Fiction
The Returning Heart. By Dorothy Charques. (Hamish Hamilton.
- 6d-) Green9s Hands. By Barbara Whitton. (Faber and Faber. 7s. 6d.)
Mean Sensual Man. By Stephen McKenna. (Hutchinson.• nos. 6d.)
FoR this week's fictional distraction you can either take a romp with the Land Army girls among the beetroots—and a very innocent, giggly time you will have with Miss Whitton and her playmates— or trot around with Mr. McKenna and " important " people during the decades between the two World Wars, or, more profitably and sadly, pace over twenty-two years of shadowed, uneasy family life in mid-Victorian England, with Miss Dorothy Charques fol. alert and meditative guide.
Miss Charques writes well. She once wrote a fine, strange book, subjective and unhappy, called Between Sleeping and Waking ; in later works, Time's Harvest, and this its sequel, The Returning Heart, she has chosen to be more objective and panoramic, and seeks to relate personal life and sorrow to the wide changes and the onward social march of the Victorian years. If this scheme clogs somewhat her distinctive talent, which is for whatever is poetic, eccentric or moody, there can be no quarrel wins the care and knowledge which
she brings to her large design ; nor, on the other hand, does she allow this largeness to rule out her sympathy with the Misfit and the unlucky. For these are always her best pre-occupation, and she writes of them here with her customary gentleness, and occasionally - with a genuinely poetic penetration. Yet this book lacks vitality ; it is written with justice and delicacy—it is often very delicately witty—and it presents personal problems in a natural perspective ; but as before, in this book's predecessor, pedestrian conscientiousness has defeated the gambling courage of individualism—to our great loss, I think.
dreen Hands is obviously a first effort, and demands no more of us than that we shall be amused at the misadventures—all adjusted to the most innocent family reading—of young ladies who set out from refined homes to lift beetroots, spread muck and deliver milk pour la patrie. Miss Whitton's accurate accounts of land work are very creditable and promising—and indeed they are good enough, and her general method of attack is sufficiently lively and simple to make us hope that she will soon assimilate a very elementary rule of autobiographical fiction, which is that " I " of the story really must not be handed all the bouquets! " I " must not inevitably have the best figure in the company, " I " must not be always a walkover with the men ; " I " truly must be allowed sometimes to make nearly as much of an ass of myself as Anne, or Walter, or Pauline. However, it is clear that the author is all but a child, and she has written with verve and gaiety this innocent account of a hard life into which so many all-but-children like herself are putting so much heart and goodwill.
Those who, twenty-five years ago, liked -reading Sonia will like to read Mean Sensual Man. The author still writes with pro- fessional skill, and still confines himself to presenting the- lives and points of view of those people whose names can be found in Who's Who ; but he does justly record the alterations that take place in both throughout the course of a terrifying and kaleidoscopic quarter- century. A strange and irritating passion for underlining and for unnecessary quotation marks informs every other page of this story of a successful newspaper editor and the many women heln to complicate his life. KATE O'BRIEN.
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