Fiction
The Promise. By Pearl S. Buck. (Methuen. 8s. 6d.) The Journal of Madame Giovanni. By Atexandre Dumas. Trans-, lated by Marguerite E. Wilbur. (Hammond. 12s. 6d.)
THE publishers of It Always Rains on Sunday tell us nothing in their blurb about its author, Mr. A. J. La Bern. The book opens rather clumsily, as though the writer is uncertain of how best to tackle such a problem, but after a few paragraphs which serve to describe the background, he plunges into the narrative and tells us of some happenings in Whitechapel one Sunday before the war. The Sandigates live in Cornet Grove, regarded by them and their neigh- bours as being a cut above most of the other streets in the district. Mr. Sandigate, who works for a brewery, has been married twice. His second wife is an ex-barmaid. They have one child, a boy of eight, but two unmarried daughters of the first marriage live with them. The story opens on Sunday morning with Mrs. Sandigate screaming for her early morning cup of tea; which in due course is brought to her by Doris, the younger of her stepdaughters.
Browsing over her Sunday newspaper, Rose Sandigate is rather alarmed by the news that an old flame of hers" has escaped from Dartmoor. Her husband is not impressed. He is the sturdy inde- pendent type of British working man, who feels utter contempt and scorn for any other way of life than his own. Rose is somewhat shaken ; she remembers the delirious tastes of high life given her up in the West End by the small time crook Tommy Swann, whose mistress she woulcrcertainly have become had he not landed in gaol shortly after making her the proposal Rose, intimidated by the sentence of three years' penal servitude, escaped from a public-house into the arms of safe, if somewhat dull, matrimony. She has become something of a virago, her tongue, fluent with long practice, makes her the scourge of the neighbourhood. She has grown blowsy and idle, she bosses her stepdaughters and idolises her son. Her husband, with all the sturdy self-sufficiency of his class, controls the opposing elements of his household with ease ; they know that he will meet violence with violence, also that he is stronger than they. are. The family breakfast, then separate, each in pursuit of a personal project, while Rose stays at home to cook the dinner. Mr. La Bern knows his Whitechapel ; he gives us a lively series of studies of its Sunday morning activities, since the Sandigates are various enough to net him (and us) a wide variety of differing encounters. But it is Rose whom fate serves most harshly, for it is to her that the escaped convict makes his way. She hides him in her bedroom. Mr. La Bern tackles the difficulties of his theme with courage and imagina- tion. He overcrowds it with people and with incidents, a fault common in many novels limited by so brief a time-span as a single day. But with all its flaws, the book has a gusto which is impressiVe. The author does not blink at the squalor and poverty ; but he salts his story with irony, so bitterness is never allowed to swamp or jefine the coarse rich humour of the poor. The book ends on. a note of tragedy.
After Mr. La Bern the over-simplified characters of the more
practised Mrs. Buck, Chinese, American and English, all seem highly artificial. The Promise is a sequel to Dragon Seed. We meet again the family of Ling and also the beautiful Chinese glamour girl from America, the cultured Mayli, on whom Third Brother has set his heart. Mrs. Buck, for all her widely recognised sympathy for China and the Chinese, foists on her Oriental lovers the archest type of Western wooing ; employing the Dellian, or delayed action, con- vention between the rough soldier and his highly nail-polished charmer. Sheng crosses the Yunnan-Burma border with his troops. She, after an interview with the Generalissimo and his wife, follows' the young soldier at the head of a nursing unit. The horrors of that first campaign in Burma are sensational enough, but Mrs. Buck, fearing to be thought tame perhaps, adds a suicide or so for good measure. Her British characters are usually either amiable fools or • addable cowards. One episode tells how, having been rescued by• their gallant allies, they retreat without notification, destroying a bridge in their wake, so that the whole of a Chinese division is annihilated by the enemy. Mrs. Buck has won wide recognition for her sentimental interpretations of Chinese life and character ; her present novel is such a confusion of sloppy idealism, romantic non- sense and moral superiority amid the horrors of war, that it will do little service to her reputation.
While it enjoyed a huge Continental success on its first appearance, The Journal of Madame Giovanni, which now appears for the first time in England, can hardly be regarded today as much more than a curiosity of period literature.
JoHN HAMPSON.
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