Fiction
Insurrection. By Liam O'Flaherty. (Gollancz. 95. 6d.) AFTER an interval of ten years another novel from Mr. Ralph Bates, and very welcome it is.. Childhood in a Wiltshire village during the golden years before 1914, -hero-worship of a cousin who was shot for cowardice and insubordination in France, a frustrated— it is the only word—love affair, and so to Spain, the dream country of Roger Frome's earliest desires. rt is a delicately written book, fine and fastidious in its choice of words, warm and tender in its feeling for comedy and admirably -sustained on a note of intimate recollection. Altogether a book that offers an uncommon degree of pleasure. Yet I am not sure, remembering Lean Men and The Olive Field, that this is quite the sort of thing to be looked for from Mr. Bates. It wants something, I think, of austerity. For all his economy of phrase the sentiment of nostalgia is too pervasive, the recollection of Wellingdon Parva too loving,' the morning light on the hills too golden. And the exchanges of Roger and Ruth, like Cousin Will's merriment and Aunt Sally's bitter- sweet tongue and the Wiltshire dialect as a whole, seem to me just a little larger than life But I.complain too much. The Dolphin in the Wood is the work of a very gifted writer, and wears its liveliness and strength of imagination or memory with genuine charm.
Summer In the Country, a first novel by a writer for whom English is an acquired tongue, is comedy of a spirited and accom- plished order. To the extent that three-quarters or more of the book consists of family conversation7-it is an odd family, too, or odder than most—the work bears_. ome resemblance, I suppose, to the novels of Miss Compton-Burnett. But the -talk of Miss Temple- ton's characters is much less stilted and has far more substance. They are Bohemian gentry living in a dubiously impoverished style in a baroque castle not far from Prague—the period is the early 1920s—and the comedy they enact in the presence of a poor bourgeois fish of a visitor, a shallow, climbing young lawyer, springs from character and situation and not from a laboured and un- differentiated verbal contrivance. Miss Templeton is light, assured, delicately and sometimes mordantly acute. I wish she had not funked the ending. Mr. O'Flaherty's new novel gives yet another account of the Easter Rising. of 1916. Much of it is done with considerable power—there are scenes of mob violence and hysteria that carry a specially brutal emphasis—but the description as a whole is some- what rhetorical. The innocent young man from Connemara who is caught outside the Post Office by " the Idea " and experiences the " dark rapture " of killing is, I fear, an Irish puppet ; while the simplicity of Mrs: Colgan must appear, on this side of the Irish Sea, mere ghoulish idiocy. Still, the emotional fire and the horror
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