Fiction
By WILLIAM PLOMER
Meteor. By Karel 6spek. Translated by M. and R. Weatherall.
(Allen and Unwin. 7s. 6d.) • •
Ox a hot, stormy day an unidentified aeroplane crashes, the pilot is burned to death, and the only passenger, gravely injured and unconscious, is removed to a hospital, where he lies swathed in bandages, his life ending, his past a mystery. An excellent starting-point for a novelist wishing to concern himself with the exploration of a character and the telling of a story. A commonplace writer might have chosen to reveal the man and the story by a following-up of ingeniously accidental clues, but Mr: Karel ,apek, being as we know a writer of Much subtlety and- originality, chooses intuition for his purpose. The doctors naturally form some opinions about their patient, but it is through a nurse, a clairvoyant and a poet that he, becomes known. The nurse dreams about him, and he speaks to her in her dream ; the clair- voyant, by means of his proper faculty, perceives what is hidden ; and the poet, the myth-maker, invents, not "out of waywardness" but because he must. Sbnietinies through the mouths of these three, sometimes in his own words, the author gradually lays bare the past of the dying man, who is called liettelring. We learn that Kettelring has been a kind of prodigal son ; that his destiny, like the destinies of ninny, was "like a fiiiht from a task which was beyond his strength " ; and from ,the doctors, for example, that he has led "a strange and restless existence, for his age his heart is terribly exhausted ; he drinks from despair. . . ." The elucidation of the mystery is from the first absorbing, because we are involved not in the usual chronological succession of banal trivialities that makes up the ordinary realistic novel, but in a poetic search after the true nature of an individual.
"If your sensation of a certain personality is acute enough and COMPLETE" (says the clairvoyant), "you can with sufficient analytical and logical ability unravel it into an outspread picture of his life story. Out of the condensed form of his life you can deduce its individual events." ' And again : "There is no chance, everything is determined, awesome and beautiful, all causality apPears in the simultaneity of cause and effect."
Life so viewed may acquire a unified, monumental aspect, but when, about half way through the book, the clairvoyant says jeeringly, "I'm sorry, but events. aren't in my line ; I look at life in its totality, and I can't provide you with chequered life stories," there arises in the reader a definite need and appetite for a story." It is here (the moment is perfectly chosen) that the poet takes a hand, and proceeds to reconstruct Kettelring's life, love and work in the tropics, the West Indies in fact, where heat, superstition and capitalism play their powerful parts : "I should like to see which is fiercer, the Green Snake to which the negroes bow, or the Laws of Economics to which we bend the knee. . . . There is the question whether that black chicken, scratching itself in the shadow of the sweet potatoes, will be sold at the market, or whether its head will be bitten off for the propitia- tion of the incensed and supreme Snake."
With what a light touch, with what agility, Mr. tapek keeps us in touch with essentials ! Imaginative in the best sense, compassionate, enjoying life's many flavours, humorous, a little melancholy, he stands all by himself. Perhaps his best book, Meteor will not make much appeal to a hearty or uneducated taste.
Meteor, with its finesse and its desperate, maladjusted hero, belongs to the world of Western civilization, but as for the characters in Chapayev : "What a set ! Every face unique, worthy of an epic poem. No two fellows alike among the whole crowd, and yet they all dovetailed together perfectly, like a piece of masonry. Theirs was a rock-like unity. They formed one common family, and what a glorious family it was ! "
We are in a rough, primitive world where action counts for snore than analysis. The scene is Russia just after the War, and Chapayev is a leader of guerrilla fighting against Kolehak and the Whites, one of those popular heroes who become legendary even in their lifetimes, a sort of Stenka Razin or Pugachev. A film, about him has lately been shown in this country : it has its points, but the book is very much better. In both there is a feeling of freshness, vigour, idealistic revolu- tionary- fervour and a certain amount of naivety. The author of the book was a personal friend and fellow fighter, of Chapayev's, and draws a vivid portrait of him. "More of a hero than a fighter, more of a passionate seeker after adyenthre than a conscious revolutionary," Chapayev 'was the son of a gipsy actor by the daughter of a governor of Kazan. Re owed his popularity and success to the fact that "he, More than anybody else, was the epitome of those he led—of the raw heroic mass of guerrilla fighters," and that-he "embodied in himself all the irrepressible and _spontaneous feelings of rage and protest that had accumulated in the, hearts of the peasants." Extremely brave, active and temperamental, he was "dazed by his own reputation," was illiterate and even simple-minded, obstinate, credulous, with a violent temper that easily gave way to sweetness, passionately fond of singing, very proud of his moustache; and anything but a Marxist doctrinaire : "Ho had never read the Communist programme, never thought of studying it, and was quite at sea on all serious political questions." In short, such a powerful and fascinating character, that the book may be enjoyed for his sake alone. At the same time it is an exciting adventure story,. and obviously has some value as a historkial document. Far Enough also deals with an " epic " subject, though one more remote in space and time, the Great Trek of the Dutch northward from the Cape in 18116. It opens with some account of that old unhealed wound, the dreadful SLachter's Nek affair, and follows the fortunes of the trekkers on their long journey, taking due account of their intense racial and religious feelings, and making the most of their clashes With the natives. The conflict is somewhat over-simplified by the suggestion that" if both [Boers and Zulus] had been predatory, or both agrarianf`they might have found a working basis of understanding." Miss de Kalb is knowledgeable, and writs in a dashing, staccato manner, but her book lacks atmosphere and spirituality. The Great Trek is likely to continue a favourite subject for South African novels, but a Tolstoy would be needed to do it justice.
Mr. George Woden's fourteenth novel is introduced by Mr. Frank Swinnerton as "the longest and most ambitious novel of a writer who for twenty years has deserved well of the reading public." It is about Glasgow at the present day, and a rich old woman whose money is being waited for by a variety of people. A longish, solid, workmanlike and rather old-fashioned book, it may be recommended to admirers of the Wells -Bennett materialist school of fiction, of which it is a worthy Scotch example, but after the novels of Lewis Grassic Gibbon it seems a little colourless. In excusing a certain want of poetry in Mr. Woden's excellence, Mr. Swinnerton surprisingly, says that "one cannot very _readily, in the same book, be both realist and fantast," but indeed one can, as Mr. Capek proves, and to be enduring one must, if the examples of a Shakespeare or a Dickens count for anything.
Bitter Draught deals with the misfortunes of a Jewish family escaping from the regions where Chapayev won his triumphs. The Gentile reader, ready to be sympathetic, will find that Mr. Matveev has made a corner in sympathy for his characters, of whom he writes in the first person plural. The book opens with the usual pogrom. .Sadists and pravocateurs appear. There are anxious arrivals and hasty departures, scenes in crowded boats, trains, waiting rooms, interviews with the Roumanian police, beatings, and cancelled passports. Wherever the family goes, it is "not wanted on the voyage" or at the destination. Even at Jaffa a pogrom is in full swing, so the family is not allowed to land but gets shunted about the Mediterranean and finally settles down in Paris to carry on the family industry of turning the other cheek in horrid surroundings. Everything goes wrong all the time, which may be like life but is somehow not lifelike. The author sethns at times to' be parodying himself: the masochism which is, not unnaturally, sometimes characteristic of the Jews has seldom been so flaunted.
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