FICTION
By FORREST REID Theme With Variations. By G. E. Trevelyan. (Gollancz. 7s. 6d.) Growth of a Man. By Mazo de la Roche. (Macmillan. 8s. 6d.) The Younger Venus. By Naomi Royde Smith. (Macmillan. 7s. 6d.)
The Dark Command. By W. R. Burnett. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) She Was There Too. By Frank Tilsley. (Collins. 7s. 6d.). Miss TREVELYAN'S Theme With Variations is a brilliant novel, original in conception, and worked out with extraordinary skill. London is the scene, and the plan is this—to take three stories, each portraying a different social world, and present them side by side. The characters of one group have nothing whatever to do with, have never even heard of, those of the others ; yet somehow the book holds together, the effect is not fragmentary. Each story is told through its hero or heroine, and more or less in his or her own words ; but Sam Smith is working-class and very nearly illiterate ; Frances Jones is lower-middle-class and half-educated ; Evie Robinson is middle-class, educated and clever. Unity is achieved through a common theme of promise unfulfilled. Sam, Frances, and Evie are all alike caught in a web woven by fate or chance, from which they are powerless to extricate themselves. The theme, in fact, is frustration ; while the several struggles of the victims form the variations upon it.
In two cases at least, those of Sam and Evie, the tragedy is undeserved. Sam is the most decent and inoffensive of souls, a steady respectable working-man, simple-hearted and incapable of harming anybody. On Saturday . nights he likes to talk socialism over a pint in the bar of The Green Lion, and thus, though all unwittingly, he becomes mixed up with a group of unscrupulous revolutionaries, who pick him-,Out (there is sup- posed to be a ballot) to throw a bomb at the Coronation proces- sion. When instructions reach him, Sam is shocked, incredu- lous, indignant, but he is hunted at the end of revolvers, till at last he is actually standing among the waiting crowd with the bomb in his pocket.
For the flabbier Frances we feel less sympathy. At eighteen she marries a middle-aged dentist who soon tires of her, and in her loneliness, solaced by a mental diet of sensational news- papers and the cheapest type of erotic fiction, the imagination of Frances begins to hbver round dubious love adventures with errand boys, hawkers, and indeed every male who rings at the door.
Evie is of a far finer type, and fails only because shy is not sufficiently self-centred. • She 'passes her examinations and is offered a Civil Service appointment, but lacks the determination, or callousness, that would have enabled her to break with an odious family bent ,on keeping her at home. Sam, Frances, Evie—these are the human flies whose destinies Miss Trevelyan follows till they are caught in the web. Once trapped, she abandons them ; their ultimate fate we can picture for ourselves. The book is short, though this is not due to thinness of material, but to a fastidious selective sense that eschews the superfluous.
Growth of a Man I should describe as a competent rather than a brilliant novel. It is a long, leisurely chronicle, beginning with Shaw Manifold's boyhood on his grand- father's farm, and pursuing his career through school and college till he is appointed to an important Government post and marries. Miss de la Roche is fond of drawing a family group, and if Shaw's. childhood is lonely, it is not for lack of numerous uncles and aunts. His grandfather and grand- mother rule the house, but his father is dead, and there being little money, his mother has accepted a job away from home. So Shaw is left to his relations, who are a hard, unimaginative lot, and the boy is frequently .beaten, and consistently over- worked. Luckily he is a tough and self-reliant youngster : clever too, for he passes all his examinations at school, and gneotwhereidhoef goes to study part of the book, depicting his early years narrative, later line,at Tthhee first
on the farm, I found the most interesting, but the later chapters describing expeditions in the northern forests have their interest also. It is on one of these that Shaw contracts the malady of which his father died. Then follows a picture of life in the Quebec Sanatorium where he is_gradually nursed back to health. The whole forms a plain, straightforward
tispun-out and
ties, yet readable. There is nothing in the book that strikes a particularly new or individual note, but I should think it will please, for it has pleased before. There is certainly nothing to offend, nothing startling, nothing to harrow the feelings or uncover disquieting worlds to the imagination. It is safe, honest work, quite up to the Whiteoak standard
In The Younger Venus Miss Royde Smith has written a sentimental comedy of great charm, delicate and imaginative, recalling, though it is modem, always a faint fragrance from the past ; and that, I take it, is what she herself means when she describes it as an " escape story." The characters at all events are real enough, and sharply etched, even if there is something dreamlike in the love story. Frome and Susan meet only on the last page, and what has drawn them together lies " out of space, out of time," the book he has written being the medium through which the approach is made, so that when the actual moment arrives courtship is unnecessary.
There is little plot to outline. The Adderley family— consisting of Susan, her sister, and her mother—are going abroad, and, through an agent, they let their house to Frome. It is an old house, buried in the heart of the country, and its quietness appeals to him, he will be able to write his new book there. But the owners have left many traces of their occupation behind them—spiritual as well as material— even a tutelary guardian in the shape of a cat—and Frome's imagination is stirred. The tale now shifts between the adven- tures of the travellers in Paris and Geneva, and Frome's less active experience at home. It is a romance of two worlds— Susan's and Frome's—yet one has the sense always that these worlds are moving closer, as if drawn together by some mys- terious force of gravitation. It is this, indeed, that gives the book its peculiar atmosphere, and distinguishes it from an every- day social comedy. The actors in it are delightful. Even the solitary rascal among them, though he is thoroughly dishonest, possesses a whimsicality and humour that make it easy to forgive him. He is a connoisseur, who profits nefariously by his knowledge of the Old Masters, and one of the charms of the novel is that it contains so much about pictures and drawings. To the people in it Such things-matter. They . know that in Walter Crane's illustration of Snow White's stepmother.thehat has " been lifted froni a head in the Uffizi Adoration of the Magi" ;• they are familiar with the .poetry of Donne, and with Baroccio's,Madonna del Gatto: Their -interests are of that kind; "'escape interests " -I suppose; and I dare say the book will appeal most to those who share such interests. But
others will. like it too.. .
- 'Is' The Dark 'Command an- escape Story ?' It deals with the American-, civil or rather ,w4.13. One jiiisdde..in.it, the guerrilla fighting along the Kansas-Missouri border. It is a picturesque -and - stirring .romance; with a hero'.and. a 'villain who begin as friends, and . whose destinies Arc intermingled throughout. Johnny is stolid and loyal; 'Cantrell a strange mixture ..91 treackerottsness and. reckless:bravery. ' Both fall in love- with Mary, which would matter less if-Mary could ccittie -to a siecisfnle between-them. alit first she favours Johnny, then runs away with Cantrell, and .finally returns to.Johuny. Mr. Burnett has taken more pains with these portraid than usual in a novel of action. Johnny we like ; Cantrell we dislike ; towards Mary my own feeling remained reserved. She lets Johnny down badly, yet continues to appeal to him every time she gets into trouble. This Mr. Burnett treats as a pardonable feminine weakness quite compatible with charm. It may be, but I prefer the dogs, who at least know their Sown minds, and are excellent, setting, indeed, a very high standard all round.
Mr. Frank Tililey is a realist, and 'She Was There Too gives a realistic and unattractive picture of working-class life. When the book opens Joe and Ethel have been married for three weeks and disenchantment has set in.' This is credible ; what I fail to see is why their subsequent history need have been so sordid. People no better off than Joe and Ethel get married every day, and even seem to make a tolerable success.of it. But Mr. Tilsley rules it otherwise. Trouble begins. when. Ethel, with rage and bitterness, discovers that she is Pregnant.' Joe is blamed, and from now on the book becomes increasingly meilicrd In tone, each detail adding to the total effect of ugliness and squalor.
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