Fiction
FOR all its occasional excess or. confusion of poetic sentiment, Robert Henriques's Captain Smith and Company, published in 191 still seems to me one of the most original pieces of imaginati writing of the war years which retains its peculiarly tense at visionary quality The Journey Home, which came afterwards, a disappointing, though interestingly so, and I looked forward wi some eagerness to Through the Valley. This is a sharper disappoto ment, a book with quite a few claims, I suspect, to popularity It with too little else that is really worth Mr. Henriques's disinteres9 labour. It is the work, one would say, of a formidably robust at yet anxious writer, who seems to have brought out for inspect] some of his private intellectual obsessions and in the result has to most pains over what is least significant in the novel. This appa uneasiness of his apart, the book gives the impression of ha ' been fitted together from fragments widely separated in time perhaps in imaginative mood also. Drawn-out and rather shape! it lacks, I think, something of ordinary concentration.
Not that there is nothing to hold and entertain the reader in lavish story of the revenges of 'time in a Cotswold valley, of changes set in motion by the further decline of the remnants thelanded gentry during the years from the General Strike of 19 until our own day. Mr. Henriques's scenes of the hunting field, instance, are composed with immense nervous zest and vigour, w his closing pageant of the glories of the black market is excell cynical fun. In, batiNeen, however, comes a chronicle of the adv' tures or introspective explorations of three rather hazy young m• one the heir to an insouciant and decaying squirearchical traditi' another the exemplary agent's pallid son, the third a self-consci' representative of Anglo-Jewry (the last two, by the way, seem to conceived as complementary aspects of the same character), which too often extravagant or rhetorical. Altogether a prodigal somewhat heedless performance, in which Mr. Henriques has t few opportunities forthe exercise of his most distinctive abiliti• ,The population of the earth, or perhaps only of the 'United Stagy —Mr. Stewart is a little vague on the subject or else is quite consciously possessed by the notion that the earth is really the sa thing as the United States—is smitten by a new and fearful epide most probably caused by a virus, produced by mutation. Mankin' or, once again, American mankind—becomes all but extinct. California. however, a young university student has the good 1 to be bitten by a rattlesnake and survives That is the starting-pa of Earth Abides, a fantasy with a faint dash of M. P. Shiel, with too little of his ingenuity and none of his horror. The ea part, before Ish discovers Em and sees her as the mother of natio is much the more interesting ; Mr. Stewart plays, suggestively moments with bits and pieces of biological argument. Afterwa with the dim theme of the genesis of 'social organisation apparent working in his mind and with the new community in the maki feeding on the tinned goods left over from the American way of if the point of the fantasy is lost. The narrative is punctuated italicised fragments of meditation or rhapsody which leave a sin of rather naive and petnaps specifically American didacticism. Earth Abides has,its moments of thoughtful' sobriety and even Wellsian speculative fancy.
I am a little at a loss what to say of Free Among the Dead, wh'
is a poetical, symbolical, Germanic sort of novel—the book is, in fact, a translation from the German—that vaguely derives from Stefan George or perhaps from an attempted reconciliation of George and Rilke. Mr. Marnau is known as a poet, in German and in English, of rather fine-spun quality, and Free Among the Dead. though for most of the time it pursues a level naturalistic method and style of narrative, is plainly a work of poetic temperament. It is about a group of cultivated and artistic young men who, in archaically romantic fashion; plan to spend the winter of 1939 in knightly service at the court of an aristocratic young woman, Elisabeth der Haydn, somewhere on the frontier between Hungary and Austria. All are blown about in the gale of the world, and all but one of them perish. The moral Mr. Marnau draws, which is not so very different from that suggested by Mr. Stewart, is that something new in the way of spiritual consciousness is needed to save human society. Much of the writing is ordinary enough, though oddly measured (this is possibly the translation) and a little jocular, but every now and then there are exaggeratedly wordy and doubtfully significant passages. _ The Holly and the Ivy is lightly and airily done, a pointed little feminine essay in the domestic and other commonplaces of middle- class and culture-conscious young love in war-time and afterwards. Sylvia, an artist, and Andrew, a scientist, meet in a youth hostel in Shropshire during the war and marry, after which Andrew returns to the R.A F. while Sylvia goes to live with his mother and has a baby. Miss Cowlin has a vivacious air but little invention. I should have liked her rather artless narrative better if the intellectual conversation of her lovers were not so intolerably priggish, if Sylvia herself were not quite so cold and complacent an egotist, if the obstetric detail had been taken for granted, and if the portrait of Andrew's gibbering mother were not so flagrantly overdone. How- ever, there are readers, I am tempted to say, and women readers.
R. D. CHARQUES.
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