FICTION
By KATE O'BRIEN Lord Samarkand. By Horace Annesley Vachell. (Cassell. 8s. 6d.)
Bidden to the Feast is a novel to be thrust with both hands upon readers—the right readers. For good and sweet as it is all
through, one realises with regret that in a world which demands heat, thrill, over-statement and bad writing of its novelists, this careful tale of a departed, simple, sorrowful everyday cannot be a popular novel. But seldom indeed have I felt goodness in a contemporary work as I feel it here. Let those who read it read it slowly. There is nothing to hurry over in its pages—but much to ponder. It is a novel about Wales written by a Welshman, and if that connotes to practised novel-readers either " incredible " frankness " or " savage indictment," let them be warned. These things, as blurb- writers understand them, are not here. There is indeed a plenteous indictment, but it is not " savagely," but only sorrowfully and solemnly conveyed.
Bidden to the Feast has faults. Let us begin with them. It is laboured ; its pace is too uniformly slow ; unnecessarily cautious, its author funks his occasions of high poignancy and takes refuge in a certain vagueness of sentiment ; to give period authenticity too many " period " stunts are forced upon the • text—the Phoenix Park Murders, Oscar Wilde, Henry Irving, Madame Patti, Blondin ; but above all the difficulty of conveying the music of Anglo-Welsh speech has sometimes caught the writer into effects of sentimentality and repetition. (This is a trap which also catches the recorder of Anglo-Irish speech, and evasion of it is difficult, for the Celtic mood does not go easily into English.) These things noted, however, and with the warning established that there is no violent 'sexual exposition in this book, nor any national or anti-national mania informing it, let it be said without further cavil that it is touching and beautiful with a beauty now growing rare. Its emotional spring—which factually and informatively releases much of great practical interest—is the love of a 'Welshman for the land of his fathers—and this, conveyed in page after page without acrimony or prejudice, but only as the kind of local, sweet passion which is eternal and most humanising in men, cannot fail, it seems to me, to warm and attract readers of any speech or colour who have known the benediction of racial roots and background.
The story is simple and sad. It traces the fortunes of a very poor coal-miner's family in Merthyr Tydvil from 1E65 to the close of the nineteenth century. It gives most excellent descriptions of the underground life of that period of miner, child-miner and pit-pony ; it describes the rising insistence of the miner of that time on his social rights; it portrays his home-life, humble, violent and tender. It is realistic, pitiful, dignified, humorous, mournful.
It hardly has a plot. Two sisters, twins and singers, work out their natural, saddish destinies through its chapters. The one goes her own way, to escape from Wales, a kind of• success, and death ; the other, unselfish, is the servant of her brothers' destinies, and of local and native concerns, and grows old a spinster, but rich, humorous and sweet, with dear _graves to visit, her native scene and sounds about her, and the remains of a thwarted love, now brotherliness, to smile at. Megan is a good, rich character, set down without falseness or straining— but that can be said of all the chief characters of this book.
They are unremarkable and real ; their value is in their power to suffer, protest, die or strike out to safety without losing their dignified normality. Above all, their value is in their willingness to live, and to enjoy—for this book of sorrow, injustice and struggle is lifted to inspiration by the Welsh gusto for fights, funerals, sermons, eisteddfods, plays and ' oratorios. Music, •the music of choir and pulpit, of burial procession, concert, theatre and everyday speech, ennobles its 'people in everything. It is a story founded on love and under- standing ; its author takes an unblinking view of man's inhumanity to man, but knows that Wales, however tortured and ill-used, remains a land of song. It is, in fact, a very noble book which the Welsh people should take proudly to their hearts.
When we turn from the simplicities of Bidden to the Feast,
the more complicated commotion of other novels seem small, silly stuff. But The House in the Dunes has the merit that it conveys effectively its locale, the desolate sea-worn land about Dunkirk and the Franco-Belgian frontier. It is an efficient story of conflict between tobacco-smugglers and douaniers, and there is a certain interest in the author's obvious knowledge of the methods used to get Belgian tobacco into France under the noses of customs officials. The system of training and " packing " dogs to race over the border with heavy loads of contraband is well described and worth reading about. The story is obvious enough. The hero-smuggler is a nice young man, an ex-boxer of gentle nature and few words who has married a prostitute and keeps her in considerable comfort on the profits of his illicit trade. But he falls foul of a dangerous douanier who, taking a fancy to his wife, becomes his deadly enemy. The two pursue their desire to outwit each other to a bitter end which means death for both. The violent plot is relieved by sentimental interludes at a lost, idyllic inn in a wood in Belgium, where the ex-boxer finds all the tender, good dreams of boyhood and where he is inspired, vainly, to forsake the folly of his present career. It is a thin, easily read book with the merits of truth to scene and a sufficiency of excitement.
Lena, by Roger Vercel, seemed to me merely tiresome. It is what people call " theatre," meaning " cinema." It might, indeed, make a reasonably good film. As fiction it is handicapped by the author's _ ridiculously awkward method of narration and, in this version, by clumsy translation. It deals with the highly-coloured adventures of a French officer, wounded and captured by the Bulgarians during the Allies' Macedonian campaign in 1919. The heroine is a preposterous Bulgarian girl whose motives and behaviour scented to one reader to be nothing but nonsense from beginning to end of her sad adventure, and the Frenchman who narrates these is forced by his author's choice into the 'position of a quite ridiculous prig. Were the central figures more human and attractive, and had one been spared the absurdity of the pseudo-bestial scene in which the girl is shot by the inexplicable Frenchman, the book might have had some merit as a record of twentieth-century war, and its savage futility—because it is clearly an embittered eye-witness who writes, and ideas and sincerities do lurk here and there. But the main characterisations are pretentious and silly, and therefore kill certain underlying novelistic merits.
The list of the published works of' Horace Annesley Vachell which is printed inside the cover of Lord Samarkand is formid- able enough to make any reviewer squirm. But the only two books in the whole array which I remember to have read are Quinney's and The Hill. I read both in childhood, and of the former remember only that it was about an antique dealer, and of the latter that it dealt with Harrow—and that it enthralled me at a time when any book about boys at school was a key to Paradise. Lord Samarkand, it now turns out, was the bully of The Hill, and was called " The Demon." It seems that he was always " hairy-heeled "—whatever that is. Apparently it's an almost incurable affliction about which your best friends won't tell you. Well, " The Demon " is now the Lion of Samarkand—a Press Baron, the People's Friend, the enemy of Communism, and a power in the land. He is in his fifties, is married to a very aristocratic Catholic wife and has a son in the Guards of whom he is not quite sure, until the closing pages of the book, that he is the father. He is also in love with a " jolly " girl called Judy, and he is manoeuvring for a divorce in order to marry her. But the Communists kill him in France— and everyone is left well provided for and with dean slates. It is all absolute nonsense—or so it seemed tome. But as practically everyone in it is either in Burke's Peerage or a member of the Gridiron Club, perhaps the ignorant outsider had better not be too 'sweeping. The dialogue is either thick with banal generalisa- tions shaped to look witty or runs to this sort of thing : " You like dogs ? " Yes. They never let you down, do they ? ' " Mr. Vachell is not a reliable guide to the workings of the Catholic mind, nor, I should venture, to Communistic lines of thought. And I suspect his portraits of Fleet Street journalists of a certain mon-reality. But it may be assumed that he has written in Lord Samarkand a fantasy which will appeal immensely to all those who know beyond a peradventure that they are not " hairy-heeled."
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