FICTION
By FORREST REID The Gladiators. By Arthur Koestler. (Cape. 7s. 6d.)
THOSE who can appreciate the lightest of light comedies will enjoy The Brandons. Mrs. Thirkell has something of the
touch of Mr. P. G. Wodehouse, if you can imagine a Wode- house novel without its farcical plot, its slang, and its knock- about situations. But I seem to be depriving Mr. Wodehouse of most of his qualities, so I had better abandon the com- parison.
The Brandons, at any rate, is very good fun, while keeping always within the bounds of probability. I admit that the dialogue is perhaps rather thickly sprinkled with " darlings " for my taste ; nevertheless, the " darlings " do not indicate sentimentality, they are merely the feminine note. All the incidents spring naturally out of the conception of the two chief characters—Mrs. Brandon, a gentle, sweet-tempered, middle-aged widow, endowed with a disastrous charm which she somehow cannot resist exercising—and old Miss Brandon,
her aunt, who has a fortune to leave, and makes the most of this advantage. Both are excellent, but Miss Brandon, Aunt Sissie, I think wins. She is a "no nonsense" person, which means that she herself rejoices in being rude, in contradicting flatly any opinion that differs from her own, and in exercising all the privileges of a self-appointed dictator. She is not beloved—far from it—but she is a lonely old woman, and it does not occur to her that she is tolerated and humoured much more out of kindness than anything else. Actually nobody wants her money ; they all have sufficient of their own ; and if they submit to being bullied and called fools, it is simply because they are amiable. Around these two charac- ters the story moves, with its sentimental and domestic com- plications, which we guess will be tidied up before the end. But meanwhile there is plenty of entertainment. The young people in the book are as good as the elderly and middle-aged. All live, including the servants—particularly Nurse, who main- tains a stern and delightful authority over her now grown-up charges. The happenings are very ordinary—a village fete, a funeral, a picnic, calf-love, the reading aloud of a first literary effort amid maddening interruptions, afternoon-tea on the lawn, the sudden appearance of an Italianised aunt from Cala- bria—but they are presented with so much liveliness and humour that we ask for nothing better. It is clear that Mrs. Thirkell takes a pleasure in writing of such things, and it is equally clear that this is the secret of the pleasure she com- municates to her readers. She is not a realist; her art is selective, sympathetic, charming; and in perfect harmony with the spirit of her comedy she has given it the background of a mellow English summer
Miss Barnes is less indulgent. The people in Wisdom's Gate belong to the same class as the Brandons, but they are Americans moving in Chicago society, intensely modern and sophisticated. To the Brandons their standards would seem strange and bewildering ; and, in fact, the relations between them are so curiously involved that the family-tree which is placed at the beginning of the book proves distinctly useful. One's first impression is of a sort of General Post in which all the husbands and wives have been interchanged. Every- body has been divorced and married again, and what makes it odder is that the reshuffling has taken place within a narrow group, so that the brother-in-law of yesterday is the husband of today, while all continue to meet on terms of astonishing intimacy. The children are sorted out, following their mothers, and the whole thing produces an effect of precarious equilibrium. Nothing, however, is regarded from the children's point of view. It is not that the adults feel no affection for them, but merely that sexual gratification comes first, and everything else necessarily goes by the board. Precept is all the elder generation can offer, trusting that there will not be too close an inquiry into example.
So, when John, a boy of fifteen, begins to inquire, he is supposed by his mother to have a complex. She tries to explain to him how important love is, and how difficult it makes things. If she has divorced his father, for instance, and has taken a new husband, this does not mean that she
has not still a very high opinion of her old one. But John fails to understand, and continues to confuse love with affection and fidelity. He even tiresomely refuses to see how, if the love of yesterday faded, the love of today is likely to prove more permanent. "His young voice, breaking, yet cool with disillusion, echoed and re-echoed in that silent room. 'At least if you're sure that this love will last. You know what you said. It comes and it goes. If you really believe that—I should think you would feel that there could always be another love? ' " Poor John! It is not the last dis- illusionment he is destined to receive.
It is through his mother, Cicily—once Mrs. Bridges, now Mrs. Lancaster—that the novel is presented, and perhaps the most elaborate portrait in it is that of this second husband, Albert Lancaster. He is drawn indirectly—by which I mean that our impression of him is derived from the impressions he creates upon Cicily, her family, and her friends. Let us give him his due : he is good-tempered, amusing, physically attractive, and, when there is no question of self-sacrifice, kind. On the other hand, he is absolutely non-moral, and so long as he can prevent Cicily from being jealous and unhappy by keeping her in ignorance of his numerous infidelities, he believes he has fulfilled his entire duty as a husband. To the women with whom he has these affairs he feels no responsibility whatever. They know he is married—in fact, has been married twice—and has three little girls by his first wife, and a boy by Cicily, his second. If, after that, they expect a lasting attachment they must be fools. Besides, he himself has to face certain risks. He had to give up his job in China, for example, and had to pay a lot of money—Cicily's money—to the husband of a pretty little idiot who gave the whole show away by taking it seriously. Albert certainly is convincing. Of course Cicily learns what he is really like, and for a time insists on separate bedrooms. But in the end she forgives him, and the book closes on a scene of recon- ciliation. It is a philosophic rather than a happy ending, as the author is quite aware. What, perhaps, she does not see is that it reduces Cicily to Albert's level. Had the forgiveness been for the sake of the children it would have been different, but quite clearly it is simply a yielding to her own physical desire ; she forgives Albert for precisely the same reason as she abandoned John's father. This, I take it, is the "wisdom," and it leaves me in sympathy with John.
"A novel in the richest tradition of English fiction—the novel of character." So runs the brief blurb of Foveaux, and I must say I found it misleading. "The richest tradition of English fiction" suggests such names as Fielding, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Trollope, the Brontës, coming down to Meredith and Thomas Hardy. Certainly not all of these are favourites of mine, but not one of them can I imagine writing a Left novel of Australian slum and working-class life, which is what Foveaux turns out to be. It is a conscientious book of its kind, but that kind has been rather overworked of late, and it is difficult to get much freshness into a realistic chronicle of housing problems, labour strikes, unemp:oyment and the rest. Even the Australian scene produces no sense of novelty, for one might be reading about any large indus- trial town. The absence of a particular hero or heroine con- stitutes, I suppose, part of the scheme, but it also means that the interest, diffused over a large number of characters, is proportionately weakened. There are indications in several of the scenes that the author could write a much better novel than this if she paid attention to form, planned a definite story. and kept to it. I do not for a moment expect she will agree. yet this first step appears to me essential if she is to make any artistic progress.
Herr Koestler's The Gladiators is an excellent historica! novel. The time is B.C. 73-71, and the subject the rebellion of gladiators and slaves under Spartacus, and the founding in Southern Italy of the short-lived Sun State. I have left myself no space to review it here, but this strange episode in Roman history makes an interesting and tragic romance, while the translation is unusually good. Herr Koestler draws a paralle: beween that period and our own, and the whole book reflects a somewhat pessimistic social philosophy, of which the failure of the humanitarian Sun State becomes a symbol.
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