Fiction
THIS is a week for the amateur of the novel rather than for the general reader, for the major merits of the novels under review are of the kind that demand some work from the reader, demand, in fact, from every reader as much as from the professional reviewer a response of discriminating criticism. Moon Gap, which I think the best of them, is an American novel, and is particularly interesting in that its background, characters and plot depend wholly on its being so ; all are interdependent and none could exist elsewhere. The background is the ghost of a mining= town in Nevada that was-built to match a brief strike "ofgold and now lies rotting and deserted save for the snakes, the rats, the bears and the only living human characters, the gold-obsessed miner with his three children and, remotely on the periphery, the man who is looking for uranium. Cassie, the oldest child, has returned from her only trip to the city to wait for the return of the young husband who deserted her. Reniembering the standards set by her dead mother, she recognises that her failure was, and will be, inevitable unless she can re-establish for the family the values her mother proffered. She is ghost-ridden, ignorant and desperate, and her failure seems inevitable. It seems certain that in attempting to free her brother and sister she has let them go only to destruction, Her struggle takes place on .a strange level between a reality that is barely real and a vision much nearer our reality, and the haunted mind struggling in this imaginative limbo is displayed with poetic conviction.
Paradoxically Mr. Beluncle fails by its success, a triumph of
craftsmanship involving a failure of art. Forging phrases with flaw- less brilliance, Mr. Pritchett establishes the portrait of his hypocrite hero, in his dream of himself the man of property, the man of God (as interpreted by Mrs. Parkinson's sect), the business magnate, the devoted father and dutiful son, but in reality a harsh incompetent bungler in each of these roles. By the- time we have read some
30 pages, have seen Mr. Beluncle destroying his wife and sons, flaunting himself before his woman partner, clumping around in his dreams of grandeur, we have accepted him as a fictional incarnation of permanent reference. °But it is of the nature of Mr. Beluncle, as Mr. Pritchett has created him, that he cannot bear the whole weight of a novel on his shoulders, for his nature is that of a minor character in a major work, and merely to display him in a series of different poses is only to repeat and re-emphasise what has with such consummate craftsmanship been so speedily established. The comparison between Mr. Beluncle and such creations as Mr. Micawber, Mr. Skimpole or Mr.- Dorrit is an obvious one, and leads to the conclusion that, though Mr. Pritchett's creature is, in the same mode, as brilliant an invention as any of these, he himself lacks Dickens's genius in perceiving that such creatures can never be more than adjuncts to plots based on characters more capable of heroic development.
A Tridl of Love, a first novel,, is set in Algiers, lately the fashion- able literary locale for trials of this nature. I have seen some reviews of this book which suggest that it fails because the character of its hero, Peter Hudson, a successful columnist, is a distasteful one. I do not find him distasteful. It is the novelist's function to uncover the bad as well as the good in his hero, and it is a legitimate means to choose a hero more conscious than most people of the struggle between the two. Though Hudson may seem more cowardly, more calculating, more foolishly heroic than we care to think ourselves, it is still our struggle he mirrors, and I find- him a sympathetic and convincing portrait of Phomme moyen sensuel. Mr. Edelman's setting for his conflict, which includes the promiscuous wife of a French collaborator and an American general who kicks a journalist, is sufficiently if not outstandingly interesting ; his ending is cheap and more suited to the " trick " short story ; his dialogue is excellent. All in all, he is a readable and very promising new novelist.
The Heart of Fame, the story of an actor's rise and fall, is likely to be the most successful of all these books. For some reason it is conventional that the moral to stories of people who start in Man- chester and make good is that they would have done better to have stayed in Manchester, and the narrator of Mr. Playfair's story has it on his conscience that he encouraged. Charles Stranleigh not to do so. Whether Stranleigh, in fact, owed his genius to the world at the cost of his own destruction is a point well worth arguing, but the success of this book is not primarily due to the problem it poses but to the way that problem is posed. Mr. Playfair has made Stran- leigh a hero of genuine pathos, and maddening, weak, callous as he may show himself, our sincere sympathy is involved with him throughout. I should like to quote Mr. Playfair on romantic acting, for his comment seems to me to apply equally to romantic writing and to his own book. He writes:
" All that a realistic actor must do is to convince his audience
of the existence of some `true to life' character whose counter- part they have met or may reasonably expect to meet . . . a romantic actor must convince his audience of the existence of a character whose counterpart they have never met - . . and never will meet. Realistic acting makes its appeal to the memory ; romantic acting to the imagination."
MARGHANITA LASKI.
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