Fiction
By GRAHAM GREENE UNDOUBTEDLY an aesthetic pleasure can be gained from reading Dr. Cronin, the pleasure of observing a certain kind
of novelist flowering with a superb unconsciousness. Here, pressed between two covers, is a perfect example of the Popular Novelist. Viewed in this light his defects become positive qualities. One is inclined to praise his inability to create a plausible human being, for one real character would break the book and Dr. Cronin's importance as an Awful Example. A long literary pedigree is of importance to characters in a novel of this class ; it is a badge of respect- ability, an assurance to the reader : You have met us all before in the hest of company. There will be nothing to shock, nothing to disturb you, nothing to give you ideas."
So in Grand Canary we have the missionary seduced by a loose woman, the boxer with a " seductive Irish voice " who reads Plato (spelt Playto to indicate the brogue ; but how does Di. Cronin pronounce the name ?) ; the cockney bawd ; the sardonic, embittered doctor, won back to hope in life by the love of a good woman whom he nurses through the yellow fever. Their physical appearance is minutely described- " chiselled " features, " strong teeth, sometimes firm " teeth, sometimes perfect " teeth, almost always ".white " teeth ; they " hiss " words, their eyes blaze. This is all fair barnstorming, board-rattling stuff, but the popular novelist must also know how to write grandly. On these occasions the English language loses any meaning whatever for Dr. Cronin. Literary phrases run riot. He turns berserk, reckless of consequenceS: " Slowly before their eyes the day languished as with love, swooning towards the arms of the dark." Dr. Cronin is liable to turn nature on with a tap at the most unnecessary moments. When the missionary succumbs to the loose woman (" He stumbled inside the cabin. He closed the door.") the next chapter opens with
supreme irrelevance : " But night succumbed in turn to morning and all the warm beauty a the darkness drooped into the ocean like a languid hand."
It is extraordinary how obscure the Popular Novelist can be without losing his public (Dr. Cronin speaks somewhere of a silence which is lingering yet chaste," of omniscient winds," and his principal characters are frequently having visions " which words could never formulate "). This is sometimes explained by what is called the narrative gift. He may not be able to create character ; he may not have much of a story to tell, but how quickly it is said, how cleverly he tells it. This is not true of Dr. Cronin, whose characters all tell each other what they know already as in old-fashioned plays, and it is difficult to understand how a narrative gift can ever be said to exist apart from any merit of style, story or character. Mr. Kincaid certainly has the gift, but he also has the gift of creating character and he has an extraordinarily interesting story to tell.
,Durbar describes one day in the life of a Native State.
In the dreadful palace with its Victorian Gothic facade, its Pre-Raphaelite stained windows; its rooms full of Second Empire brit-b-brac, deck chairs and rustic seats and musical boxes and bugs, soap advertisements and sports photos, the old Frineess Indira plots against the life of the Raja. The Raja, a young man who had been educated at Oxford, had had his will power killed by drugs and his brain is a confusion of memories of his father, the coarse old sadistic warrior watching elephant fights in a reeking arena, and of Oxford— dons' breakfasts and punts and parties at the ' Trout.' The dynasty, though not his life, is saved by the courage of his wife and by the old Prime Minister, Nana Saheb, a secretive, courteous Brahman, who, when -rifles begin to be used in the city, reassures the British Resident with a story of fireworks for the Durbar, as intent on saving the State from English interference as from the Princess's conspiracy. This is a quick, flamboyant, exciting novel. The strangeness ..
of native customs are never tiresomely explained ; you are never conscious of a guide at your elbow-describing, pointing out . . . It is as though you were whirled through the city in a fast car, catching a glimpse here of odd costume, of curious behaviour, an appalling stench at this corner, at that the scent of unfamiliar flowers. You see what you can, you forget, you remember.
The growth of a novel in the mind of the author has a particular" interest. Was it a " story which first flashed on the fancy, a relationship, a character ? I think in 111r;. Mordaunt's case it was a character, in Mr. Kincaid's a Ntnrv. One imagines how Mrs. Van Kleek first appeared to Mr,. Mordaunt, completely herself, with her ninetyish curves and her egregious Hotel on a tropical island and her thin black cigar and her " girls " on the back verandah. Turgencv once told James that his novels always began with this vision of a person. Afterwards he had " to imagine, to invent and select and piece . together the situations most useful and favourable to the sense of • the creatures them- selves, the complications they would be most likely to produce and to feel." It is here that Mrs. Mordaunt has failed ; one believes in Mrs. Van Kleek, one does not believe in the sentimental story told about her ; of how the son she had deserted when he was a baby came to her hotel, a mis- sionary in pursuit of an eloping wife ; how she followed him without betraying her identity into the plague-stricken village where he was working, and after he had died in her arms, returned to her hotel, and her cigar, and her girls. But though the story is sentimental in conception, it is very well executed, and the portrait of Mrs. Van Kleek has a bold maturity. Her life had run " through the houses of rich men and poor men, aristocrats and nouveaux riches, from Peckham Rye to the courts of Rajahs," and now the friend of the English Governor and the Catholic priest, the owner of the only hotel and the keeper of a polite brothel, she talked with an easy unconventional wisdom; "I have encountered a great many grand passions in my life, on the whole they amounted to very little, scarcely a man among them I really liked."
Perhaps The Enemy at the Gate, among these novels, keeps the best balance between story and character, but at great expense. It is a typically French study of morbid psychology, as mechanically competent as the novels of Julian Green, without that author's restraint. M. t'Serstevens has only been able to limit his subject by isolating his characters in one of those small sandy villages so far from urban contact that one cannot believe that they exist today. The number of sexual dramas concentrated in one district are unbelievable. " In each fold of this earth, encrusted with sea salt, delivered up to the storms, there lurked comedy or drama, inspired by love." The novel has the romanticism, the technical skill and the complete unreality of those magnificent cloudy engravings of the Byronic period.
Any newcomer to detective fiction deserves admiration ; invention is perceptibly drying up. It becomes harder and harder to create a new crime or a new detective. Mr. Masterman seems happily unaware of the need of a new crime. The case he presents is very ingenuous. An unpopular Oxford don is found shot in the rooms of the Dean of the College. Circumstances make it certain that the murderer can only be one of the members of Senior Common Room who had dined in college that night. Of the twelve dons four had perfect alibis, seven have no alibis at all. The amateur detection is carried out by a Viennese lawyer lecturing at Oxford for the faculty of law. His method of detection is extremely simple ; it depends chiefly on his intuition, and the reader can hardly share his intuition. The crime, from the lack of any proof whatever, would never have been brought home if the murderer had not confessed, an unsatisfactory ending. As a detective story, therefore, Mr. Masterman's novel cannot take a high place; as a novel it can be recommended. It is written in a charming, tentative style which catches the character of the old Senior Tutor who tells the story ; and the character of the athletic, brilliant egotistical Dean, " with a great pretentious facade and behind only a few mean shallow rooms," has a solidity one seldom finds in a detective
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