24 NOVEMBER 1944, Page 20

Fiction

Joseph. 9s. 6d.) •

ALL three of these novels are about the present war ; and it is difficult to guess how much the public wants to read about that, at present, in imaginative writing. It is being so thoroughly reported to us, by straight journalism, by radio, and by pamphlets and _volumes short-range and eye-witness history that one' wonders doubtfully how much appetite can be left for the novelists' view of actualities ; but we must suppose that, many as have been already the novels and short Stories of the war, a great and greater flood of them still lies ahead of us. It is only natural that the generation of writers, proved or potential, who have had to sacrifice so many of the years of promise to a discipline and an ordeal not of their choosing will be impelled, in any breathing space that they can snatch, to turn an imposed and hard experience to their own native uses.

Not all, indeed not one in a thousand, will do this as.well as Mr. Harry Brown has done it in A Walk In The Sun. Mr. Brown is an American poet who has published three volumes of verse, and who, before he joiqed the United States Army in i94;, worked o Time and The New Yorker. He is twenty-seven and, the wrapp tells us, is at present attached to the film division of O.W.I. He i now a private, whereas in the Corps of Engineers he had attain the rank of sergeant. I give these details because I think they help to relate him to his first novel, now under review, and because is a man of exceptional, clear talent, from whom we may expec significant work henceforward.

A Walk In The Sun is a very short, simple -story ; it tells who happens to a platoon of American infantry in one morning, durin the landings in Italy ; it describes an episode which is complete itself, but relates iii feeling and atmosphere backward and forwar to immense events, and it quite unpretentiously symbolises, whil it seems merely to illustrate, war. While we follow the group o men, deprived of their officer and dependent for their purpose o the guesswork of a sergeant and corporal, we grow intensely inter ested in it and in them ; from their confusion on the beachhead their courageous tactics before the farmhouse and bridge whic they surmise to be their objective, we get to know this well diversifie little company of men ; we get to know them and ' the seen through which they move with singular accuracy. Thi accuracy, which gives us the light of the Italian day and, as easil almost as their names, the personal characteristics, the priva anxieties, the fears and the disciplined bravery of the soldiers, 1 26. the reward of very careful. writing. Mr. Brown's technique is o lightness and economy, but it catches in all the essentials abou living men in danger, and it seems to this reviewer to be as tru as it is delicately wrought. Because he is a poet, it may be that h• has . made a shade too much use, for his purposes, of shape a refrain, of the wise-cracking of the two with the machine-gu Friedman and Rivera ; but the wise-cracking is good in itself, a it has, for those who look for such things, a formal value. The sto . is built on simple lines and hak all through it that kind of cloth which persuades us that we will remember it.

In There's No Story There, which is straight, hard reportage Miss Holden takes us inside the strange, hushed, unnatural life those who work in shell-filling factories. The sense of permanen danger gives the book a very special quality ; and indeed the emerges from it, tough and realistic as it is, a feeling of dedicatio which the thirty thousand workers at Statevale carry as unself consciously as they learn to carry their asbestos clothes. Th lonely, hostelled, welfared life is all here, and if it makes sad, co reading, it is indeed most edifying, too ; it has a curious, pl dignity, and leaves many questions in the reader's mind.

Mr. Bates's new novel is a well-made tale of the perils an sufferings endured by the crew of a Wellington bomber who a forced down in occupied France in 1942. The hero of the story the pilot, Franklin, who loses an arm, falls in love with a mo loyal and courageous French girl, and eventually escapes with h into Spain. The thing is done with great care and in close deta and many people will read it with interest ; but admirers of N Bates's earlier work may be puzzled by the laboriousness and th dull texture of the writing. There is excessive use throughout words like " sourness," " sickness," " impotent savagery," " impote bitterness." These expressions deaden the effect they aim at, a so do such loose sentences as " The war splits us apart with infinity.

Kam 013/HEN.