Fiction
MISS STORM JAMESON is famous and distinguished not only for her great gifts as a novelist but also because, having a markedly strong sense of her own time and Of the obligations towards it of the talented, she has, throughout the terrible years which led up to and eventually contained the last war, devoted her powers not only inspirationally but in many forms of practical generosity and humanitarian passion to our woeful contemporary scene. In all her writings of the last decade we have been made aware that she feels the immeasurable pain and madness of human life without mercy to her own sensibility, and that only in probing it, only in being relentless, can her conscience come to any terms with her art.
So now we read Before The Crossing; and it is indeed a desperate evocation at once of evil and of that dried-up hopelessness which is not evil, but can find no avenue to good. The period of this story is summer, 1939, the setting London and Paris, and the charac- ters arc an odd assortment of intellectuals, rakes, civil servants and power-politics men, Nazi agents, brutes and so on. The plot is a man-hunt, and the chief character, David Renn, writer of " dry, corrosive novels," is secretly some very special kind of British police agent. So there the layout is, for a gritty and violent story told against the encroaching darkness of the first Sunday of that Septem- ber. And what more to say of this detailed and laborious piece of work from the pen of one who has long taught us to look in her pages for true passion and honest writing? Why, only the subjective truth—that for this reader those qualities are not here.
First, as to the handling of the plot, the plain story-technique : this is infinitely too slow for its brutal kind, and its clou, its reason, supposed to search all of our consciences in a kind of sub-psycholo- gical theme, is ultimately lost in slow, thick movement, folding and re-folding of motive, suspicion and surmise until the mind revolts from so much ado about a few uninhibited brutes. But, seeking through all this heaviness, the author's feeling for her theme, her relation to it, this reader, wearied past bearing by turgid and crude sentences in which she could not trace meaning always, was left high and dry at the end. I see no inspiration and I feel no truth in this slow, careful book. Nor, alas, can I find life amid the characters, who all, novelist, magnate, Nazi gangster, amateur whore, physicist, undergraduate, civil" servant and so on, talk and think in one dull mean idiom of shoddy introspection. All are suspicious • all are cruel, irritable, self-centred and more or less ignoble; there is no hope; in every soul there is only fret and nag. Alleviation of the very credible fears that lie ahead of 1939 seems to lurk only in low personal savageries, in acts of downright brutality, or in cheap afternoon fornications conducted crankily and without manners. No air blows in this book, and nothing grows; and this author who loves France can find only this sort of thing to say of Paris : " stretching its arms in the young light with the reluctance of an ageing woman to stir up the acids in her body." What does that image mean beyond a clumsy determination to be preposterous? Regretfully I turn from this too cheaply bitter book. Sartre's Age Of Reason was a foolish piece of boulevard grumbling; but this is a more depressing work, because, taking the most wretched parts of all our egos for its narrow field, it fails even to make us smile at the figures we cut.
A Summer In Buenos Aires is an agreeably dry, straight and accurate-seeming story dealing with a few months in the life of an English girl, Violet Bell, who is employed as governess in Argen- tina to two little English girls. Their father, Colonel Hamilton, is a widower, and he decides to marry Miss Bell. But the latter falls unsuitably in love—and behaves, in view of first premises, a shade unconvincingly perhaps in her passion. So the summer ends sadly, ineffectually, with the return of the poor governess to England. Miss Strachey has a nice, dry wit, and knows the scene and the people she has chosen to deal with.
Peal of Ordnance, by John Lodwick, is a dry, amusing, grown-up story of the adventures which overtake Sergeant Tamplin, R.E., after demobilisation. He had been trained to a high degree of expertness in the use of high explosives, and in the early pages of the book, whilst he is still in Trieste, we are allowed to observe him and his companions-in-arms amusing themselves effectively in joke-applications of the skill they have learnt so well. But when, back in civilian life, an accident induces amnesia, Tamplin's wartime expertise returns to him as a form of madness. Thereafter he follows single-mindedly his zest for experiment in high explosives, with exciting results. But mercifully a second accident restores him to other interests in life besides trying to blow up the War Office and the Albert Memorial; and all ends peacefully with fishing and smuggling in Cornwall. Mr. Lodwick has managed his fresh and lively story very well, and for all the fun his moral is not lost. Another service-story—this time of the R.A.F.—is Beautiful Friend by Richard Collier. But .this, alas, is neither lively nor amusing, but only the slow attempt of a very young and so far unaccomplished writer to set down in some personalised form experiences which were common to millions of young men of his generation. There is a ring of truth in his records of the frustrations, delays and longueurs of service life; but the character-drawing amounts to nothing, and the end of the book, which is tragic in intention, fails to move because we have never believed in the life of the victim.
KNEE O'BRIEN.
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