New Novels
Private Life of an Indian Prince. By Mulk Raj Anand. (Hutchinson. 12s. 6d.) Now or Never. By Wayland Hilton-Young. (Cresset Press. 10s. 6d.) MR. MULK ANAND'S villainous hero, the Maharaja of Shampur' known to his intimates as Victor or Vicky, is the type of Indian prince one used to find living in exile on the Cote d'Azur ; but that was when the British were ruling India. Now they have gone. And how is the new India to draw under a central government this back- ward little State of Shampur and its hysterical ruler, so devoted to " independence," and one soon sees why. The story ire told by Dr. Shankar, English-educated and in attendance upon the Maharaja for the sake of the money, though he often feels he ought to go away and help the oppressed animals and people. Armed with a clinical ther- mometer and a capacity for soft answers, Dr. Shankar takes part in the arguments and insults ... " At this Srijut Popatlal J. Shah flushed a vivid coffee colour." The main theme of this not altogether edifying book is His Highness's infatuation for the hill woman Gangi, whose "frailities, ficklenesses and cruelties were the secondary hues as against the lush splendour of the primary colours of her lusts and passions," as Mr. Anand puts it. He has this affection for tumultuous words but often when the reader thinks he is drowning there will come a quick bright phrase like a hencoop on the floods... " The poignant yearning for the holy life made Victor's face look a trifle bilious." Dr. Shankar, as we have seen, also hankers after righteousness and in the end, having said goodbye to Vicky in the lunatic asylum of which he is by now a fully qualified inmate, the doctor sets out to help the " crude rough people, who stank no better than their oxen." His English education may be held in part responsible for this practical step. Indeed what makes this book so particularly fascinating is the evidence it gives of strong English- Indian mixed feelings running in the blood. It is rather like an uneasy but indissoluble marriage, of whose humours and importance the author is usually, but not always, aware.
M. d'Autheville's novel, admirably translated by Baroness Bud- berg, is extremely bizarre. One is not sure where the author stands, but certainly lie does not ask us to disbelieve the spells and witch- craft and the opinions of the heroic Dr. Henrik upon theosophy and the rights of the Mtislim genie to operate in a world of sanitary squads and anti-locust flame-throwers under a French Colonial Government grown loving and practical ... " I'm trying camphor', he said, 'Caffein no longer has any effect.' " The setting is a French military post in south Morocco, efficient and friendly but with an eye open for trouble on the frontier. The beautiful young Berber girl of forceful character, called Saadia, is supposed to be unlucky because all her fiances have died violently and also the weather is being unusually destructive. Dr. Henrik is sad because his fiancée was taken up by the Nazis, for which he blames his own carelessness. There is a lesbian sorceress called Fatima who fancies Saadia. There is also an irritable professor of zoology— " You put soft insects into alcohol ; hard insects are impaled, sir, impaled. How often must I repeat it "—who is searching for rats whose hairs stand on end ; but the authorities are only interested in the plague-carrying variety. When the bubonic plague breaks out, Saadia, riding by night, kills the enemy chieftain who has stolen the vaccine from the crashed aeroplane, and rides back with it. While social life at the settlement is enlivened by the dancing of the Blue Girls, descendants of temple prostitutes, industrious, innocent and serious, the dark spells of Fatima pursue their victims. She is a woman with one black eye and one gray. She turns herself into a yellow dog, still with one black eye and one gray, and scratches on Saadia's door. In the end she has to be burnt alive as a witch. Why does not this book dismiss itself as nonsense ? Because it has such beauty and simplicity, because the words and images are so fresh, because there is no facetiousness and the wonderful and the practical are matched with a child's eye and because the author, for all his simplicity has a remarkably shrewd insight into human character. "At Poitiers, where she had to change, she hadn't been able to resist the temptation." This art of beginning well is not the least of M. Simenon's great gifts. An ageing woman, grossly fat, is plodding home from a life given up to sordjd misadventures and drink in South America, Egypt and Turkey, to the family house in provincial France where she hopes to find her brother. He has just hanged himself. This woman, Jeanne, Aunt Jeanne to her brother's dis- ordered family, instead of lying down and dying, as she, thought, takes on a life of practical helpfulness. M. Simenon, in fact, appears to have written a moral tale, the moral being—salvation through works and let faith go hang. Jeanne's seventeen-year-old niece is debauched and sullen, the sullenness being hopeful because youthful. In an interview, as unsavoury as it is comical, the girl confesses to her aunt, with a mixture of pride and shame which is also youthful, the details of her wickedness. Her aunt, playing ace to that king, responds with some details of her brothel in Istanbul. Jeanne's helpfulness is marred by attacks of dropsy and we hear again from the excellent gruff doctor who came the night of the suicide. The dead man had been operating unsuccessfully on the black market. A hysterical sister-in-law, a weak nephew who promoted his sister's vices, a niece-in-law whose detested baby Jeanne has to tend, feed and pacify, serve as a general gloom to make Jeanne's late-flowering virtue shine brighter. When one has paid tribute once again to this author's astonishing artistic vitality it remains to be said that this tale by and large seems odd. Mr. Hilton-Young is very good about the Civil Service in Now or Never ; one especially warms to him for his shrewd defence, in the mouth of one of his characters, of Whitehallese. Ministers, he says, are tired when they come to reading Cabinet papers and they like things couched in familiar terms—" On a basis of the quanti- fication of these provisional index figures.... Due to this I feel on balance," and so on. The persons in the story are the disinherited landowner, young James ; Otto, bright hope of the Ministry, whose grandfather, old Casali, bought James's family's landed estate ; Lesley, girl medical student, engaged to the good Otto but switching to James ; and Miss Selina Waterbutt who marries Otto.. There is a general feeling about the love situations that it does not matter who marries whom, a pettishness and lack of depth. Otto's father plays a sinister part but as he overheard Lesley describing the family as " criminal profiteering wops" he may be excused. The book is
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