20 SEPTEMBER 1935, Page 30

Fiction

By SEAN O'FAOLAIN His Chinese Concubine. Laurie. 7s. 6d.) The Farm at Santa Fe. 7s. 6d.) The Lion Beat the Unicorn 7s. 6d.) By Norah James. (Duckworth.

NORMALLY one finds room in a page of this size for three or four novels : that is in itself an indication of standards.

Some, more strict, might think that only two-to-a-page novels are of a sufficiently high standard. The complete highbrow might think that too much : thereby coming close to the utter Puritan who thinks that no -novels at all should be reviewed by. a serious journal in these degenerate days. This week because I have had to read quite a bunch of books to find one or two really good ones, and because it may remind people of the nature of the general run of modern fiction, I take leave to deal with a longer list.

M. Dekobra may be ushered in and out without ceremony. He doesn't need it ; his publishers inform us that 4,000,000 copies of his works have been sold. His Chinese Concubine (a deliberate misnomer, just to drag in the shocking word) is placed in China and concerns the antipathies of two brothers, one of the ancient order, the other respectably married to

a French grisette. The tumult of Asia gives M. Dekobra his opportunities for having various people arrested, kid- napped, tortured, shot—the shooting being a positive relief from the scenes of torture : and there is a generous amount of lovemaking. It is an entirely efficient thriller which will probably be found presently on certain uncertain bookstalls in the West End and will be considered cheap at the price.

The Farm at Santa Fe is far more creepy ; and if you do not mind showing that generous and easy disregard for the commonplace on which romance thrives, you will be persuaded

that it is weird without being unreal. Indeed Mr. Kirk must be complimented on the manner in which he has managed to keep those two unsisterly ladies on his hands—Romance and Realism—all through a book which would undoubtedly make a magnificent film. One believes almost entirely in • his two older people, the simple good-hearted Mr. and Mrs. Wilkinson who take Fanny Verney on a cruise to South America to save her from the deadness of Chillinghamt: one believes sufficiently in the warped Keith Buchanan who falls in love with her in Rio : one believes only too well in that farm of his—the secret of which it would be a shame to disclose but which is horrible : that one doesn't quite believe in Fanny or her mother or Chillingham is the measure of Mr. Kirk's aptitude for Romance and his inability to handle the ordinary with the same skill. But what would you ? It is a fine yarn, well told, and the publishers' advice not to read the last few chapters in bed is not merely a good advertisement.

After that gruesome farm in South America you may

need a sedative. Miss Norah James is to hand \vith The Lion Beat the Unicorn. She does not make the common- place of a bookshop in Victoria either marvellous or unusual : for one thing she faces the issue with courage—namely, that it is not, as we might think, nicer to fail to make a livelihood as a book-seller than to succeed as a book-maker ; for another

thing, she is not quite able, or so one feels, to invest a bookshop even with what charm it might in reality possess. But she does one thing which is worth doing—she proves very pleasantly', indeed that with a bookshop in Victoria and the people who pass to and fro by it every day there is as much material for an interesting novel as in things and places . remote as' China or Brazil.

Two other women writers publish volumes A' short stories. Of these one respects the integrity of Miss' PhyllisBentley and admires the elegance of Miss Phyllis Bottome, without feeling certain that the elegance is quite the same thing as mastery either of style or matter or that the integrify has gone just quite far enough. Miss Bottom's stories are the least persuasive stories imaginable : they smell of the shiny magazine. This kind of psychology is much too conventional :

" France was not a country which Basely greatly respected : either Roman Catholic or anti-clerical in its tastes (and Basely thought that neither of these things was nice to be), and once at least revolutionary. Strange when it was so near England l "

And so is this kind of description : " Anna sat down on the grass. The autumn crocuses floated about the meadow, as if their pale pink cups were bubbles blown by a hidden God, out of the spendthrift earth: They were fragile- looking flowers, like the children of old parents."

Yet Miss Bottome always works on good ideas, which is perhaps her weakness : one senses that the " I-want-an-idea-for-a-

story " method is always obliterating the spontaneity of the direct impress of reality.

. At lighter material Miss Bentley is excellent. Her sketch; in " The Lesson," of an elocution teacher is perfect. When she puts herself to a harder test as in " True Reward " the story is always a better yarn but not such a good short-story.

The evil head of that snake in the grass for all tired writers-- Mechanical Technique—raises itself at once : ." But most of the day the grey stone quays lie bare and wind- swept, inhabited only by a few ancient fishermen in mended jerseys, who, propped against bollards and smoking clay pipes, exchange slow words of reminiscence, their faded old oyes fixed on the sea, which always figures in their stories."

It is the typical seaside scene, so typical that it might describe a poster for somebody's tobacco. Come, come Miss Bentley, if the place was windswept where would the old salts be'? Where would any sensible man be ? Especially if he were ancient ? Are not bollards twenty yards apart'? Must they be clay pipes ? And the eyes faded ? And does the sea always figure in their stories? Still, one often feels that

life is flowing naturally into Miss Bentley's work, and to read her at her best is like hearing a real person telling you what she has seen and heard.

There can be no question about the integrity of Mr. Arthur Calder-Marshall. On that count his Dead Centre, a cross- section of public-school life, is unassailable : he wills desper- ately to be honest. His method—a curious one, making one wonder if it could ever result in a novel—is to take some fifty or sixty characters, boys, masters, working-staff, and in a page or two to allow each one speak for himself. There is no development of character or incident, although one inci- dent—a boy's affair with one of the maids—seems at one moment to promise the "old-fashioned" plot. That one does not mind since it is, clearly, part of the author's attitude to the novel to reject old-fashioned technique : what we do mind is that we have forgotten Number One in this Case Book of a Public School by the time we reach Number Six, and that by the end of the book the fifty or sixty characteris have merged into a unified impression of but one thing only- i.e., a Public School. If that was Mr. Calder-Marshall's deliber- ate intention, to make the School the chief character, then his book Is absolutely beyond criticism. It is, in a word, in that case perfect, and we can have nothing but admiration for the deliberateness of his purpose and the suitability of his technique. • Otherwise, it is a collection which includes several brilliant sketches.

Mr. Hanley's novel ought not to have been called Stoker Bush but Anne Bush, for it is the unfaithful wife who is the real focus about whom the other two main characters, her husband and her father, move. If Mr. Manley had realised that—and authors do not always realise what they are doing—his novel would have been much the better. As it is he responds with syrhpathy to the bat-like groping soul of the stoker, and holds 'a fair balance of sympathy and disgust for the stupid, growling, bodzing, owl of a father, while treating Anne rather more mechanically although she is the trigger of the entire move- ment. • The narrative has a sullen, over-slow, even tedious quality, and we are not given much help by the abominable 'style : " Mrs. O'Mara, being born tale-teller and only rival of young lady in Scheherazade, had told of private life of this man, basing this puroly on personal appearance together with fuel from her own vat of imagination, which in opinion of neighbours was inexhaustible. So, coming into this street, old man, who behind locked doors of his house, played wrong way with young girls, was now stared at by women standing at their doors."