FICTION

By KATE O'BRIEN Rabble in Arms. By Kenneth Roberts. (Collins. 9s. 6d.) The Adventures of Christopher Columin. By Sylvia Thompson. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.)

The Young Cosima is a pity. A disappointment. Reading it I frequently put the book down and wondered if, in fact, it was all a mistake about- Henry Handel Richardson. I recalled the vices of style which had done their best to kill the Richard Mahony novels, and I though; with anxiety of Maurice Guest. Could that have been, .for all the vividness of memory, a badly written, unimportant book? So I thought I would turn its pages, and I took it from the shelf and, meaning to dip about, read it through—for the third time. It is not merely not a badly written, unimportant book, but it is magnificent and passionate. It has all the weaknesses of style of the strong writer. It is repetitive, exuberant, and sentimental. But it is a superb, true tragedy of weakness and strength, and music, gaiety, ambition and despair blaze through it. From its young executant all might have been expected, and those who trumpeted it were surely right in their praise and expectancy. I have never felt myself, while saluting their creative energy and bitter sadness, that the Richard Mahony books, clumsy, dusty, and careless, were the development most happily to have been expected from the young, hard intuition that knocked out Maurice Guest. But they were good books—rough, impertinent giants to the frivolous dwarfs of fiction being spawned about them.

The Young Cosima is nothing like that. It is a nice, neat book, like many others. What has happened to Henry Handel Richardson? Why, in any case, was she led to choose a theme so over-memoried, over-recorded, over-historied? Surely strength knows itself, and that if it is literally crea- tive, as hers is, it cannot be cabined by bibliographies? Or did music, which she knows, mislead her? Was she seduced from creativeness by a too easy love of the world where music is the thing? I believe so, and I regret an unlucky abduction of one art from another. For this novel—of the very interest- ing early life of that woman who was daughter of Liszt, and wife of Hans von Billow and of Richard Wagner—is not, in the high sense of Henry Handel Richardson and others, a novel, but a very scrupulous and honourable shaping together into narrative form, with nervous and limited imaginative lighting, of facts which this adjuster is too true an artist to injure, even though such restraint destroys her own great talent.

It is a terrible problem, this, of documents and dead but true lives in the hands of that kind of artist whose power is not in manipulation but in creation. Henry Handel Richardson was never a reproducer, but always a maker of characters. One feels in this book, taken as it must be from records, a fearful embarrassment before its fixedness. Were style, adjustment a,,A decor the strengths of its author, there might have been no cl'fficulty—but since she is great in her lack of these strengths .,nd almost solely because of her power to invent passion and character, since she is great in her freedom and in her indepencknce of incidental failure—this history, tut of the books of gossips and letter-writers, was not her theme.

Nevertheless, it certainly makes an interesting story. And this great novelist who has used it, bending her power, has shown Cosima by no means invented, but, as she must have been, wise, hard, alluring, true, courageous and generous. She is not so successful with Wagner, who can hardly have been quite the easy, coy, small stormer of these pages. But von Billow is convincing, and their triangular situation must be, without reference to documents, true. It is painfully repetitive of climax, as the triangular dramas of the intelligent always are. And as we read scene after scene, and see more and more clearly with each the impossible loyalties involved, to music, to passion, to self-love and to worldly interest, we see what drew Henry Handel Richardson to her involved and eternal theme—but, remembering Maurice and Louise and Schilsky, we wish that she had forsaken the alluring but too fixed truth of history and invented her own Wagner, her own Cosima—for scrupulousness has killed, as it must, creative passion, and has, curiously but perhaps naturally, emphasised her willingness to lean on clichés.

There Needs No Ghost is, as novels go nowadays, a blessed

relief. is honest-to-God entertainment, and when, I ask

you, does that crop up? Mrs. Adam is a writer to be observed. I- did not read her first book, War on Saturday Week, but her second, I'm Not Complaining, was a very

brilliant study of schoolmistresses in a provincial elementary school. This new novel has defects, certainly—the chief of them being that our satirist, nervous of her brutal, dry power,

decided to tell her story through two mouths instead of one.

Her theme is the week or so of crisis last autumn, while we waited for war. And she begins, superbly in my opinion, to

tell us of what that time was like through the medium of

Miss Ethel Perry, the Vicar's sister in the village of Caledon, in East Anglia. But, alas! she does not stick to this interpreter,

but finds it necessary to complicate and vulgarise her satire by letting us have half of the story—the more involved, personal and unnecessary half—from the tiresome young mistress of a painter in London, who comes with her baby and her painter—for the baby's sake—to the safety of Caledon, where she had spent her unofficial honeymoon. All her part of the

narrative is tricky and knowing, and just like anyone's novel— but Miss Ethel Perry is an idiot, good, sweet and brainless, and though not quite in the class of Miss Bates of Emma, yet

rings that sort of bell. It is a thousand pities that Mrs. Adam did not make the effort necessary to place the whole story cf Caledon in the Crisis in Miss Perry's hands. Had she

braced herself to that, Miss Rose Macaulay might have found a rival at last. As things are, her threat is only a far-off-hint- but it is audible; and meantime, Mrs. Adam is unquestionably an ironic and informed entertainer.

Cossack Commander is an extremely well translated, and therefore, I take it, an extremely well-written novel of the

adventures in 1918-19 of the wild Cossack battalions which became a part of Russia's Red Army in the confused and un- wieldy civil war of that time. Kochubei was an amazing

Cossack, an illiterate and irrepressible genius and leader of men, and those who care to read of the valours and dis- asters of those years in Russia will find in this book much to entertain and inform them, and much also that is humanh touching and well imagined.

Rabble In Arms is by Kenneth Roberts, and therefore all who enjoyed North-west Passage will be on the look-

out for it. Further, those who care deeply for the intri- cacies, wrongs and rights of the American War of Inde- pendence will find their passions well engaged by this industrious re-establishment of some of its events. Thee

can debate with themselves and their author the questionable, intriguing character of Benedict Arnold, against whom the narrator of this lengthy book, Captain Peter Merrill, will not hear an adverse word, but whom cold history treats more temperately. However, this uninformed reviewer. never before having heard, to her recollection, of General Arnold, must leave the rights and wrongs of him as she find, them here very generously set out in partisanship, but by an author who clearly knows his history and his references, and can only say that those who like a long show story of endu- rance, mitigated by an absurdly conventional plot of love and espionage, and supported by what appears to be sound historicity, have -here their good, strong cup of- tea—Boston tea. Mr. Roberts is, in his pedestrian way, both an exacting and a rewarding author.

Miss Sylvia Thompson has once again, in The Adventures of Christopher Columin, disappointed us with an irritating glimpse of how good a satirist she could be, if she could

avoid cold feet after the first thirty pages. Christopher Columin begins so well that his odyssey, once he really gets started, is quite shockingly nonsensical. He meets a nice little boy. Everyone and everything else that happens to him is synthetic honey.