 SEPTEMBER 1946, Page 20

Fiction

Feint variously up-to-standard entertainments trais week, all easy to read if you like, and all quite easy to forget—and one good, sophis- ticated hovel, malicious and sensitive.

Rogue Elephant is the first of Mr. Walter Allen's• works to come my way. Readers of his earlier novels will certainly need no prompt- ing towards this one, but the less lucky should now take note of a novelist of marked distinction and subtlety. In this book he reveals some kinship of spirit with Mr. Joyce Cary, although his crisp economy of manner and his care always to underwrite, his greater detachment, may make his appeal the stronger to some tastes. What he lacks of- the exilierance and inspirational raciness of the other writer he makes up for in graces of form and control. And wit runs gleaming through his -prose ; not in set jokes or sudden high liairs, but as it were he writes in a quiet weather of his own, of low-toned, unremitting irony, Rogue Elephant is, in short, a singularly good piece of comedy. Henry Ashby, who fancies himself as Miching mallecho, " as the test-tube of cholera bacillus that is broken into the water supply, finds it expedient to accept an invitation to visit a country house in Devon. He is a self-conscious, literary bounder, self-made so far as he has got, and still carefully on the make. He is fat and ugly, with green.eyes. He scents a mystery in the oddly assorted, yet quiet, civilised, ordinary household—a skeleton long buried but by some of the family never forgotten. Naturally he cannot rest until he has dug it out, and it is characteristic of Mr. Allen's true sense of balance and of comedy that, the success of Ashby's mean inves- tigation while only of pass.ng vain gratification to him does in--fact do the Forrester family some service, and is in particuar of great psycho- logical value to its youngest member, the mild-girl Audrey, whom it changes into a happy and released grown-up.

It is a quite terrible family secret that is revealed, and, as we pursue it through many subtleties of hint and echo, we engage in a closely dove-tailed domestic comedy; tense and dry, and paced with accurate and unusual character-drawing. Incidental to Henry Ashby's major pursuit in his cruel, conceited dallying with the emotions of the two young girls in the house, the elder and harder of whom he finds himself obliged .to seduce, so as to be rid of her emotional claim. " He was not a seducer. Indeed, the made love only with extreme reluctance and as a last resort. It was emotional domination he enjoyed, not sexual, which too often gave the coup de grace to. the other." With Sheila indeed, and in general in his mischievous inter- lude at Swithins, he builded better than he knew, and if the air is clear in the end and the two girls are sane that is not his fault perhaps, but a fruit of his author's accuracy and proportion.

Silver Fountains by Dorothy Mackinder is a simple story of life in a French village and of the anxious struggles of Monsieur le Cure to instil ;be virtue of Christian charity, to protect sinners or sus- pected sinners from the malignancy of their neighbouks, and to save the malignant from themselves. The setting is attractive. Miss Mackinder knows the world of which she writes, and she presents it unaffectedly and with good sense. - The Jug is a long family saga, beginning with the funeral of the Duke of Wellington and ending some -time during the recent war. Its chief character, Helen Symington, is nineteen when the story starts. She is a high'1y respectable girl, and when she is twenty, just before she marries, she commits a shockingly cruel and selfishly motived murder. She lives to be a greai-grandmother, a peeress, a leader of society and a beloved old beauty and autocrat. One prim reader waited in patient hope for Nemesis to catch up with her, and was out of sympathy with her and her influence from beginning to end of the book. But the old dear got away with everyfaing and

went belatedly to an honoured grave. Shocking, I call it. •

The TroUble with Yesterday and- Thanks God ! Take It From Here are two short, easily written and easily read entertainments. The latter is a snappy, gay record, mostly done in very fast, amusing conversation, of an adventure between two American marines and a young best-selling woman-writer. The three meet on an express train bound from New York to Hollywood, and there is no need to be precise about the misunderstandings, light emotions and deep drinkings that carry them along—but the whole thing is good fun, very quick and as easy as winking. Mr. Levinson's autobiographical sketch—he is a London taxi-driver of Russian-Jewish origin whose childhoOd in.rhe East End and in an orphanage was very poor and hard—is in manner, a shade too whimsical and cocksure to be entirely pleasing, but he is convincing and realistic about his youth and gives a true and often toucthing picture of hard times and early hopes and