New Novels
THE TEMPTATION OF ROGER Hutton. By Edward Newhouse.
(Gollancz, 12s. 6d.)
THE CRUISER. By Warren Tute. (Cassell, 15s.) THE SUMNER INTRIGUE. By Frank Swinnerton. (H utchi nson, 12s. 6d.) ONE is amusedly sorry for poor Roger Heriott. He is yet another of those decent, economically vulnerable little guys whose consci- ence, as American writers keep telling us, is the seismograph of their society. A shrewd, urbane, autocratic old uncle has rescued him from a dingy academic job and installed him as Executive Secretary to the Averill Foundation, which, among other things, dispenses fellowships to violinists. One young candidate, pro- pelled by his dreadful mother, is a genius and sure to win on merit. Unfortunately he seems to have stolen a worthless but talismanic paper-knife from old Miss, Averill, and the uncle, who controls the Foundation, will no more countenance kleptomania than a nephew's intransigence. The penalty awaiting Roger, should he back his esthetic conscience to the point of resignation, is forbiddingly underlined. It would consist in teaching agricultural students at a Mid-Western college, the academic equivalent of a salt mine, how to correspond with mail-order firms—a grim prospect, but hardly worse, even on a halved income, than repeated collisions with the mother, who denies the theft. Time is short—one fears for Roger's duodenum—but not too short for a further crop of crises to mature. The privacy of his office, already compromised by a malignant spy-secretary, is suddenly invaded by Munn, his father-in-law, a gross, genial W. C. Fields- plus-Incredible-M izner of a man, who himself is simultaneously afflicted by a drunken mistress and a bout of residual decency. This old scamp would like to do good to his grandchildren and has a tidy sum with which to do it, but his past exploits in sex and finance have detained his daughter, Roger's wife, in a state of
pathological home-pride charged by hate and fear. Munn's for- tune is in the balance, his daughter shuns hie, and Roger's future is there once more at the mercy of an obsession; but even this dots not fill the busy fortnight covered by these pages. His cousin Carol, an elegant, promiscuous floater from the world of Scott Fitzgerald, is also on his hands (Wary was thirty; she looked thirty. Carol must have been thirty-six; she looked twenty-five. Make it twenty-eight.'). She is having trouble with a lifegtfard picked up in Florida : 'I don't know what possessed me to bring that boy up here. He did, I guess. Very tender. And athletic. In so many ways. All night. Never saw anything like it. Had absolutely nothing left over for anything else. Wouldn't go to work. . . . He started running into money. Developed tastes, you know. Shirts, luggage, painted ties. That wouldn't have been so bad. But then he got ambitious. Drummed up projects . . . one of those glass- bottomed boats. Those boats are quite costly. Absurd. And that's when he started getting nasty. Oh, but nasty. The way extremely stupid people get, you know? . . . You don't suppose Daddy [the powerful uncle] will do something drastic?'
These problems, and there are several more of them, are posed and developed in well individualised and effective dialogue. Roger can hardly be said to surmount them, but they all pan out in the end. It all goes to support the stubborn American belief in the power of purposeful good will to change society. It is, however, hardly surprising that Roger himself, in the centre of this adroitly depicted maelstrom, is less a character than a kind of articulate vortex.
From all accounts—and certainly from Niven Busch's The Actor—a space-cadet is a Sussex farmer by comparison with the more prosperous inhabitants of Hollywood; nothing and nobody, it seems, can invest these creatures with any serious semblance of reality. Fortunately Mr. Busch's main character, Dan Prader, ex-cowboy, ex-star, and now (in his fifties) an intermittent stunt- man, is far from prosperous, though on payout nights he is slightly more so than his wife until she catches up with him. His wife is a loyal, ill-used but evidently beloved hell-raiser, as adept in arousing the passion she fails to monopolise as in beating up its casual beneficiaries. Their estranged son is now an ace director who refuses to employ his father until the climax on location in Mexico, where Dan faces the triple hazard of an importunate female lead in a mauve Cadillac, a pursuing wife and a mortally dangerous cliff-jump on horseback. The right values achieve a triumph which the very stuff of film life contrives to denude of dramatic value.
Happily for most British readers, the life of the Royal Navy seems to have the opposite effect. Mr. Warren Tute, himself a former naval officer, in writing the life of an imaginary cruiser completed in 1938 and sunk in 1940, has paid a fervent and more or less uncritical tribute to naval tradition with the minimum of help from his characters and the maximum from factual detail. The latter, admirably presented, builds up a satisfactory effect of power; the former are rudimentary. Captain Trevesham, like C. S. Forester's captain in The Ship, is a being of improbable distinction; the only man to fall down on his job is inevitably the wealthy, caddish torpedo officer; the rest of the wardroom are schoolboys, not always overgrown; the lower deck, despite a mort of salty humour, is a floating servants' hall. The Navy, how- ever, has a way of conforming to its tradition, and the loss of realism is thus probably less than might otherwise appear. The last action is undeniably impressive.
'Like all FrAnk Swinnerton's novels,' says the blurb of The Sumner Intrigue, 'this is perceptive, ironic and unsentimental.' It might have added, and certainly implies, that this tumultuous affair, much of whose action is seen through the eyes of an intolerable old watchmender, is informed by a zest for life. There are hordes of characters bursting with it, or something like it, and Thorphill is a nice enough old place to have merited the scrutiny of Hugh Walpole. The perceptiveness, irony, lack of sentiment (where applicable), gusto, local colour, etc., are de- livered in short, breathless, exclamatory sentences which approxi- mate to the stately rhythm of a cock-fight. H. M. CHAMPNESS
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