24 JUNE 1938, Page 34

FICTION

By EVELYN WAUGH National Provincial is a long, ambitious and unusually successful novel about politics ; not about politics in the Disraelian sense—the world of high diplomacy and Cabinet intrigue, state secrets, petticoat influence, the rise and fall of historic figures—but electoral politics, and local govern- ment elections at that. No doubt English men and women put in rather more time than they used in talking about politics, but it is not the most valuable part of their day either to themselves or to the novelist. English politics,' like most of our national activities, only attain dramatic and human interest at the top. The adventures of a Cabinet Minister are excellent material for literature ; those of the elector, qua elector, are not. Qua elector he is merely part of the machinery by which the Cabinet Minister is enabled to lead to a dramatic, human life. In his private capacity the elector may, and probably does, lead a far more interesting life than the elected. Miss Cooper only recognises this private life in so far as it affects his electoral life. That, at any rate, seems to be the bounds she has set herself, and when in the first pages the reader realises this he may be tempted to despair.

The opening fifty or a hundred pages are discouraging, but the book is well worth persevering with because the authoress's talent again and again transcends the self-imposed limits ; also because although the subject matter is not suitable for a novel it is of some interest, and Miss Cooper is able to exploit it to the full.

The title is peculiarly apt. National Provincial seeks to explain, by analysing a local election in a provincial town,

why the present National Government is in power in England, when, in that particular district at any rate, its opponents were in a substantial majority. To do this she takes what is popularly known as a " cross section " of urban industrial society. She has tried to include every type—the old- fashioned safe bourgeois, the smug conservative vicar and his

socialist curate, the self-made minor magnate and his half- baked children, the communist don and the communist working man, the old-fashioned trade-unionist, the muddle- headed young bourgeois who thinks that perhaps the other fellow has something to be said for him and the self-assured young bourgeois (brothers) who think that if there is to be a class war he will fight, too, for his own class, the gentleman's daughter who finds it hard to fit in with her commercial in-laws but who, when it comes to the point, sides with them against their employees, and so on. They are all there, very accurately observed and portrayed ; they tend to be types rather than individuals, but the authoress has seen to it that they are types and not caricatures. The only wholly ridiculous and disagreeable figure is the Marxist intellectual ; the rest are all given some admirable qualities and the three candidates for election offer a very fair choice for the reader's sympathies.

Miss Cooper's own opinions incline towards socialism, but she is under no illusion about her fellows.

One of the chief defects of the book is inevitable to the theme. There is far too much discussion. It cannot be said too often that in a novel the interest of the conversations must not depend on the interest of the views expressed. No great novelist has ever allowed this, nor ever will. Novelists simply must not write dialogue like this :

. How do you know that there is nothing more for any man than material reality ? That's a dogma you can't prove.'

I can't, but I can prove that there is material reality, and I base my philosophy on what I can prove by touch and sight ! ' " A judicious editor could cut out about a third of the book and leave it the healthier for the operation.

Another criticism which suggests itself is one which, perhaps, the authoress will contest and resent : that is that many aspects of the book seem very old fashioned. They smack of the drawing-room comedy of the time of The Younger Generation. In particular the clerical passages seem ill informed. For better or worse the Trollopian English parson has disappeared ; revolutionary opinions are no longer a bar to preferment ; Mark Forrester, at the present moment, would be in bishop's gaiters—and probably a highly paid columnist as well. The old Galsworthy trick of personifying conflicting opinions is employed freely, but there are no grave sacrifices of probability.

At one point, when the factory owner's son runs down a fascist, the reader fears that he is going to be led into a conven- tional drama of justice, but the incident does not become of any greater importance than it naturally would. Much of the strike and election material might have come from mass observation in Northtown. The effect of young women: in industrial disputes is admirably noted : ci

" The pickets, at a loss, looked at Tom for help. He stepped forward and caught a girl by the arm, exclaiming, Listen, Comrade ! '

The girl giggled and plucked her arm away from him. She said pertly, ' Miss Johnson to you, if you please. '

Miss Johnson to you, if you please. . . . What happier way could be found of summarising the new problem with which the " progressives " have saddled themselves by enfranchising and emancipating their women ? It makes the reader under- stand why the only thorough democracy in the world has refused to grant votes for women.

The occasional comic relief is far too rare, but all the•more delightful when it comes. Rosie, the housemaid, is a delicious character ; wherever she appears, and especially in the en- chanting appendicitis scene, one realises what an excellent novelist Miss Cooper may become when she sets herself a more grateful task.

Love is a Sickness is an extremely depressing tale of an impoverished Bohemian who loses his young lady. Like

Annabel Lee's high-born kinsman, the movie men from Hollywood take her away and make a star of her and he is left comfortless. Gloomy as the luxury of Beverly Hills must be, one can hardly blame the heroine for preferring it to her own milieu of drunks and paying guests. One curious thing—the characters all talk American, even to the extent of saying " Aw," when English people say " Oh," " Ah " or " Eh." One could in fact read many consecutive pages of this story and imagine that it was staged in America :

" He certainly can do things with a piano. I'll have him play ' Star-dust ' for you later on . . . There's quite a nice kid . . . Come on over ; she's easy to talk to and ready to play."

Apollo Flies is the story of an airman who is killed just when he has become engaged to a girl who has loved him for a long time. There is more to it than that. He had become an airman as an assertion of independence and escape from the hunger of the girl. That I take to be the real theme of the book, which is loaded with detail mostly in the form of the heroine's erotic reminiscences and expectations. She is very beautiful and enormously attractive to men and women,

but she reveals herself as rather an ugly character of whom the hero is well rid. Compared with Love is a Sickness or National Provincial the local colour seems false. Perhaps that wealthy world where the ladies maids wear aprons does

really exist but Mr. Kahan does not make it convincing. He employs, too, the tricks of narrative which Katharine Mansfield popularised ; the shifting of time sequences, intrusions of internal monologue, memory and day dream, which keep the reader rather busier than the importance of his work justifies ; There is also an absence of humour which is disconcerting, particularly in the hero's Air Force slang.

Hollow Sea is typical of its author's art. Mr. Hanley has achieved a style of book entirely his own, perilous to imitate. Those who relish this kind of gamey meatiness in

literature will find just what they want. It is the tale of a troopship in the Dardanelles ; men die and rot ; men go mad. There are no women ; there is no land. It is just an iron

hulk full of men and muck :

" Were they really in the bloody wilderness ? Were they going round in circles ? . . . That damn bell hadn't rung in the nest for days. . . . A cake-walk for those fellers on the lookout job and no mistake. A cake-walk. And no dirty business for them. Oh, no. Well, he was used to seeing good men go over the side."

The writing is rich in oaths and slang and technical terms. Americans write this kind of thing and are mildly titivating ; when Europeans do it, they are genuinely horrifying. If you want horror, Hanley is your man. Personally I can't read him, but that is a private opinion. He is a highly respectable man at his job.