"Fiction
By WILLIAM PLOMER
Eve's Doctor. By Signo Toksvig. (Faber and Faber. 7s. 6d.) - •
Wolfe. (Barker. Os.) •
ferment in the Ukraine. Later, when the young man becomes " Sergey, our task consists in tirelessly pushing forward our ideas a power in the Young Communist League, the story gets and our slogans into every person's mind . . . We shall organise a diffuse. An account of an early outbreak of Stakhanovism whole series of meetings and conferences and councils . . . (a fancy name for hard work) in the building of a railway Then Miss Toksvig, though pursuing an interesting idea, is reminds one that the making of the book itself was a hard apt to fall by the wayside and embrace triviality task accomplished in the face of great odds by an invalid : he " In another couple of days, Kate was able to take a piece of dry was enabled to dictate by the same idealism that enabled him, toast with her chicken broth . . . But all she wanted was a mouth- when active, to kill people—" in order to bring the day ful, &c."
nearer when peOple • would no longer kill each other." On Miss Pamela Hansford Johnson, too, could have been a learning that Ostrovski's MS. received a prompt and cordial little trimmer. In Here .To-Day she lifts up a corner of the welcome from the Cultural Propaganda Department, one veil that hangs over the outer suburbs, and shows us people cannot help remembering how the greatest Russian writers behaving very like the things that crawl, scuttle, and prey had to fight against orthodoxy, conventionality, and censor- on one another under a damp stone. There is, as the blurb ship. Perhaps it is easier in some circumstances to be a remarks, " a strong undercurrent . of romance, redeeming
" saint " than an artist: ' ': the encircling gloom of trickery and-lear,r- but one would
Ostrovski gives some clinical details about his hero's final hesitate to take this particular kind of gloom as typical. condition, but they are nothing compared with the fairly Within an area enclosed by two pubs and two shops not complete course in gynaecology and obstetrics that Miss only do little weaknesses have 'their–. day, Nit Mr.:Doppy Toksvig provides. While there need be no moral or aesthetic functions—Mr: Doppy. the florist, who. in the .,intervals of objection to turning the inwards outwards, there is a strong constructing "three wreaths and a cross and one Gates-of- cmotional one : that people, generally speaking, like their Heaven " . can always pause . to cast his . net of blackmail entertainments to be free from the sorrow and anxiety a little wider. _ Miss Johnson knows the world She -Writes of, naturally a point where miles of little shops and rows of little houseslly associated with illness.._ They need not, however, i, li
be put off Eve's Doctor on that account. Miss Toksvig, who is Danish and married to an Irishman, has a clean :. a halfwitted boy seems the only wise and dignified inhabitant. Scandinavian mind and brings it to bear on a conflict in Ireland at the „present day...between scientific enlightenment n
and CatholiC obscurantism: Lest a controversial rat be unpleasant, of eyeryday life ; not for nothing is one chapter smelled, I hasten to add tbat the most ,acirairable and en- callOd "Spider in the Washjug.". lightened character in the book is a- Catholic priest.- • Her Mr. Humbert. Wolfe says he is to Byron as the marsh- does not, however, take the centre of the stage : that is mallow to the water-lily, and in this belief gives us in jingling reserved for " Eve's Doctor 7 himself. There is apt to be verse a discursive account of the impressions of a tourist something a little disconcerting (as well as lucrative) in in the world today. SOmetimei slangy and sometimes adoration shown- by -female ,patients, as every handsome wistful, he ends up in that lovesome thing, a garden. But doctor knows,, and.Miss Toksvig may disconcert some readers " everywhere," his publishers claim, " he exposes the dross with her portrait of Dr. Michael 'Murrough,t the ownif:34p. :. ,Iiillifutill6 ritter 1.--i- .- in his- Own- peculiar elfish -inanner."4. Alec Brown. (Seeker and Warburg. 8s. 6d.) . White trousers, a " long, strong " jaw, " dominating " brows DeliCate Monster. By Storm Jaineson. (Nieholsein and `Matson. with a " narrow, level, blue look under them, a glimpse of Ls.) • cool summer morning sea," and, most singular of all, an Here To-Day. By Pamela Hanford Johnson. (Chapman and aquiline nose which was " in control." It is a pity thit Hall. 7s. 6d.) - more Miss Toksvig was not a little more " in control," for she his Don J. Ewan. By Humbert something to say, an obvious affection for her adopted TIM fascinating book which Andre Gide has written about country, and some insight into the character of its inhabitants.
his visit to Russia, explaining that he is given to chastening In Delicate Monster Miss Storm Jameson has her talent those whom he loves or at least " would like always to in perfect Z.eiiitrol,' and she is more iMpreSsiVe in a book of approve of," includes an account of his visit to the bed- this kind than in her longer sociological novels. I recommend . converge on a common, a little world of which, at moments, Here are the seedy humours of the bar-parlour, the workings of petty power and puy ambition, and the details, often , .
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