New Novels
The Sponger. By Jules Renard. (Longmans, 15s.) AN inspector of fiction recently estimated that sixty-four novels of school life have been offered for sale during the past ten years. Reduced by half, that estimate might be acceptable. But what- ever the figure, the fact remains that more and more schoolmaster-writers are taking what they hope will be remunerative advantage of a pro- fession that offers them a complete erector set and time to play with it. Colleagues and their wives, boys and th'eir parents, governors, the school building, townspeople, the town, with pubs, cinemas, dance halls—all the prefabricated parts are there waiting to be assembled. For an experi- enced reader these facilities have not led to satis- factory results.
Such a reader, braced for the intellectual exer- cise of a new novel by Iris Murdoch, may perhaps be forgiven his dismay at finding himself, in the opening chapter of The Sandcastle, at lunch with a bickering couple, Bill Mor, schoolmaster, and his crushing wife Nan. Not taking to them at all at first bite, he may wonder what other awful familiar faces are lurking in the pages ahead. His fears would be misplaced. To start with, Bill is not nearly so ineffectual as he appeared to be, and Nan—well, it is not easy to like her, but not impossible to admire her when she acts in defence of her home, her husband and her children. Mature women readers will be on l*r
side. Will grown men be on Bill's? And who will rally to the support of Rain Carter, the slip of a girl who caused all the trouble? As extraordinary as her name, she has come to paint a portrait of Demoyte, the retired headmaster.
Bill, old enough to be her father, falls heavily in love with her and she—improbably but not inexplicably—with him, Demoyte conniving. The situation, delicately made convincing, heads for the inevitable crisis. According to the point of view, tragedy is averted or a happy future sacri- ficed at the end of a loosely linked chain of comic, poignant and unnerving events at which Bill's son and daughter assist. Touches of fantasy or symbolism in the manner for which the author has made herself famous are, though sparingly applied, not conspicuously omitted. 'The Role of the Gipsy in The Sandcastle'—in a decade or two's time some young critic is bound to begin his career with an essay under that heading. Meanwhile, it is quite safe to say that this is an extremely satisfactory novel fully justifying the generous praise it has prominently received. That it is nowhere so 'clever' is to deter any young father and mother from full enjoyment of it is a fact to ensure its reaching the large public to which it is addressed.
Readers who Catch the King Lear allusion in the title The Gilded Fly will be disappointed if they expect Hamilton Macallister's schoolmasters to commit much lechery in his narrator's sight— or out of it. His narrator is George Pent (Oxford : that's- important—his colleagues can do no better than Durham) in his first job at the grammar school of a small Midlands town. Fun is ex- tracted from intrigues for the headmastership, from old cars, difficult boys, troublesome parents, love affairs and the standardised items in the course of a term that extends to 286 pages, on the last of which the old-fashioned words 'The End' are to be read. For a first attempt much here is to be commended : seriously considered it can be regarded as an exposure to lambent light of the types represented by the words 'a half-breed of the class-system, a casualty of education.' Its author will do better than this.
The social-political novel, revived by Maurice Edelman, is evidently coming into favour, at any rate with novelists. Godfrey Smith's The Friends is a smart example of the genre. With excessive ingenuity in juggling with time and a baffling system of chapter numbering it records episodes in the careers of a group of men of our time who first met as undergraduates. At the centre is Richard Skeyne, politician with a creditable past and an assured future, happily married but restless because, apparently, he is aware of his mediocrity and shrinks from accepting re- sponsibility. Or is it because he is nursing regret for the missed opportunity of eloping with an impossible American woman encountered in Geneva? The key to his character and conduct is missing. With the rest of the group there is no difficulty. Even the corpulent and thrice- married Dermot • Mondrago, described as 'the famous poet,' can be tolerated—probably because we are not offered free samples of his poetry. The old tutor as eminence grise, the Jewish financier, the fatuous near-aristocrat, the uncouth Dorset incorruptible—these are distinctly silhou- etted in a witty flash-back operation of which the real object has been concealed.
Wearing decorations conferred by American re- viewers (It is a lusty book, not for the squeamish' —New York Herald), Brother Surgeons, by Garet Rogers, makes fiction of the lives of William and John Hunter. A high-pressure style employing the expletives •`Ecod' and `Bygar,' such compounds as crabsidled and such childhood favourites as 'felled him with one blow' need not hinder the unsqueamish from relishing its proffered excite- ments of body-snatching, its detailed descriptions of disease and the crude methods of ignorant practitioners, and its not quite OK-for-sound Hogarthian brothel scenes.
Jules Renard might have applied to himself what he recorded as Valette's definition of Flaubert : la perfection dtt talent, ntais du talent settlement. In style he was such a perfectionist that translators have fought shy of him : his best have been G. W. Stonier and T. W. Earp. Now Edward Hyams has Englished L'Ecornifleur under the title of The Sponger. Sponger? Isn't that too blatant, too harsh an epithet for the tentative, self-conscious, amateurish parasite Henri? Renard had toyed with the idea of call- ing his book Le Flagorneur, which is something different again. But this will never do. To begin with misgivings is to encourage the kind of cap- tiousness that might object to `I like everything that is eccentric' as a rendering of 'J'aime toril ce qui est original' or the faded journalistic 'We were the cynosure of all eyes' as the equivalent of 'Nous aimantons les regards'; might indeed go so far as to suggest that 'It is this fact which routs me' is no man's language. Best forget Renard and all his works if The Sponger is to provide the entertainment its incidents afford.
DANIEL GEORGE
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