Fiction
The Night is Ending. By James Ronald. (Hodder and Stoughton. 9s. 6d.) I Will Be Good. By Hester W.' Chapman. (Martin Seeker and Warburg. 10s. 6d.)
WHEN that old dispute about the value of a classical education was recently argued again in a correspondence in The Times, no one wrote a wiser defence of classical literature, as a source of pure pleasure, than you may now read in W. P. Crozier's uncommonly good novel of ancient Rome, The Fates Are Laughing.
As Publius Antonius Celer lies dying he fondly handles the rolls of his favourite books, and presently begins to speak to his family gathered by his bedside. " . . Books have always been my friends, my generous, faithful friends. They never disappoint, never wound or betray. They're always alive, always with you, so that you have friendships that are never broken, that have no fault in them. I couldn't tell you how many, strong and delightful have been my friendships with famous men and women whom most people foolishly think to be dead, some Of them hundreds of years ago, but who are much more alive today than most of the men and women who walk about in Rome. They are my intimates, my confidants, while often the people that I am supposed to know are complete strangers to me."
His mind a Little clouded perhaps by his failing strength, he goes on gently talking of his friends and adventures. " Did you see the Trojan horse, sir? " his doctor asks, seeking to humour him. "See the horse!" replies Publius. " My dear Chion, I was in it." The pictures pass again before his eyes—the siege of Troy, the death of Agamemnon, Socrates, Ulysses and the Cyclops, Helen, Dido, Cynthia, Lalage. A final word of Socrates, and then he holds out his hands and bids goodbye to his two favourite slaves, to his wife, his daughter and son-in-law, and closes his eyes to sleep. It is a moving piece of writing and a proper end to an agreeable portrait of a man too cultured and too politically simple for the Rome of Tiberius and Caligula. But The Fates Are Laughing is not a comfortable and peaceful study of educated Romans like the good Publius. On the contrary it is an exciting story of the anxieties of a young married couple in a city as dangerous as the Berlin of Hitler or the Paris of Robespierre. At the height of the power of Sejanus this worthy Publius is busy arranging the betrothal of his daughter, for reasons of policy, to the son of Sextus Cornelius, a relation of Sejanus and high in the councils of his patty. When the Emperor Tiberius suddenly unmasks the alleged conspiracy and strikes at Sejanus, Sextus and his son are among those exiled, and Publius, fortunate to save his family at all, makes hasty arrangements to marry his daughter to the man she had always privately deter- mined to have. It is their adventures in Rome, Alexandria and Antioch, pursued by the revenge of the rejected suitor, which makes the story of this admirably written novel.
Right-minded readers resent prefaces, and usually skip them. The Fates Are Laughing has a biographical postscript written by the author's daughter. Perverse readers will certainly turn to this first of all. They will be rewarded by finding the reason for the extra- ordinarily convincing quality of the historical background. To the writing of this one novel Crozier brought the historical researches of a lifetime.
In the highest kinds of novel, characters and background are vastly more important than the bare bones of the plot, which is often uncommonly thin. Lesser novels are built on the reverse plan—not round the characters but round the plot, and the more ingenious that plot is the less true to life are the characters likely to be. The Night is Ending, by James Ronald, has one of these huge intricate plots, and the characters are correspondingly improbable. Ruth Malvern, the central figure, is one of those embarrassing people who calls her father by his Christian name—and " Johnnie " it unhappily happens to be—which is enough to start off any heroine at a dis- advantage. This Johnnie is a prodigious cad, for whom no reason- ing young woman could possibly feel any affection at all—but Ruth does, and when he goes mad (for no observable pathological reason) she combats despair by a tireless devotion to the service of chance acquaintances.
Although at every point the characters of The Night is Ending are twisted to accommodate the plot, and the plot never moulded to fit the inevitable will of the characters, it says something for Mr. Ronald's art as a story-maker that the reader does gain a sneaking admiration for Ruth's indefatigable energy as she drives her way through her multiple undertakings as school-mistress, foster-mother, shopkeeper, agiiator, lawyer, and general fairy godmother. That Mr. Ronald is not an accurate observer of life or even of human physique, is obvious from his strange reference to the nit vement of a girl's Adam's apple: but in spite of this and other misapprehensions of human behaviour, there will be many who will find here a full romantic adventure to their liking.
I Will Be Good, by Hester W. Chapman, is an extreme example of the book which trusts too easily to the ingenuity of a frame- work. Blanche Peverance, a blameless and successful lady novelist, as a 'result of a 'great shock, throws up her work and (like Ruth Malvern) devotes herself to the service of complete strangers. A remarkable 'busybody, she so influences their lives (or thinks she does) as to precipitate a tragedy beyond the plan of any of her own romantic novels. It is a smart idea—but preposterous: it does not usually take much outside influence to construct an eternal triangle upon a given basis. The characters refuse to dance to this tune. As a compensation for the emotions they cannot show, the author has cultivated a style of grave dramatic intensity. It cannot conceal that I Will Be Good is only an improbable version of a
Previous page
