Fiction
Little Coquette. By Renee de Fontarce McCormick. (William
Heinemann. 9s. 6d.) Out of the Dust. By Ruth Cokayne. (Hurst and Blackest. 8s. 6d.) Not Expected to Live. By Marten Cumberland. (Hurst and Blacken. 8s. 6d.) The Right Honourable Gentleman. By Roger Fulford. (John Murray. 6s.)
Lark Rise to. Candleford. By Flora Thompson. (Humphrey Milford, The Oxford University- Press. 15s.) NEARLY every author is blessed in the theme of his own childhood: . the age of innocence is remembered, with humour, tenderness and pity by writers as different as Charles Dickens, Edmund Gosse, 'and Percy Lubbock. But the author of Little Coquette,- a -gory of. a French childhood, has destroyed her own rights in the subject by taking a liberty with truth. She explains in a foreword : " Simone d'Entremont is a little girl such as once I was. My life was like hers . . . The people, the places, the events of which I tell -are in essence true, but the details are drawn from many sources; hence the characters of, the book and the correlation of events are really fictional:" This manoeuvre has not produced at all happy results. The book reads like an autobiography, but the reader senses at once that it is inaccurate. Too much is remembered. On the other hand it cannot be read as a novel because it entirely lacks the .design of a novel. While the book halts between the two, the fiction masters the autobiography, the device destroys the innocence. _ Little Simone is given a phenomenal talent for eavesdropping and reading other people's letters. The device demanded it. How else could a small child have observed all the details necessary to the story? But now the device has tainted the heroine. It has deliberately created an unpleasant child. Lazy, ignorant, inquisitive, spoilt, Simone cannot and does not hold the reader's affection. Mrs. McCormick's ' true memories of her early life in France would probably be as entertaining as childhood memories usually are. But the memories of Little Coquette are unconvincing because too many, and sometimes uncongenial because too scandalous. They are more the tattle of a ladies' tea-party than the memories of a genuine child- hood. But those who enjoy a pitiless stream of gossip will find some amusement here.
Little Coquette is immensely sophisticated. Out of the Dust is precisely the opposite. For her first novel Ruth Cokayne has chosen a particularly difficult theme—London life in peacetime, the scene about eight months from now. She discloses an optimistic heart when she records the consumption in a private-house, during one week of February, of oysters, soles, fowl; pheasants, goose and hare: but on the whole the background of next year's London is well imagined—gamblers in marginal profit, simple housewives
flummoxed. by regulations, theap . grumblers lamenting past over- time money, extortionate restaurants, raucous night-dubs, youthful
societies preaching uplift and being wonderfully boring about it (a result which was not perhaps a part of the authors intention). The background is good, and it is the more a pity that the charac- terisation is weak. A member of the religious pep society might
go to a repulsive night clubi but it is highly improbable that she would propose to make money by a dishonest deal . in_ cars, or
insist on going on tour as a mannequin to display undies. Nor would
her mother feebly allow such: a thing (though she does say " that's right " instead of " yes ") if she - were the well-bred; practical. sensible, experienced W.V.S. lady we are given- to believe. , The elder daughter (engaged to a prisoner of war) invites a- man to play golf the first time-she meets him and-on the next occasion Calls him by' his christian name. He, presumably to return the compliment imparts to her the most scandalous confidences about his dead wife, killed -in an air raid. These characters are not the unpleasant people of the bOok but those who are expected to engage- the reader's sympathies. As with the February menu, they hatre been imper- fectly studied. But in spite of these and many other gross incon- sistencies, the book is easy to read. Miss Cokayne has a simple style and can draw a good background. It would be just to infer that she will write a better novel than this later on.
For a long time now more than one murder has been almost essential to a detective novel. About half way through the story, just as things are straightening out, custom requires a second crime to heighten the hysteria. Lovers of carnage will be delighted to know that Not Expected to Live (an excellent .title) has a total death-roll of seven. Marten Cumberland's type of detective story rests on the tireless assembly of facts. It is not relieved much by humour or character study, which necessarily places it below the best, but the reader will develop an affection for M. Dax of the French police, in whom it is a welcome quality that he does not do all the brilliant work himself. It is a natural and convincing feature of the story that considerable help is given by M. Dax's assistants in the solution of what is certainly a remarkably well-kept secret.
The Right Honourable Gentleman relates the career of Augustus Stryver, M.P., from his humble beginnings at Bury St. Edmund's in 1903, to his lamentable fall in Half Moon Street some thirty years later; tells how he changed his coat, colours, convictions, and even religion, surmounting all the difficulties which might assail the conscience of a National Liberal, and got himself where he always meant to be, in the ranks of the Ministers of the Crown. The book is described as a satire, but it is not quite true enough, sincere enough or disciplined enough to deserve that honourable description. An odd mixture of serious record and farce, it appears to have been written more with a giggle than with tears of righteous anger. It is amusing in places, but not in one particular place. Religious con- version, a subject uproariously funny in the high comedy of Evelyn Waugh, is acutely embarrassing in a work of this kind.
Very welcome is the new addition of Flora Thompson's trilogy. Lark Rise, Over to Candleford, and Candleford Green, now pub- lished together under the title Lark Rise to Candleford. The first of these books was published only in 1939 but they have already established themselves as classics of the English countryside. The new edition is uncommonly well illustrated with wood engravings
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