New Novels
WHAT to read, or whether to read at all, is a problem everyone is wrestling with these days. I believe a good procedure is to read the newspapers, and .for the rest turn to old books, once familiar and always lovingly remembered, but by now, as we shall probably find out, much more than half-forgotten. Poetry is' good to read at present, old poetry ; I re-read Endymion the other night, and although I was surprised by the apt and bitter re- minders of the potency of evil which it contains, the chance escape to the sides of Latmos was astonishingly grateful ; "an endless fountain of immortal drink." Another night I was tantalised—being far from my own bookshelves—by the excellent suggestion for present reading in bed made by Mr. Desmond MacCarthy over the radio, viz., Robinson Crusoe. Obviously the ideal book for inducing the quiet mind, after the midnight news.
But also it is a good thing, I think, for ourselves and for others, if we try to stick as close as we can to the less selfish, more harmless, of our fixed habits. As a principle of behaviour this does at least eliminate occasions of fuss. And I suppose we are all agreed that the less fuss the better. So, if it has been our friendly and laudable habit m read contemporary fiction week by week, let's not be fussy now ; let's go on reading it, taking its ups and downs with the same cheerful patience which I hope we accorded to it in brighter days. Miss Rose Macaulay first then this week—not because this reviewer has enjoyed her book most out of the above list, for that is not so, but because her fame cannot but be reassuring to the fiction-seeker, and because this new book does almost literally guarantee to the civilised one genuine smile per page. Especially to the English liberal civilised, those elect who are always quite as ready to smile at themselves as at the foreigner, only with not quite the same edge of malice.
But some readers may be disconcerted by the gap between Miss Macaulay's two manners of satire. On the one hand, she gives us a well-assorted group of English characters, all but one of them belonging to the cultivated middle class ; and these she satirises freely and fairly, but with a saving warmth of flesh-and- blood affection, and while bestowing on them that individualising vitality which inner knowledge cannot withhold. Opposed to these we have a family of Spanish grandees, each member of it standing for a particular mania of Spanish conservatism, and each a stylised puppet, carelessly, not to say insolently, overdrawn. There is, therefore, a frequent switching from gentle realism to a somewhat shrill artificiality, and this unevenness troubles the form of the book ; as does the introduction of the mermaid character, Ellen, who surely should have had a whole novel to herself. At any rate, she seems even more uncomfortable in this one than her author can have intended her to be. It seems very wasteful treatment of a rich and lovely idea.
The story, however, of And No Man's Wit will interest people who know Spain, have been saddened by the end of her terrible war, and like to debate her problems, and with them the problems of Europe in general, as they stood in August, 1939. Miss Macaulay's little troupe of more or less enlightened English people set out through Spain to find a young man who was son, brother and betrothed respectively to four of them, who had fought in the International Brigade, and, since the conclusion of the war, was missing. - They invoke the aid of an Aragonese landowner who had been the missing young man's friend at Oxford ; so they meet a whole Spanish family, and the book henceforward is well prbvided not only with odd adventures:, but with recurrent dia- le6tical opportunities, all of which are satisfaatOrily taken, right up to the silencing imposed by the Outbreak of the present war. And then: " It is people that matter, he thought. One can differ =about anything, and still sit and talk." That is what we -all believe. It is in defence of that conviction,. largely, that we wage this war, which will have to destroy so Many " people that matter."
Nuns in 7eopardy will not be everyone's book, but it is very agreeable once you get past the first twenty pages or so, which seem.,to promise, only the usual bright youn. g man's re-hash of the shipwreck-and-how-odd-can-we-make-it-this-tithe convention. Mr. Boyd has made it quite refreshingly odd, with no straining for effect, but out of the workings of a free and sensitive imagina-: tion. A -passenger ship, outward bound from Australia, is wrecked, and one boatful of its survivors manages, after a great deal of suffering, to reach a coral island, which- they find. empty of all signs of human life, save for a solitary bungalow, Europeanly built and furnished, and clearly not long deserted by its owner, one MacPherson. They -settle in and around this nucleus of familiar life. Their colony consists of six Anglican nuns, one of them only a novice, young and beautiful ; one schoolgirl.; a cultured English oddity called Mr. Smith ; a handsome ship's offiber called Dick, and an agreeable young sailor called Joe ; two sailor-toughs called Tom and George; and a beautiful copper-coloured islander, called Harry.
You think you know, more or less, how this comedy will pro- ceed—but you do not. And even if in terms of plot you did, that should not lessen your pleasure in Mr. Boyd's subtle exer- cises amid the twists, absurdities, desires and innocencies of the human heart. His comedy, though high, is by no means desic- cated ; he has a careful light touch on human feeling, on phantasies of dream and thought, and even on mystical intima- tions. He is at home with the -eccentricities of truth, and with the truth of eccentricity, so that even if we do not believe in all the odd developments on the island, we do believe in the spiritual and outward adventutes of his major characters, and are touched by them. Wisely no explanation is attempted of Mr. Smith, the Mephistophelian genius, the instigator of good and evil, whose enigmatic influence is justified, and even made necessary by the whole atmosphere of the story. This book makes an agreeable " escape " into a world of vivid - physical beauty, and of psychological phantasy that is always delicate and sometimes touching. Nuns in 7eopardy is the sort of novel which only the English write, I think, and in which they frequently shine.
Priest Island is about a sheepstealer who is exiled for life on a desolate island off the north-west coast of Britain, and about a young woman who hears of his plight, and goes out to share his life and bear him a child. The book has good points ; its practical Robinson Crusoe side will appeal to sensible people, who always like to read of the overcoming of the elementary diffi- culties of living, even when these are recorded by such bores as the Swiss Family Robinson. But Peter Costello is a special kind of bore, the introspective, mystic kind, and not all his knowledge of bird and wild life could make me have patience with his bogus visions and intimations. Mary Byrne had courage indeed to face a whole -lifetime alone with such a ponderous brooder.
The Rich Uncle is a simple, drab, sub-acid tale of how a lot of dull suburban people hover meanly for many years about a wealthy widower, on whose will they have some kind of conventional claim. Their commonplace follies and disap- pointments are neatly worked out, and the author certainly has a talent for delineating deadliness, but the cumulative effect is as of having spent a week-end with irredeemably dull and common
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