, Fiction

By WILLIAM PLOMER

Famine. By Liam O'Flaherty. (Collancz. 8s. ed.) The Bast Wind of Love. By Compton Mackenzie. (Rich and Cowan. 8s. 6d.) We the Miring. By Ayn Rand. (Cassell. 88. 6(1.) Old Father Antic. By Doreen Wallace. (Collins. 7s. 6d.) The Kings of Beacon Hill. By Christine Whiting Parmenter. (Methuen. 7s. 64.1.) Too often it happens that the novelist with a message is

not artist enough to raise his work above the level of propa- ganda, while the novelist with technical skill or a modicum

of sensibility is too lacking in passionate convictions to carry his readers along with him. Now and again however guts and taste arc found in conjunction. They have seldom been found in happier conjunction lately than in Famine. Mr. O'Flaherty has long since made his name : this book

ought to make it clear that he is one of the most distinguished writers of his generation. He has here a grand intention ; his rare talents as a story-teller, his mastery of narrative and dialogue, have never been better employed ; and he has this advantage over many of his shifting, shallow,

urbanised contemporaries, that he is a man with roots and a background. His subject is the great Irish famine of

the 'forties as it affected one small community and certain families and individuals in particular, but his book is very much more than a good historical novel. It is a magnificent assertion of sympathy with the perpetual struggle of the mass of humanity for bread, freedom, and civilisation. It is an indictment of tyranny and the callous misgovernment of a people " treated as if they were in a state of armed

insurrection instead of their being on the point of destruction by famine." It is an appallingly lifelike study of extreme,

prolonged and widespread poverty, a poetical but never gushing or rhapsodic expression of love for the Irish people and a demonstration of what can be seen every day, and not only in distressed areas—the heroism of the obscure when faced with the unendurable that yet has to be endured.

I can think of no greater compliment to pay this wholly unskippabie book than to say that I believe Dauinier would have read it with admiration, and with a just appreciation both of its warmth and its grimness : nobody would have under- stood better the significance of these hollow cheeks and deep shadows, of certain grotesque and . corrupt persons given unjust power by unjust laws, of the stupor,. misery or dementia brought on by want, and in contrast the courage and generosity of individuals, of the superb Mary Kilmartin in particular, the help and comfort that the poor give the poor, and the hopes that cannot be extinguished even by soldiers and policemen. As a picture of a single district the

story rings as true as if it were related from actual experience, but one could wish that the district had included one or two of ,those landowners who did their best in those bad days for their tenants.

Famine is a longish book but The East Wind of Love is a great deal longer, and is only the first instalment of a tetralogy to be called The Four Winds of Love. Mr. Compton Mackenzie confesses that five years of reviewing have left him with a prejudice against very long books, but there is no reason to believe that this prejudice is shared by the average novel addict, nor is there any reason to suggest that Mr. Mackenzie's industry has here been misapplied. At his best a very enter- taining writer, he has experience of various kinds of society— leisured, theatrical, military, parsonic, to name no others— and there is evidence that what may be called his social consciousness has developed with the years. This becomes clear when one compares The East Wind of Love with Sinister Street. This latest book, like that celebrated early one, deals chiefly with the lives of young men growing up in the early years of this century, and Mr. Mackenzie has not. only been able to take advantage of the greater frankness now common, but his scope is broader and his grasp firmer. " The youth • that was maturing at the beginning of the century," he says, " was just. as heavily oppressed by what it felt were the security and sameness of existence as the youth that came afterwards was to be oppressed by its insecurity and empti- ness," and he makes it his business, without neglecting amatory adventures, to Show the steady growth of political convictions in several young men who keep in touch with one another after having been at school together. One of them i, Iri ll and plainly destined to be:kerne,. a revplationary in the land of his forebears ; there sic --two Jewish brothers, one nliritiical prodigy and the other a homosexual 'heading straight h )r. Marxism ; and there is John 'Ogilvie, the most iniportaid ,

who may be expected to turn, if indeed he has not already turned, into a rampant and kilted §Cotch nationalist.

We cannot afford to ignore the hints in the blurb that Mr. Mackenzie " has written what might be termed in an older man his literary testament," and that "-this work is an account, fundamentally; of how the events of the past thirty-five years have affected . . the author." The whole work cannot

be judged by its first quarter, but as it unfolds we may expect, among other things, that the conception of Home Rule for Scotland will even more often catch our attention than it does here. Meanwhile we are offered a complex story involving many kinds of people, changes of scene, converga,.

tion pieces, and so on. Mr. Mackenzie has a nice sense of

the period when German bands played in the streets, travelling clocks were given as wedding presents, " ripping " was a term of praise, and Mr. H. G. Wells was the dernier cri among young

intellectuals ; he inchides some solid dialogues on sucli themes as Dostoievsky, religion and iinkrialisrn, and .some amusing satirical passages, particularly an account of a meeting of Kensington Jacobites.

One often wishes that writers would yield a little More to their satirical inclinations, and that -goes for Miss Ayn Rand. From internal evidence one would guess her to be

a middle-class White or Whitish Russian living in exile in America, and We the Living (0 title of no-particular significance) - is so frankly counter-revolutionary that it ought 'tci annoy readers of Red or Reddish i sympathies. Writing, often graphically, of life in Leningrad in the 'twenties she seems anxious to show the corruption of those-- newly-- raised to- positions of authority. The story is simple. Kira, her bourgeoise heroine, falls in love with a surviving young man of upper-class origins and White sympathies, and in order

to get money to send him to the Crimea, and so save him , from tuberculosis she prostitutes herself' to 'an admirer in the G.P.U. The difficulties of obtaining board and lodging during the period of the story are entered-into at great length and with every appearance of verisimilitude :

" Vasili sold the mosaic table from thercliam;ing-room . . . Fifty million roubles and four pounds of lard.' I made an omelette with

the egg-powder we got at the co-operative."- ' ' "

Miss Rand's account of the social upset following the Revolution is detailed and likely enough ; she makes a certain amount of rather bitter ffin of the Workitigs.; Of ::the

new bureaucracy and of the lapses of -the *tie* ',orthodox into such unorthodoxie3 as private trading. flut towarels Kira, who stands for individualism and those. little, things

like scent and lipsticks which Mean So Much to a woman, Miss Rand is altogether too partial- If Kira had :played the game with nice Red Andrei instead of nasty ,White Leo (who had " a slow, contemptuous smile, and a swift gait, and in his hand a lost whip he had been born to carry ") we might have liked her better. Just listen to Miss Rand on Kira's mouth :

" When silent, it was cold, indomitable, and men thought of a Valkyrie with lance and winged helmet in the sweep of battle. But a slight movement made a wrinkle in the corners of her lips— and men thought of an imp perched on top of a toadstool, laughing into the faces of daisies."

What's in a mouth ? An opera, it seems, or a silly symphony.

Old Father Antic and The Kings- of Beacon Hill bring Us on to firmer ground. Here we are asked to face dcimestic problems of which people ,sometimes. try to ignore the exis- tence. Miss Wallace, who writes with :good feeling., common sense, and no affectations, gives firm suppOrt to those who wish to reform the divorce laws, and shows how right they are to resent the intolerable situations in which ordinary decent people may find themselves through no fault of their own. Miss Parmenter gives a chatty, good-natured account of an American nkcsalliance which yielded to treatment; so that the young thing who emerged from a-candy store in 1900 to marry " abovei " &itself was by 1P84. not merely a - • • granny •bilt "-a veritattle Brandt dame.