17 JUNE 1938, Page 40

FICTION

By KATE O'BRIEN

The Crowning of a King is an immense and detailed novel dealing with German military life on the Russian front in 1918, after the peace of Brest-Litovsk. It is by the author of The Case of Sergeant Grischa, and although echoes of the affaire Paprotkin resound significantly through the work

now presented to us, this is in fact, Herr Zweig tells us in a revelatory and despondent author's note, his first novel, now " fundamentally altered by the events of the year 1933." " It was not then foreseen " (in 1926) " that the old ruling class. would again succeed in returning to power, even before the book of its defeat had been written."

That return is math to seem all the more amazing and disheartening by perusal of The Crowning of a King. The book's purpose is to present, at their climax, the sins, talents and blindnesses of the German officer-class as well as its undermining and collapse, the Nemesis which surprised it. The undertaking is vast, and proportionately carried out, for Herr Zweig is possessed of almost all the necessary powers— a sense of history; a penetration into racial and social problems ; an eye that looks coolly on individual character, more warmly on landscape and on the broad essentials of human feeling ; and especially, an unflagging moral passion which is admirably held to . its true function by a historian's detachment. And if among these virtues we do not find a sufficiency of those others which, aesthetically speaking, are necessary to the perfect novel—if selectiveness is not often enough applied, if the sense of form is teased by awkward divagations, and if we miss the pressure and heat generated by the full exercise of imagination—such objections are perhaps beside the point, for Herr Zweig is not here concerned to give us a work of art, but a great wedge of bitter truth.

In the first half of 1918 Junkers and Pan-Germans did not yet see what their philosophy and its application had done to Germany ; they did not, even at that date, apprehend the tragedy of their people, or the power belatedly engendered by suffering in the stricken. Certainly the War was proving expensive—but its cost to conscript, clerk and university professor did not impinge on the ruling class, which admittedly on occasion lost one or other of its own sons, but could accept such traditional tragedy with ritualistic military decorum. Certainly American transports were coming over to France in great strength ; certainly Foch had some military talent ; certainly the English blockade was a fact. But the German people could be fed from the Ukraine now, and terms being made with those devils, Lenin, &c., whom Junker cunning had launched on Russia, there were feathers for nests in the east, estates to be manoeuvred for, sinecures to be attached. And meantime while factions disputed which variety of German princeling should rule in Lithuania, there were Polish castles for the Ober-Ost staff to reside in, there was duck-shooting at their disposal, they had Rhine wine to drink, and sturgeon and white bread to eat. And if victory seemed unlikely now on the west front, there would be at least " a German peace," and the restoration of the status quo ante. That disaster threatened from within was not possible ; that its leaders had outraged the heroic spirit of a people was the suggestion of criminal lunatics.

Captain Winfried, a sensitive, intelligent young officer of bourgeois and liberal class, is the hero of The Crowning of a King and his character, gentle, observant, responsive, is set off against that of his commander-in-chief in the east, General Clauss, a man of brilliance, charm, humour, ambition and

folly. These two represent the conflict embodied in the book, which in so far as it sticks close to them is magnificent, and when it spreads itself too far wide of them becomes diffuse and confusing. Winfried begins by adoring his general, who reciprocates by a certain favouring of him, and by somewhat protecting him from the malice of other members of the Eastern Command who hold him suspect because he played a humane part in the Grischa case. The story is of Winfried's disillusion- ment in Clauss, and of Clauss's failure, through egotism and class blindness, to rise to his own possibilities of greatness. In the end, after much suffering, Winfried sees where Germany has been brought to, where guilt lies and what must happen. Clauss does not. His dreams are Pan-German and megalo- maniac and their story ends in a magnificent quarrel. This is undoubtedly a great book, as full of information as, in the light of recent German history, it is of question and sorrow.

The Blackbird is every inch a novel, and a very good one. Its author has an interesting manner, which in his first pages seems a shade too self-confident, even turgidly so, but which clarifies itself as the story grows and becomes in fact a curiously delicate kind of matter-of-factness. The book's great achievement is the central portrait of a woman. Evelyn, whom we first meet in London in the years before the War, is then a young girl of the English upper middle class, bitter, cold, conceited, unpopular, trying to be a painter. Hartley Wetherburn, a correct but pleasant young Civil Servant, be- comes infatuated with her, and in spite of a curious War-time interlude with another tragically destined girl, she is his fate. They marry, and their married conflict is bitterly and coldly worked out. Evelyn is terrible, almost without an admirable quality—and yet the author makes one feel her husband's desire, and his powerlessness. It is the sort of book which even those who hate or despise its central characters may read with pleasure for its asides and good phrases. " It was one of her convictions that a woman who baulked another woman's curiosity could never thrive with men." I recommend The Blackbird because it is ruthlessly clear and entertaining.

Julie is. also commendable. I did not like it as much as Mr. Creighton's book, but I certainly enjoyed it very much more than during its first chapter I expected to. It is a curious story about a very sane and quite immoral girl who is first presented to us, on a liner travelling from Africa, as a funny little crippled, headachy mystic child who is on her way to England for medical treatment. En route she meets an ambitious, sordid young Jew, and they—like Hartley and Evelyn in The Blackbird—are each other's fate. Julie gets her medical treatment, and it is successful. She later becomes secretary to her Jew, and his mistress. He is a fire assessor, and arranges arson in London warehouses. She knows this, but does not mind overmuch. He is caught out, and gets seven years' penal servitude. During his first months in gaol Julie falls in with a priggish and idealistic young Irish poet and has a sentimental interlude with him—but all her real feelings are with her crude Jew in gaol, and she decides to wait for him, and to promote certain shady speculations for him while she waits. It is an odd, convincing story— weak only in that there seems no relation between the boring little Julie of the liner and the tough young girl who later on has no illusions about herself or life. But it is decidedly strong in that, against all probabilities, it persuades us of Goldberg's sensual power over his girl, and that her happiness does lie in association with his crude vitality.

Colonel PontcalTal is a historical novel which is bound to please a great many readers. It is about one of the left-ovens of Napoleon's Grande Armee, and the narrative proper opens in 1828, seven years after the Emperor's death at St. Helena, when the pre-Revolution regime is in power again, and all who do not pay lip-service to Charles X are suspects and social outcasts. Colonel Pontcarral, approaching forty, is living in misery and under police supervision on his wretched estate in Perigord when a trifling accident brings him into touch with a great aristocratic house of the neighbourhood. Whence his career flowers again into arrogance, storm and, with the July Revolution and the enthronement of Louis Philippe, to power. He marries, miserably, into the house of Ransac, but the marriage brings a certain romantic alleviation of his own bitterness in the person of a sweet young sister-in-law. Overcome by this complication he goes to Algeria with his regiment of hussars and dies in the field. The story is of an interesting period, and is very readable.

Nya, by Mr. Stephen Haggard, is neither what it should be— a simple, childhood tale of a little girl out of joint with her surroundings, nor, what it should certainly not be, save in the hands of genius, a love-story between a child of fourteen and a man of twenty-six. In places I found it hideously embarrass- ing, and in others pitifully funny. In fact I can only say that it struck me as an ill-advised piece of writing.