paint women as beautifully as Renoir. an his leisure he
marries a Norwegian called Nora, invents an inflatable bathing-costume, which makes him a 'tycoon,' gels mixed up, rather implausibly, with a communist plot, and ends up as a national hero because of seeming to have drowned a communist assault division. By this time, implausibly in a different way, his ambitions have changed to something to do with morality. It's all tremendously and continuously readable, a second-class jolly sexy romp, in fact ; the dialogue is abundant and lively, the girls are pleasant, and there is a good climax, but the author strolls about on the stage too much of the time, saying loudly, and with an immovable grin, how funny and odd and charming and fundamentally harmless everybody is. 1 wish. Mr. Coates, who is obviously a very able writer, had concentrated harder on his characters and on their relations with one another, which he tends to laugh off. If he were to reveal more about the people to whom the funny things happen, the things would be funnier. He need never be afraid of being boring.
background of fairly fashionable post-war London : there are tots of parties and night-clubs and chaps' flats. The whole thing moves on such an exalted plane of hilarious banality that one hardly knows where to fix one's main interest, whether on the cowardly, boastful narrator, in whom his friends see " a certain waywardness, which if properly disciplined, might one day flower into something worth- while, " or on Several, a financial, sartorial, linguistic, poetical, natatorial, mimetic, musical, mystical and mathematical wizard who is also good at arranging flowers, or on the toiling ab ovo expositions of women's magazine cliches. One stares with a kind of admiration - at gawky, long-legged schoolgirls burgeoning into tender woman- hood, at Meredith finding all party politics a trifle—unsophisticated, at the protests that people no longer talk and sing and love and live, at the strangely touching little scene where Meredith and Several, white-lipped with pain, one gathers, at the spiritual barrenness of London, keep their peckerevik by enjoying a snifter : He, poured me a generous measure in a jealous, curving brandy glass, and another for himself. I cupped the glass in my hands and warmed it, and passed the glass to and fro under my nostrils.
Several smiled with pleasure at my obvious enjoyment. " Taste it," he said.
I sipped a little, rolled it over my tongue and teeth, sipped a little more.
" Don't be misled," Several warned me, " it's very deceitful—. as old ab both of us together, and twice as wise."
We sipped the brandy in silence.
Mr. Evelyn Waugh ought to have thought twice before he put those bits about brandy into Brideshead Revisited, and other bits too.
The fundamental qualities of The Flaw in the Crystal. are, regret- tably enough, those of a great deal of contemporary fiction : behind all those off-the-peg avowals of weariness and distaste for the modern world is an ignorance of what that world contains and a disinclina- tion, based on appalling conceit, to go and find out.
Captains Courageous
The Nation and the Navy. By Christopher Lloyd. (The Cresset Press. 18s.)
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