New Novels
My Time, My Life. By George Camden. (Dent. 8s. 6d.) THERE is no relief greater than waking from a nightmare ; no horror to be compared with the nightmare from which there is no escape. The nightmare that becomes the only reality is the ultimate dread, far less endurable than any horror of true reality. The Image of a Drawn Sword tells of the enduring nightmare ; Week-End at Zuydcoote of horrible reality. The nightmare in the former is the hero's conscription into a strange military unit, formed for an unknown yet terrifying purpose, and admitting of no escape. The reality of the latter is the Dunkirk evacuation as lived by a group of French soldiers for whom no evacuation has been arranged. The atrocious happenings in this book are dispassionately more horrible than anything in The Image of a Drawn Sword ; yet because Week- End at Zuydcoote tells of something we have all, alas! accepted as real life, it is Jocelyn Brooke's story that leaves one in the grip of obscure terror.
None the less, it would seem that the assurance of reality as compared with nightmare is becoming blurred today. Recently many books and even more unaccepted manuscripts have told of nightmares that have oddly the same theme—the group of young men, conscripted for an obscure and terrible purpose, cut off from all life that includes women and children and home, finding an immediate compensation in a developing sense of comradeship and, overhanging all, the certainty of ultimate disaster. It is frightening to try to analyse the subconscious social stresses that make this theme so recurrent among young writers today.
There is a difficulty in criticising such books by the accepted canons of fiction-writing. It is possible to say that Jocelyn Brooke's story is well-written in clear descriptive prose, that he admirably conveys the fog of non-comprehension that prevents his hero's perfect communication' with the unreal world, and that the putre- faction and decay of the real world left behind is compelling and impressive. But with verisimilitude no criterion, how is it possible to criticise the symbolism of a nightmare ? Why must Reynard enter it through a dug-out, why is disobedience punished with whippings lashed to a triangle, why does smoking become distasteful to him ? There can be no universally accepted significance in the symbolism of one man's nightmare. Certainly the book is queerly and horribly frightening, but if such novels are to become the rule, we must revise our beliefs about the function of the novel.
A strange feature of The Image of a Drawn Sword is that it ends with a triumph—"-Reynard paused a moment longer, filled suddenly with a serene happiness such as he had never known before ; his will unflinching, strong in his purpose: aware that past and future were fused at last in the living moment." In contrast, the last sentence of Week-End at Zuydcoote is: "Maillat did not even know that he was dying." Maillat had, in the inferno of his week- end, lived kindly and morally and honestly. In most good books today all kind, moral, honest characters are defeated or killed in the end. Of the friends who made up Maillat's small group, it was inevitable, by contemporary rules, that the cheerful, friendly Alexandre should be blown up by a shell, and that Dhery, making his collaborationist black-market arrangements, should survive. In this book there is no victory for the admirable virtues. Its sense of defeat is perhaps best symbolised by the British officer at the cross-roads chanting, " English to the right! French to the left! The English will embark: the French will not. Even the choice of freedom or capture is an arbitrary nightmare choice. The book is superbly written and most excellently translated. Horrible as is its story, it compels the reader, comparing it with the first book, to recall Mr. Churchill's conclusion to his first volume of war-memoirs that " reality is better than dreams." - After these two, The Frontier seems rather a pathetic book. It is a well-told story of a village that, by a slip of a pen at the 1919 Peace Conference, found itself with a frontier down the middle of its street. Stresses, hatreds, nationalisms develop, but finally, in that most touching of all contemporary wishful thinking, " The People " arise and rectify the stupidity of "Ther Politicians." I can't, in fact, remember any case where "Ther People " have successfully done any such thing, but one can't help agreeing that it would be nice if they did. Friendly and sensible action by " The People " is probably the Cinderella wish-theme of today, and The Frontier provides a most agreeable escape from reality.
With My Tin-4 My Life we are back in the nightmare world that is our reality today. • This is a working-man's journal of his life during the war. He is married, has a child, a good friend, and a home. His ambitions are limited to the desire to continue to enjoy these things, and perhaps one day—though he knows this will never come true--g-to live in the country. At the end of the book his friend, who went into the Army, has become a bitter fervid Zionist, and his wife and child are killed by the escape of gas into a tube-shelter. It is impossible to doubt that this simple moving book is written by a genuine working-class man who feels the middle classes (" the ladidahs ") as alien from him as another nation. For the middle-class reader this book provides a most interesting documentary on the life and thought of a London worker.
The Pteasant Morning Light is foolishly described on its jacket as " A Romantic .Novel," but is, in fact, a most fascinating and searching account of three American girls and their own attitudes, and those of their society, to marriage. It would seem that the pressure on an American girl to get married—anyhow, to anyone-
Is so intense that to be a spinster is to know that you must be neurotic, abnormal and a total failure. I have discussed this book with American friends, who assure me the picture is accurate ; without this assurance I would have found it incredible. In a minor sphere the life it reveals is as nasty a nightmare as any.
MARGHANITA LASKI.
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