Fiction

By WILLIAM PLOMER The Weather in the Streets. By Rosamond Lehmann. (Collins. 8s.)

A Gun For Sale. By Graham Greene. (Heinemann. 7e. 6d.) Their Ways Divide. By Dennis Kincaid. (Matto and Windus. 7s. 6d.)

Cathedral Close. By Susan Goodyear. (Ghetto and Windus. 7s. 6d.) The Happy Alienist. By Wallace Smith. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.)

IT would be dangerous to speak without qualification of a book as " essentially feminine," for this might easily be taken as a term of abuse, since the fallen women of today are those who from sheer ignorance, economic pressure, or a bad home influ- ence, are busy at their desks, writing novels in which they offer their naked and essentially feminine souls, with the shameless. abetment of publishers, to the circulating libraries. On the other hand, there are occasions when one can think of no higher praise, and the novels of Miss Rosamond Lehmann owe their charm and value, and perhaps also their success—they are best-sellers in America and France as well as in this country— largely to the fact that no man could have written them. What is more, no other woman could have written them, for probably no other woman writer with an equal knowledge of the feminine heart in relation to modem moneyed society would be able to go on being so kind. If only because they show no touch of scornfulness, Miss Lehmann's writings must be specially comforting to all those of her readers who doubt- less feel that she would understand their troubles without laughing at them. It would be absurd to try and make out that Miss Lehmann writes like a sort of solemn and maternal confidante, but how can one help calling her sympathetic ? Who else would have dreamt of writing " An enemy's death is simply awful " ? Who else has shown, in a succession of books, so much concern with the fate of the woman who " has little and expects so much," or has much and expects a great deal more ? The Weather in the Streets, a sequel to Invitation to the Waltz, is an elaborate study of a woman in love, a married woman in love with a married man. As a picture of certain aspects of contemporary life it could scarcely be bettered, for Miss Lehmann knows, as they say, her stuff, and knows it through and through. She is just as strong on family life as on the circumstances surrounding adultery and abortion, and in one conversation piece after another shows us every stage in the progress of an affair which does not run altogether smoothly. The sureness of touch which leads to comments like " Kate, bless her, had slipped with no trouble into a suitable marriage within easy motoring distance " and to things as brilliant as the account of Olivia's visit to a respect- able abortionist goes with a strong sense of the irony of situation, " I don't really see," says Olivia's husband Ivor, from whom she is living apart :

" I don't really see any reason why we shouldn't occasionally see each other, do you T As a matter of fact, I've often felt I'd like to ring you up, or drop in . . . I didn't quite like to."

If there is a fault to be found, it is that Miss Lehmann here in places has abandoned the neatness of, for instance, A Note in Musk, for diffusiveness, continually pressing into service our old acquaintances, the Three Dots. . . . She seems to be one of those writers who feels that the complexity of our lives and the relation between what happens inside and outside us cannot be faithfully rendered by sticking to any rigid or narrow form or convention, even a newly-invented one. They may be right, but perhaps they allow themselves too much freedom. Nature Miss Lehmann obviously loves, " and next to Nature, Art," but she is at her very best where she shows no favouritism and loves them equally.

Of Mr. Graham Greene, who needs no introduction to readers of The Spectator, one would say that more than most writers of his generation he has from the first been technically indebted to the cinema. As a film-critic (fortunately not swayed by a boisterous enthusiasm) he has no doubt found out more thoroughly than ever how the wonderful means at the disposal of the film-makers are often applied to con- temptible ends, and the result is really remarkable, for in A Gun for Sale he has beaten both the scenario-writers and the ordinary writers of adventure stories at their own game. He has written an exciting thriller which reads very much as a quick-firing gangster filM lOoks and sounds, and whereas successful English writers of action stories tend to equip.

their heroes with the standards of an old-fashioned public school and with ideas (if they can be called ideas) far removed from present-day needs and facts, Mr. Greene, shrinking from uplift, provides a topical satire on the seediness and callousness of social and political life. We know that in the present century assassination is deliberately used as a political method and that wars have been deliberately fomented by the agents of armament manufacturers ; we know too well that a single incident of a violent nature, a murder for instance, might be enough to destroy the world we know. Allowing a few accepted facts of this sort to cast their menacing shadows across his pages, Mr. Greene at once produces an air of tension and foreboding, and then follows, with quick camera-work and skilful sound-effects, the closely linked fortunes of a variety of individuals. The strength of the modem hero, from amateur gunman to dictator, is as the strength of ten because his heart is warped, and this decidedly applies to the harelipped hero of A Gun for Sale. There is not a clean limb in the story, and Aunt Sallies, from rich thugs to wearers of old school ties, fall in heaps in the course of a personally con- ducted lightning tour of the seamy side. Mr. Greene describes all this as an entertainment. He is right. It is. Try it and see.

Their Ways Divide is Mr. Dennis Kincaid's fourth novel about India. If the earlier ones are as good as this they must be very good. First of all we are shown a pleasant meeting in the nursery of a collector's bungalow between Edward Holme, the collector's little son, and Naru, a little Brahman ; then, in alternate chapters, their growth and education. Edward goes

to England and Naru stays in India. " You are going to school soon," remarks Edward's aunt, " and English schoolboys are

very brave and self-controlled and they tease anyone who is a milk-sop." Meanwhile a pandit comes every morning to teach Naru Sanskrit, and wearing a white dhoti he strolls under flowering trees. Edward moves on to a public school, and Naru, having gone through the thread-girding ceremony, which makes a true Brahman of him, to the Gothic cloisters of the Rajwada College in Poona. " I am sorry to notice," says Edward's housemaster, " that at the house-match on Saturday several boys—several I repeat—showed so little interest, so little esprit de corps, that, instead of watching the match properly, they were talking and laughing together." And Naru presently comes under paternal correction for flirting with advanced ideas. The next thing is that Edward, now grown up, returns to India as an official, and at a Bombay cocktail party meets Naru again. Mr. Kincaid's descriptions of Bombay seem particularly good, and while he is amusing us he is busy showing us modern India. A Mr. Hashimbhai, for instance, said at the party that he thought Poona " rather awful " ; it made him feel " quite desoriente." The ways of Edward and Naru now converge. Edward is amiable but hopelessly unimaginative ; and Naru, emotional and adoring, awaits an understanding of which his English friend is incapable. Their ways divide, and the end is disastrous and dramatic. There can be few novels that state more clearly the difference between the Englishman and the Indian, and the fatal results of education—Edward facing the world with sealed eyes and sealed lips, and Naru vainly imagining that violence may help.

Cathedral Close, a nice quiet book about nice ordinary people, may go on the shelf with Trollope and Walpole, though resembling neither. But The Happy Alienist is a disappoint- ment, for Bessie Cotter was said to have caught an effect by great frankness. The rather cheap idea on which Mr. Smith's new book depends may be detected in these words :

" You, the great psychiatrist, Volk, to whom the minds of men and women are open books—simple as the ABC you like to say— have ceased to use your own mind. You have blinded yourself to facts simpler than the ABC. You won't recognise what everyone in Vienna saw at a glance—"

With a tittering facetiousness that is perhaps meant to make

for smooth, up-to-date comedy, this point is dragged out into a story of sorts. It might have proved more ductile if Mr.

Smith had not mistaken the boring for the daring.