Fiction
Colonel of Dragoons. By Philip Woodruff. (Cape. :as. 6d.) WHEN, as sometimes happens, the English and American novels of the week have brought me to a low condition I have thought how refreshing it might be to read a translation from the Siamese. Here, unexpectedly, is a Turkish novel of not at all foreign temper and of no little charm and interest. From Sir Wyndham Deedes, who has quite plainly gone about a confessed labour of love with uncommon skill and sympathy, we learn that Mr. Guntekin, who is today the Turkish representative with Unesco, is almost the only Turkish author to be made known here in translation—a pity, surely. An earlier novel of his was apparently published in this country under the title of The Autobiography of a Turkish Girl. The present work, which at any rate in narrative mode and in its even-paced descriptive realism is scarcely distinguishable from what we produce at home, has an ease, tact and veracity that provide the pleasantest relief from the all too evident strain or disproportion of most types of the contemporary home product. Not that it is an altogether satisfactory novel. Scene and incident are knit together with genuinely picturesque effect, but the Mediterranean light and warmth of the opening are not sustained, a shrewd and salt comic vigour in the ,margin of the story is too soon discarded, and the psychological or sentimental emphasis of the later half of the book grows repetitiie. Yet clarity and coherence of imagination, qualities in a novel which generally deterinine, I think, all the rest, are always engagingly there.
Set in the period of the last decades of the Ottoman Empire, for
the most part in a Mediterranean island by the name of Meis, the story retraces the history of a middle-aged to elderly farmer, Nazmi Bey, who is greatly revered by the islanders. Admirable fellow though he is, Nazmi's saintliness is never made -appafent in his recital of his own fortunes—a weakness, this, all through. A high. spirited schoolboy, a dashiiig young staff officer at Saint-Cyr who became known as " the Prince of the Bosphorus," pleasure-loving, reckless and intelligent, Nazmi iought in a score of guerrilla engage- ments in the Balkans, contracted rheumatic fever and retired from the army to his island farm. Here he married the cousin who had always adored him and discovered peace of mind amid scenes of bucolic seclusion. Then Jiilide appeared, an orphan with sea-green eyes, impenetrable, sophisticated and ironical, for whom he felt only a rage of distaste until love woke in him, a man almost three times her age. This, in its familiar idiom, makes a candid and touching story, restrained though drawn-out in the telling. Meis and its island manners are charmingly realised, Nazmi's courtesy of mind and heart is extremely well brought out, and Jiilide herself, for all that the transitions of feeling between them are over-emphasised and altogether too prolonged, is real enough. -But then reality, in this context of romantic feeling or behaviour, is something that derives in the first place from the novelist's force of conviction on the subject.
Mr. Guntekin, I would say, is much more convinced where he stands in this as in other matters than is Miss Elizabeth Taylor, whose story of an " inconsolable love," cleverly and sensitively handled though it is, seems to me to be too flagrantly made up. Does Miss Taylor really believe in Harriet and her wispy, ghostly. incandescent passion for Vesey ? Both are so unsubstantial as human beings, so amorphous in character, that it is not at all easy to identify or resolve their feelings for one another. From chile- hood—somewhere in the Home Counties—Harriet doted sacrificially and ignorantly on Vesey. She worked in a shop while he postured at Oxford—he meant to be a writer—and then, when her mother died, married Charles, who was a solicitor and older and is scarc6 less shadowy. With a daughter of fifteen she still trembled at the thought of Vesey, now a poor and shabby actor, while with tiw tears running down her face she loved or tried to love Charles. Miss Taylor's is a novel of acute feminine sensibility, which bears the impression of Miss Elizabeth Bowen's example, particularly in the atmosphere of the dimly-lit scenes in street or teashop between the constrained, reluctant, obsessed lovers. She has excellent moments of small observation, passages of delicate and clever comedy—the cleverness in the dialogue is at times patently out of character—and is reasonably restrained, on the whole, in her addic- tion to the pathos of being female. But A Game of Hide and Seek is without the gift of storytelling. It lacks any sort of unity and i• too often inconsequential.
After a novel about insanity Mr. Fritz Peters has produced a novel about homosexuality—an American novel, it is almost unnecessary to say, though with a French setting. Well meant, I do not doubt, Finistere certainly avoids adding to the verities. subtleties, audacities or wha•ever else which apnarently reside in this over-written subject. But it is rather too facile in imagination to project much more than the typical-.case-book circumstances of a psychopathology of childhood. There are knowledgeab:e and. daresay, illuminating things in the book, but too much, evasion and too much sentimentality—much too much—to make -the net very comprehensible business comprehensible, not to say " signifi- cant."
Described as not a novel, not pictorial biography, but " a chrome in which the historical characters say and do only what is recorded in their own letters and diaries." Colonel of Dragoons is concerned with the brilliant enterprise of the rash, the vehement, the magnifi- cent Peterborough in the Peninsula during the autumn and spring of 1705-06, about which I know nothing. Mr. Woodruff has several maps and some eighty pages of notes at the end of the book. He writes with a feeling for language. with care and enthUsiasm 10.1. his subject, and he has invented in Colonel Awbyn of the " Queen' Dragoons" a most prepossessing soldierly soldier. One like', 3 story, all the same, in what is presented in the form of fiction.
R. D. cliARQurs
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