Fiction
The Street of the Sandalmakers. By Nis Petersen. (Lovat -Dickson. 7s. 6d.) The Second Son, By Dominique Dunois. (Jarrolds. 7s. 6c1.)
NOVELS that have not been stretched out or squeezed down to the conventional three hundred-odd pages sometimes excite a hope that their size has been determined by artistic necessity. The Street of the Sandalmakers and Largo each occupy nearly five hundred pages, and-Will please those numerous readers who like plenty of reading matter for their money, as well as what may be called pageantry ; Tropical Waters and The Second Son are on the concise side, but are none the worse for that. Each of these four books endeavours to offer a thoughtful picture or criticism or elucidation of some form of life, and each is written with uncommon ability.
The Street of the Sandalntakers is the work of a Danish super, tramp, and is said to have ve been printed already in nine different languages. The author, ,it seems, conceived a sudden obsession with Roman history, got up all the authorities with such diligence that he made himself ill, and then produced this copious tale of Rome under Marcus Aurelius. The writing is fluent, the local colour is laid on in shovelfuls, and no doubt the details are correct. The publishers claim that the book is " more alive than The Last Days of Pompeii and nearer to the heart of man than Quo Vadis." Even if this be trae, novels of this kind are at best a synthetic product, and it is difficult while reading to forget for a moment that we are in the hands of an ingenious author. It is all rather like a fancy dress ball, where the best costumes undoubtedly deserve a-prize.
General KrasinOff has -.-the advantage of :being concerned with a less remote period in history, though St. Petersburg in the years just before the War seems very far away and long ago. -4.--Tius-place -and- time-affords a rich field for a writer able tq speak from first-hand experience, and General Krassnoff plunges us into the everyday life of a society that we now know to have been doomed. Tolstoi was not long dead and his influence was active ; rich people were just beginning to play bridge and dance the tango ; and there was a current saying that God is too high up, and the Czar is too far away."
' The plot centres upon the notorious Beylis case—the supposed ritual murder by Jews of a small boy at Kiev. An autopsy is performed by Tropareff, a Home Office patho- logist, who, besides being a dissecter of corpses, brings a scientific intelligence to bear upon 'the morbid anatomy of Russian society. As a verS, well-constructed story begins to unfold itself, a variety of characters emerges, and each seems to typify some separate element. of the gradually approaching catastrophe. Troparefes pleasure-loving wife Valentina is repelled by him and prefers the company of gay young cavalry officers. One of these, Rantzeff, simple and unso- phisticated, clearly has the sympathy of his creator. An " officer and a gentleman," he lives for God and the Czar and the glory Of his regiment, adores horses and riding, and his duty is his pleasure. Another, Bagreneff, brings about his own ruin by becoming involved with revolutionaries, and as far as his country is concerned, wants to " give the falling man a kick.".. Although these two characters are faithfully presented, the contrast between them is so marked as to arouse a suspicion that counter-revOlUtionary propaganda stalks between the lines. As one 'reads on, the conviction that for General Krasnoff virtue must necessarily be ancien regime becomes fixed in one's mind, and the pleasure that can be taken in his story, his inventiveness, and his descriptive passages is dampened. When at last, after a violent outburst of anti-Semitism on the part of Tropareff, we are referred to a footnote which declares that " these words are but too true " we are left lamenting that poli-, tical rancour should have Mingled with the ink of a gifted story-teller. Tropical Waters has an appropriate smoothness an'T behcy. It reads as if its author had made a tour of South Anierica and had enjoyed the experience so much that he felt he must write a novel round it, rather than as if the actual story was the fruit of' some inner compulsion, The flavour is dry, the manner fastidious, the sequence of events a little forced, while the characters are a little too cool to be true.
The story is told in the first person by one of two English. men who find themselves - on a liner bound from Tilbur to, Buenos Aires, and the voyage, with its pleasures and ani- mbsities, is very neatly described. The narrator is a middle, aged scientist ; the other is a viscount of 33 who travels in wallpapers. The heroine, their fellow-passenger, is a blonde called Marlene Irrigoyen, who combines the attractiveness of a film-star with virtue. -" I carry in me," she declares, the whOle moral energy that my parents never used." :II:irlerie is travelling to her husband, who is 'good-looking, terribly melancholy, " evil and inhuman." He " had fought in a dqzen odd wars and revolutions and shot men dead out of dikike for their manners. He played the guitar so that every bine in your body melted, and he didn't care whether he lied or not." Describing himself, he says, " I can only r -
enjoy pleasures that you moral ones forbid yourselves. ThSt
alone wakes me, when there is something you would call wicked in the saltation." Marlene believes that this bogey will suddenly.'teed her, and intends to find and reclaim Min, The two Englishmen, having become her friends, go with her, in case the suave, cold and deathlike spouse prikres unamiable. He does prove unamiable, and exciting adventures ensue. Mr. Fraser writes with accomplishment and by no means without subtlety, though with something of:the :over:smooth effect of,"a:ttlah who Ilariceg just a little too well.
On the very first page of The Second Son we are invited to view a most singular. thoroughfare, " an erratic road which tore in from ..the country leaping like a little girl, wound between two hill-sides . . . waddled _through the meadows and shot straight and swift at a tiny church perched on the top of a hill." Not having read the book in the original French, we do not know whether author or translator is re- sponsible for making the topography of Touiaine so dynamic. The translation is marked--some would say marred—by a few Americanisms, but otherwise seems free from this early eccentricity. " As the door of the farm-house slowly opened," runs the first sentence in the book, " a white-faced young woman appeared on the door-Sill." This seems to promise a depressing tale of rural life. The promise is fulfilled. The white-faced and somewhat spineless young 'woman, Maria Berthault, has a terrible mother-hi-law who almost com- pletely ruins the lives of every member of her family, including herself. So intense is the old woman's lOve of her property and the power it gives her, that she determines to keep it intact, and forbids the appearance of a second, grandchild.. Maria, however, is already pregnant. Her visit to Big Alice, the local abortionist, is made too late, and her second son is ' duly born. The child dies young, its eldei brother is killed in the War, the father takes to drink, Maria sinks into apathy. But towards the end of the book Maria and her husband make a sharp. recovery, uproot themselves from their native soul, and even produce a duplicate of the second son, complete with radiant golden curls and forget- me-not eyes.
Madame Dominique Dunois, formerly a Femina Tie Heureuse prize7winner, reaches a .hi. gh level of competence, arid there are some beautiful descriptions of the second son and the care bestowed on him by a crippled woman. Later in the book, unfortunately, when the child re- appears as a ghost at his Own funeral or comes to hold reproachful colloqiik with his father, he is likely 10 alienate some of the sympathy which the reader felt for hini when he was an infant gazing at a bee or suckled by
a goat. _
Previous page
