Fiction
Seven Tempest. By Vaughan Wilkins. (Cape. 9s. 6d.)
THE mixture as too often before. Four pieces of fiction, all up to entertainment standard, one supposes—if that depends on narrative tidiness and attention to the obvious points of repre- sentational detail. Four stories for the war-captious, differing from each other in everything save in their uniform failure to become novels—that is, to translate life rather than to copy it, to imagine character rather than to accept types.
Superficially, both Mr. Wilkins and Mr. Beresford attempt the imaginative effort, in that the one creates, with care and vigour, a vast nineteenth-century scene, and the other, with even more care but with insufficient vigour, invents a curious immediate future for England and for Europe ; but neither troubles to create a living character or anything more than a low-relief of
human actions. •
However, for those who enjoyed And So Victoria, Seven Tempest may not seem disappointing. It is a tale of the early years of Queen Victoria's reign, and contains masses of period detail, a great variety of figures, and many sketches of historical personages. The book might indeed be described as a pageant of immoral European Royalties and of Hogarthian oddities. Its heroine, Princess Anne Louise, Duchess of Limburg, belongs to the spirited, defiant category of fiction-princesses, and is depicted without variation throughout the book. One may question, how- ever, whether " Uncle Leopold " of Belgium, to whose remark- able talent for making the wheels go round full justice is done by Mr. Wilkins, would not have been a better judge of character than to be so easily deceived by a wench of seventeen. But the portrait of the first king of the Belgians, is entertaining, if un- likely' Prince Albert the Good, though always good, makes some lively and improbable appearances, as the story threads its variegated and determinedly romentic way. Mr. Wilkins spares himself no pains within the limits of his conception, and he writes with vigorous descriptive ability, concentrating always on episode and scene, and caring not at all for character or feeling.
Mr. Beresford's reputation for sound and thoughtful work will secure many readers for his fanciful guess at a way out of present chaos for England and Europe. He sees us visited in 1940 by an act of God—a planetary disturbance which by earth- quake, landslide, &c., dismisses the war and the Nazis and sets us back at all-round social reconstruction. How a certain Mr. Campion of the Treasury and of Holland Park brings about this social reconstruction is the hopeful, patient story—but it is dull, and sometimes a little absurd.
Miss Streatfeild's scene is London in the days of the blitzes, and her characters are " Mayfair." The theme is lifted front The Bridge of San Luis Rey—the supplying of an answer to the eternal question of why one should be taken and another left. The author writes more convincingly of Londoners than of country people, who are less trustfully orthodox on the subject of God being in His heaven and all right with the world than she seems to suppose. The characterisation throughout is-slight, but accurate enough—but somehow the final bombing catas- trophe, led up to through 25o pages and then related in two, gives a sense of unreality.
Singing Tree is a gentle, sentimental story. The heroine has eyes like stars, is a musical genius and cherishes a life-long love for a youth called Jasper. Another girl, with eyes like aqua- marines and an inferiority complex, attracts Jasper temporarily; an actress makes a crude assault on him ; the heroine, Monica, suffers in silence. Perhaps, like the reader, she knows it will all come right in the end. Even after Jasper's 'plane has crashed over the hospital where Monica works and he has been picked up for dead, the triumph of true love is never for one moment
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