Fiction
IT is hard to read Mr. Charles Morgan's brief and tightly knit story of adolescent passion without thinking of the last descendant in a line of family portraits, where the resemblance between it and its predecessors keeps distracting us from the matter in hand. Some- where in the line is Turgenev's First Love where a boy-hero is similarly posed, even down to the examination he has to pass and the adult rivalries with which he obscurely contends. Just outside our field of vision is the all-important French school with its almost identical scope and surface texture, and in its final representative, Le Grand Meaulnes, equally obsessed with meanings beyond mean- ings. Last and most improbably is the coincidence that Thomas Mann, in Dr. Faustus, has hit on Mr. Morgan's device of making the narrator of his romance a professor of classics in an ancient university.
Perhaps schoolboy love can only be dealt with at one or two removes in this way, and if it is to be prep-school-love, then the narrator had better be as elevated as possible. To place him in North Oxford, as Mr. Morgan does, is to push things to extremes, but the consequences are bravely and logically accepted. The pro- fessor tells his story with a slightly pedantic self-importance which is not without humour. "Then an experience fell upon me," he says, "of such penetrating.impact that, though it must hive been
fragmented in time, it has in memory the effect of a single instan- taneous pang." Thus, to Athenian and Oxonian eyes, was the
capture of the Acropolis by the Persians, but the professor is here recalling the moment, some months before he won a scholarship to Eton, when he saw his successful cousin embraie his own girl- friend. To complicate the issue, his cousin was already and more suitably engaged to his sister, and-bur anxiety in the story is to see the right young men married to the right young women, with the hero left a clear field with the classics around and ahead of him. We do not get, as we do in Turgenev, an impression of being ourselves swept into an overwhelming tornado of passions which are too powerful for us ; our first and strongest impression is the scheme of academic and literary references which belong to the professor and which control the passions and vision of his child- hood with an adult authority. A Breeze of Morning is a book of great professional competence which asserts its position on the wall a little too emphatically for our comfort.
Mr. Anthony West's novel, Another Kind, shows enough vigour and power of invention for at least two novels. He begins' with a family situation in which the husband deserts his wife and children for the sake of a beautiful girl who turns out to be some- thing worse than a successful gold-digger. His discovery of her occupation adds fuel to his passion instead of killing it ; but the wife, a strong and deeply loving character, takes well considered steps to regain him. Here, one would have thought, was enough material for a psychologidal novelist to have his hands full, and it is not as if Mr. West were incompetent with his instinctive memories of D. H. Lawrence and a ruthless artistry of his own. But imperceptibly the love triangle loses importance, and the scene of post-war Britain which we had noticed only as a shadowy and unlikeable background comes ominously into the foreground in the lurid autumn reds which some American visitors are in the habit of ascribing to us. We end .up in a Communist world after a People's Court has decimated the family in which we were interested in quite another sense. The book might be advertised on a " two- in-one " basis ; both kinds of thrill—the psychological and the -social —are more than competently administered ; we respond with excitement and a good deal of defensive protest against the American view of Britain.
Mr. George Theotokas was -perhaps wiser to make his study of Greece between the wars primarily and consistently a social study. Even his title, Argo, is the name of a debating club in Athens University, and although this very readable book is built on the relationship between a law professor and his three unsuccessful sons, the real story is of Greece, its political ferment, its hopes, miseries and eternal vitality.
Mr. Rhys Davies in Marianne gives us an extremely dramatic and expert story of a girl who sets out to marry and destroy the man who had wronged his sister. Successful in the outline of her plan, she makes a spelling slip which entails the slow murder of the wrong man. As there is no means of righting this appalling wrong, we are left with feelings of shock and upset which are more like those to be gained from the Big Dipper than the novel ' • but for those who favour an approach between the two genres, Marianne may be
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