FICTION.
DEFEAT. By Geoffrey Moss. (Constable. 6s.)
Some months ago Major Geoffrey Moss produced a very able first novel, Sweet Pepper, which was reviewed at length in these columns. Its theme was a psychological one, treated, at any rate in the opinion of the present writer, with extraordinary exactitude and sympathy of vision. Its background was Hungary in the first years after the War, and the picture drawn is not only a vivid and highly interesting one, but gives an extraordinarily accurate impression both of the country itself and the temper of the time. It erred as a historical document on the side of philo-Magyarism : artistically, it was bound to err if it was to retain any unity of view-point. The novel was a good one, and achieved some of the success it deserved. It gave one high hopes, moreover, of Major Moss as a novelist ; for if, as a novel, it was good, as a first novel it was extraordinary. He has now published a book of short stories, Defeat, the scenes of which are laid in several of the defeated countries of Europe—especially, in Germany and the Ruhr. One must say at the outset that they are a great deal less able than the novel. Psychologically, several of them are spun on the same theme—that of a woman in dire straits being driven to sell herself. They are prunings, as it were, off the main stock of Sweet Pepper. But their chief purpose (and, as a matter of fact, a very laudable one) is didactic. They are intended to give (and do give) a very vivid picture of the state of affairs in that whole region of distressful countries which stretches across half Europe ; and they give it in a form which is far more easily assimilated by the imagination than any number of reports of Committees on Atrocities. The stories in themselves are interesting to the general reader, and the moral is inserted so deftly, with so little emphasis, as to make them palatable as well as medicinal. But as stories they are, unfortunately, nothing more nor less than good magazine stories, and those who look for a fulfilment of the literary promise of Sweet Pepper will be disappointed. But, of course, it would be grossly unfair to condemn Major Moss everlastingly on a second book ; for second books are notoriously generally the worst, and we await his third with an open mind. The decision as to whether he is to become a propagandist, a fiction-merchant, or an artist is a matter for his own conscience. One can only hope for the best.
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